Many people are considering SSD (Solid State Drive)  in their laptops. There are of course many reasons for this, the SSD is silent and less heat generating, in many cases less power consuming and above all else, not susceptible to shock or sudden movements of the laptop.

Field engineers love SSD it has extended battery time, made laptops that are quickly closed and shoved in a bag much less prone to overheating and they can be used in harsh electro-magnetic evironments such as in the vincinity of radio trasmitters without risking that the hard disk loses data.

The problem with XP and SSD is that most drives made with this technology requires an erase operation on an entire block before it can be written back to the drive. This means that things like disk caching and so on works different from with standard disk drives and needs to be tweaked in order to get maximum performance out of it.

Most SSD manufacturers also guarantees only 10 000 writes to a cell and although most SSD uses techniques such as wear leveling where the cells are written to in a fashion to spread the wear on them over the whole disk eventually they will start to fail. An SSD is a rather expensive item still so people would like to maximise the life spand of their drive. Hence the following tweaks.

Disable windows XP prefetcher

Change the following registry keys:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]
”EnablePrefetcher”=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOpt imizeFunction]
”Enable”=”N”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\OptimalLayout]
”EnableAutoLayout”=dword:00000000

You must reboot after the changes have been made.

Restore original setting

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]
”EnablePrefetcher”=dword:00000003

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Schedule]
”Start”=dword:00000002

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOpt imizeFunction]
”Enable”=”Y”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\OptimalLayout]
”EnableAutoLayout”=dword:00000001

You must reboot after changes has been applied.

Change the disk cache behaviour

Start Device Manager

• Select the drive for which you wish to administer the caching policy (your SSD)
• Select Properties
• Click on the Policies tab
• Look for the option ”Enable write caching on the disk” and make sure it is selected
• Look for a second option ”Enable advanced performance” and select it.

This option favors throughput/speed at the potential risk of data corruption. Since this is to protect removable drives from suffering data corruption if they are removed while a write operation is in progress — you may safely change this option on your internal SSD.

This trick can also be used to increase performance about 10-fold on USB-attached disks, but then you should be very careful when removing them from your system, use the device manager to disconnect before you remove them.

Other tweaks

Hibernation

Turning off hibernation can mean a better performance and longer life for the SSD because then Windows will not have to update the page file constantly in anticipation of a hibernation order.

• Go to the control panel
• Open the Power Options
• Select the Hibernate tab
• Uncheck Enable Hibernation box to disable
• Click Ok

Reboot your system and the hibernation option is gone (but you can still use sleep mode of course which is brilliant in combination with SSD.