How To Increase The Life of Your SSD Drives On Windows 7

JCB1

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Having a SSD (Solid State Drive) is the perfect way to give your existing windows 7 system a speed boost. But the life expectancy of an SSD drive is far less than that of a normal IDE/Sata hard-drive. So I decided to write this guide to help people understand how we can get the most out of our SSD drives by improving performance and life expectancy


Follow The Below Steps To Increase The Life of Your SSD Drives On Windows 7


1 - Disable. Windows Indexing Service. Click on start and type in services.msc and hit enter. Double click on "Windows Search" and set it to disabled. Next click on the "My Computer" icon on the desktop, then right click on the SSD drive (Usually C Drive) and click on properties, Then make sure "Allow files on this device to have contents indexed" is unticked, Click apply then ok.

2 – Disable System Restore. Right click on “My Computer” icon on the desktop and select properties. Click on system protection tab. Select your drive and click on configure now select Turn off system protection.

3 – Disable Auto Running Of Defrag. Click on the "My Computer" icon on the desktop, then right click on the SSD drive (Usually C Drive) and click on properties. Click tools tab, click Defrag now, click configure schedule. Untick the box “Run on a schedule” then click ok.

4 – Disable Superfetch. Click on start and type in services.msc and hit enter. Double click on "Superfetch" and set it to disabled

5 – Disable Windows Paging File. Right click on “My Computer” icon on the desktop and select properties, then select Remote Settings > Advanced > Performance Settings > Advanced Tab > Change. Untick the box at the top then select your SSD drive and select no paging file. If you have another hard-disk in your computer you could move the paging file to there.

6 – Disable Windows Defender Scheduled Scan – Go to the control panel, click on windows defender, Click Tools > Options then untick “Automatically scan my computer” then click on save

7 – Disable Unwanted Programs From AutoLaunch. Click start then type in msconfig and hit enter. Now click on the startup tab and untick anything that you do not need windows to run once it has started. If you are unsure what to disable please post here before disabling it.

8 – Anti-Virus. Make sure your anti-virus program does not have a scheduled virus scan, Disable it if it does.

9 – Turn off application updates – With certain programs such as adobe reader and java they can be configured to automatically check if newer versions are available, if newer versions are available they will also automatically downloaded, which means writing files to your SSD.

10 – Check Task Manager For Top I/O Processes – Open task manager by pressing “CTRL + Shift + ESC” Click on “Show processes from all users” click on the processes tab, then sort the “I/O Reads” by max to min. Now take a look at the top processes of I/O Reads and is there funny processes there?? It is possible that there is a process that takes up a lot of I.O that you could stop. If you are unsure about a process post about it in our forum. Repeat the above process for the “I/O Write” column

11 – Check Task Scheduler – Go in to the control panel and click on scheduled tasks. Disable tasks in there that you do not need. There might be a task in here to do a full virus scan on your PC or something similar. If your not to sure what you can disable post about it in our forum.

12 - Stop And Disable Unwanted Windows Services. Click on start and type in services.msc and hit enter. Now double click on a service you don't need and set it to disabled, then reboot your machine for it to take effect. Below is a list of services you might consider to disable.

Audio Service – Only disable if you don't want audio on your system
Branch Cache – This caches network content
Computer Browser – If you disable this service your computer will not popup in the mynetwork for the domain
Disk Defrafmenter – Your system will not be able to defrag with this disabled
Print Spooler – Disable only if you never plan to print anything from your system
Server Service – Disable if you don't plan to share any files / printers on your system
Themes – If you don't use windows 7 themes disable this service
Windows Audio - Only disable if you don't want audio on your system
Windows Audio Endpoint Builder - Only disable if you don't want audio on your system

13 - Install Programs On Sata Drive – If possible only install the OS on your SSD drive and install programs on a secondary sata / IDE drive.


If you have any other tips which you think will increase the life of a SSD drive on windows 7 please post about it in this article and we will add it to this guide
 
nice guide i glade to read it how can we to increase ssd drives life using windows 7 i wuold lyk to read guides lyk it
 
While the life of an SSD may be less than that of a spinny thing in theory, in practise it would take about 10 years of constant writes to get it to fail. How many 10 year old IDE drives do you have that you still use? What is valuable on SSD drives is configuring Windows to take up less space on it and some of your tips do this. Tip 8 stops AV scans - why? Reading SSD is not really a problem and it would only be one read a week anyway?

Assuming you have a Win 7 PC with a 64GB system SSd drive and a 500GB SATA drive, how would you configure Win 7 to give best performance but put all apps, etc. on the SATA drive (point 13). The important thing is that all apps should just automatically default to the SATA drive both when installing and when running. My Documents can be changed fairly easily, but how do we make installing and running apps work seamlessly. I can see a great demand for this type of dual-disk arrangement this year as SSD drives become affordable. I have tried this type of setup before but found there are often problems and you have to manually change install paths, etc. every time you install an app. Browser cache, temp files, docs, etc. all default to the C: drive still. Reg patches only seem to half work and can cause issues. A guides on how to configure such a system would be cool...???
 
While the life of an SSD may be less than that of a spinny thing in theory, in practise it would take about 10 years of constant writes to get it to fail. [...]

I've got hard drives that are over ten years old and still working, my SSD failed within a year. It really speeded up the system, but I went back to a conventional hard due to reliability.
 
I've got hard drives that are over ten years old and still working, my SSD failed within a year. It really speeded up the system, but I went back to a conventional hard due to reliability.

I didn't say that hard drives wouldn't last 10 years, just that you would not still be using it after 10 years. Technology moves on and hard drives do too, in practise you would refresh any drive every 3-5 years, usually by replacing the system. The 128GB SSD you buy now will be replaced by a faster and cheaper and bigger one in 3 years. So why worry that it will worn out in 10 yrs? SSD drives are now used in servers and are very reliable. How often do you use that floppy/LS120/ZIP drive?
 
[...]The 128GB SSD you buy now will be replaced by a faster and cheaper and bigger one in 3 years. [...]

If SSD drives only last a year, you will be replacing them more often than every three years, with the possibility of data loss. It makes sense to configure your system to prolong the life of a SSD drive, as the original poster suggests.
 
How much faster is....(I guess I should just Google this)....a SSD vs a ATA? Are we talking cutting minutes of wait times or a few seconds, for the average user.
 
How much faster is....(I guess I should just Google this)....a SSD vs a ATA? Are we talking cutting minutes of wait times or a few seconds, for the average user.
i would say roughly 3 x faster. My windows XP machine use to take just over a minute and a half to boot, I cloned my system on to a SSD drive and my boot speed went down to 30 seconds. Programs open much faster and there are less system hangs. I am very happy with my SSD
 
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