New gaming PC/SSD questionsFollow

So I've got a new gaming PC coming and it has an SSD in it as well as a regular mechanical hard drive. I've never used an SSD before and was hoping Kaolian or others could comment on some of the things I've been reading. First of all, the specs of the system I've got coming.

Intel Core i5 3570K 3.40 GHz
ASUS P8Z77-V LX (Intel Z77 Chipset)
8GB DDR3 1600MHz Corsair Vengeance Series
600W Corsair CX power supply
HD 1: (for the OS)120GB SSD Corsair Neutron GTX Series SATA 6Gbps
HD2: (for Multimedia\Data) 1TB Western Digital 7200 RPM 64MB Cache
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 2GB
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-Bit Edition)
Asus VS239H-P monitor


I've read that these are some of the recommendations with SSD's: http://www.computing.net/howtos/show/solid-state-drive-ssd-tweaks-for-windows-7/552.html
1.You should have AHCI setting enabled in BIOS before you install the OS

2. You should disable Sleep/Hibernation function in windows

3. Disable System Restore

4. Disable Drive Indexing

5. Disable Drive Defragmentation schedule

6. Disable Prefetch/Superfetch

7. Disable Windows Write-Cache buffer flushing

8. Disable ClearPageFileAtShutdown/LargeSystemCache

9. Change power setting to never let HD turn off

Has anyone done any of this on their SSD and did it make any difference in performance either immediately or over the long run?

Edited, Sep 23rd 2013 10:01pm by Kaolian Lock Thread: spammer keeps bumping this thread

Yes. AHCI, or Advanced Host Controller Interface is going to allow for faster drive throughput than the standard "IDE compatable" setting. SSD's still don't RAID well, but you would pick RAID over AHCI if you wanted to mirror or RAID 5 a set of SSD's instead of a single one. The controller type you pick determines which mass storage device driver windows loads at installation. If you change that setting after windows installation, chances are you will get a blue screen error code 0x00007b on reboot until you change it back or reinstall windows.


Sleep / hibernation actually works better with a SSD than it does for a normal drive, so I'm not sure why they put that one on there. that being said, sleep and hibernation is annoying and locks up more than it should anyways, so I'd disable it anyways.


takes up a bunch of room, rarely successful if you do try to undo something, so yeah assuming you have adequate backups I would turn that off.


Depends on how often you search for files. if you rarely ever use the file search function, sure, turn it off. If you use it all the time, then i'd leve it on. the wear and tear on a SSD from indexing is minimal.


Windows 7 already will automatically not defragment a SSD. You still want to defragment your rotational drives though, so this isn't necessary.


windows 7 already automatically disables this for SSD's.


Should improve your data write speeds slightly on a SSD, make them slower on a rotational drive.


clear pagefile at shutdown is usually already disabled. If you have more than 8GB ram, system cache size is irrelevent.


The SSD isn't going to use much power at idle, and your rotational drives do, setting that particular setting isn't per drive, it's across the board, so doing this will tend to burn out your rotational drives sooner than they would otherwise due to bearing / controller wear.

I've found this site to be very good.

http://thessdreview.com/ssd-guides/optimization-guides/the-ssd-optimization-guide-ultimate-windows-8-edition/