When solid-state drives (SSDs) first entered the PC market, they offered a significant increase in performance over older hard disk drives (HDDs). Over the years, they’ve become the default choice for primary storage on consumer laptops and desktops, allowing us all to enjoy the benefits of fast transfer speeds and quiet operation.
However, as with almost every major component in our computers, there are ways to ensure you get optimal SSD performance and the fastest loading speeds overall. Here are our favourites.
Adjust your energy plan
1. Type “Select a power plan.” in the search box and Click on the top result.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
2. Click Change Plan Settings next to your chosen power plan.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
3. Click on “Change advanced power settings”
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
4. Set “Rotate disk to” to zero.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
This setting prevents your SSD from going to sleep, which requires you to wait an extra second or two for it to wake up.
5. Change the setting from “Maximum power savings” to “Off”. under PCI Express and Link State Power Management.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
This setting prevents the PCIe bus from clocking down, which robs your SSD of some performance. The PC uses more power when the setting is off, but it minimizes latency. If you’re a desktop PC user, you can probably safely disable this setting and reap the performance benefits. The Moderate setting is probably a good balance between power saving and performance for laptop users.
Enable write caching
1. Type “device manager” in the search box and launch the utility
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
2. Scroll down to Drives, Right click on your SSDAnd Choose Properties.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
3. Select the Policies tab. And Make sure write caching is enabled.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Windows warns that enabling this feature during a power outage can result in data loss, but the speed at which SSDs operate makes that possibility extremely unlikely. In addition, this warning mainly applies to older, slower HDDs. However, proceed with caution if you are uncomfortable enabling this feature.
Optimize your SSD on schedule
SSDs work differently than HDDs because their absolute speed makes traditional defragmentation an unnecessary process. However, when files are deleted from an SSD, a trimming function is required to mark those blocks for future use. This is where the Defragment and Optimize utility comes into play.
1. Search for “defrag” And Click Defrag and Optimize.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
2. Click the Change settings button
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3. Specify how often Windows 11 should optimize your SSD. By default, Windows 11 chooses “Weekly,” but you can set the utility to optimize daily or (not recommended).
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
When Windows “optimizes” an SSD, it will retrims the blocks, which tells the drive which areas to consider empty and ready to write new data. An SSD that contains a lot of untrimmed blocks can lead to reduced overall performance, which is why such weekly (or daily) maintenance schedules are a good idea.
Disable the Windows search indexer
Windows 11 includes the search indexer with a process called SearchIndexer.exe running in the background. The search indexer constantly analyzes files and media on your computer, so the results are available almost immediately when you perform a search. However, this process also consumes CPU and RAM cycles, which is unnecessary if your SSD is fast enough to find the unindexed files.
1. Search for “services” to enter the Services app.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
2. Double-click Windows Search service to open it.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
3. The service status will likely show as Running for you to do this click the Stop button to end it immediately.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
4. Choose Disabled Under Start, type and click Apply to prevent it from running on every subsequent startup in Windows.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
You will now notice that when you perform a search, a small warning message will appear in the lower left corner of the window that says “Search indexing has been disabled” and you will be given the option to turn it back on.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
The Disk Cleanup tool will scan your system to reveal unnecessary files that can be safely deleted. SSDs tend to slow down performance as they fill up, so making sure you “take out the junk” is a great way to keep your drive healthy.
1. Search for “Disk Cleanup” to open the utility
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
2. Click Clean up system files. The system contains all kinds of data that you can clean after a quick scan.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
3. Select the data types to delete, including Windows Update files, temporary Internet files, device driver packages, and your Recycle Bin. The screenshot above shows that I have almost 4GB that can be recovered by a Windows Update cleanup.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Disable hibernation (on desktop PCs)
Hibernation is beneficial for laptops because it saves your current computer state without using any power. While this is great for a laptop running on battery, desktop PCs are always plugged in and don’t necessarily need this feature.
The hibernation file consumes a significant amount of SSD space (40 percent of your installed RAM by default). If you don’t have much free space on your SSD, you can disable hibernation file and get several GB back.
1. Open the Windows command prompt as an administrator. You can do this by searching for “cmd”, right-clicking and selecting “Run as administrator”.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
2. Type “power cfg -h off” without the quotes and press Enter.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
This will disable the hibernation file if it is currently enabled on your system.
Use SpaceSniffer to free up disk space
SSDs tend to lose performance when they fill up with large amounts of data. One way to keep your SSD in tip-top shape is to remove large, unnecessary files from the drive.
Apps like SpaceSniffer scans your SSD and gives you an easy-to-decode map showing which files are taking up the most space. You can get detailed information about the files, find their exact file path and even delete them directly from the app if you wish.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Install the latest firmware update for your SSD
Although SSD firmware updates don’t typically arrive regularly like graphics card drivers, they can sometimes provide performance updates or fix existing bugs. A notable example is the 5B2QGXA7 firmware for Samsung 980 Pro SSDs. The 5B2QGXA7 firmware fixes an issue where a 980 Pro’s Health could deteriorate rapidlyeventually resulting in an SSD reverting to read-only mode (making the SSD unusable).
Sabrent Rocket Panel (Image credit: Sabrent)
Some companies like Samsung and Western Digital provide easy-to-use utilities that you can use to update the firmware on the SSD. For Samsung SSDs, you can use the Samsung wizard (opens in new tab) app while Western Digital has those Western Digital dashboard. Another example is the Sabrent Rocket Panel for the SSDs of this manufacturer. If your SSD manufacturer doesn’t provide an all-encompassing GUI, you can go to their support page to manually download and apply firmware updates.
Source: www.tomshardware.com
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