SSD tweaks and why they sometimes don’t work

Tom’s Hardware has an interesting study on various SSD tweaks and the effects they have. Along with a very good insight.

If you’ve ever wondered why certain tweaks are a matter of fierce religious debate, it’s because some tweaks make things better on some drives, and worse on others.

I’ll weigh in with just a couple of thoughts.

Generally speaking, anything that cuts down on writes is good. Not because you have to worry all that much about life expectancy–current-generation SSDs can be reasonably expected to outlive platter drives–but because excessive disk access decreases performance, and writes are slower than reads anyway.

And if that article makes you wonder whether I’m in the disable-the-swap-file or keep-the-swap-file camp, I recommend keeping the swap file enabled. Windows is designed to have a swap file and use it. And while we can predict our memory usage under normal circumstances, what does someone without a swap file do during race conditions? You know, when some overloaded web site causes your web browser’s memory usage to jump by a factor of 10 until you close the tab? When you have a swap file, you have warning, and can take your corrective action before your system runs out of available memory and really weird things (or blue screens) start happening.

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