Optimize SSD (instlled SSD and memory into laptop)

I finally got around to buying a Samsung pro 840 256gb SSD and some more memory or my laptop(two hard drive slots; other used for storage).

This laptop (Asus g53sx) is blazing fast and literally boots up in under 10 seconds now.

I am extremely happy with this laptop and have been enjoying playing Titanfall on it

I recently found a video on youtube that teaches how to optimize an SSD. If anyone is interested it made a difference for me and freed up a lot if space on my SSD as well.

Fantastic 86mcss, I am sure you will grow sick of any computer you touch from now on that does not have a SSD installed

I feel obligated to comment on that video because as much as some of the information is very good, some of it is wrong and counterproductive. For the past 3 years I have work in validating and debugging SSD firmware for client and enterprise drives so here's my 2cents:

The guy is correct that drives have a finite amount of write cycles but you can read an infinite amount of times from an SSD with 0 degradation so hes wrong about that. People are WAY too worked up over how much you can write to an SSD these days when they really do not need to worry unless you are performing enterprise workloads. To give you an idea about how little you need to worry about writing to your SSD, check out this article:
http://techreport.com/review/25889/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-500tb-update

In summary after 500TB in writes all current SSD's on the market still function fine. The only one that shows any sign of wear is the basic Sasmung SSD 840 NonPro and NonEvo series (the lowest endurance NAND memory currently on the market). Even with the high number of reallocated sectors that thing still has life left.

My current SSD has under 1TB of writes after 2.5 years of ownership to give you an idea of typical usage for a client drive.

A few more thoughts:

1. Yes, most definitely any modern SATA drive (SSD or Mechanical) should be used with the controller set to AHCI (or RAID if thats your setup) mode. What this guy fails to tell people is you can not just switch from IDE or AHCI or vis versa without tweaking the registry or you will hit a BSOD on bootup everytime since your system wouldn't have any AHCI drivers to load the OS.

2. Using the Intel/1st party controller - Yes, this is a good tip, I would go one step further and say locate the Intel or AMD 6Gb/s ports on your motherboard. Anything before an 8 series Intel chipset had only 2 ports that were 6Gb/s and the rest were 3Gb/s SATA ports, if you stick to SATA port 0 you can be sure you are using the fastest port. Before Intel 6 series chipsets they were all 3Gb/s ports FYI

3. The power settings change he made doesn't make any sense. If you understood how modern SSD controllers function you know they automatically go into low power states on their own both with and without OS intervention. Even if you have the OS put your drive into a low power state every 20 minutes the SSD wakes up in mere milliseconds, not enough for you to even notice. With Mechanical drives its a different story, after you tell the drive to sleep it spins down the disks and takes a few seconds to spin back up.

4. Space saving stuff:

Disabling page file - I am not a fan of disabling page files, what I do on my system is set the page file to just 1GB so in case any old application I run requires to have a little bit of page file space I wont have any issues. This is a personal preference. I don't have enough knowledge of the inter-workings of windows to really give advice on this. I just agree that Windows manages it horribly if you have a lot of ram, it allocates way too much space.

Disabling hibernation - This is a personal preference, I have it disabled on my desktop but enabled on my laptop. I am always putting my laptop to sleep (S3) and windows automatically moves it into hibernate (S4) if I don't use my laptop for an extended period of time in order to not kill the battery.

Optimize - this is already set in windows 8 as he says. Daily or weekly, it doesn't matter.

Disabling search index/Windows search - WTF? His argument for this is to lower the amount of SSD usage and increase life. Windows search index is mostly reads which are infinite as I mentioned above. I use the Start > Search feature all the time and I sure as fuck wont do something that would slow that down which is what would happen if you disable this.

Disable superfetch- All this feature does is take the most often used applications based on a usage algorithm and preloads it into your ram. This is a WONDERFUL feature and does not make sense to disable it. All this does is create a few more reads on the SSD (which does not degrade anything) when loading applications to ram.

Moving documents folder - good idea, I do this on my desktop.

I've been doing those since I got my 60gb boot drive ~ four years ago. I big hefty SSD for games is on my buy-me list. Should I bother watching the vid?

Here is the video in a nutshell (the ones I agree with): Use AHCI storage mode. Make sure to use the 1st party SATA controller @ Port 0. Lower the page file size in windows to 1GB or less. Move your documents folder if you want to save space but not required.

That's about it really.

so i should re-enable my page file? i was not sure if i should disable it or not but just followed the video because i am sheepy like that

should i re-enable superfetch as well?

how do i optimize in windows 7? i looked for it and never found how to do it.

thank you for taking the time to reply Ali i really appreciate it.