I saw a post recently on social media where someone was offering a free tool for optimizing Windows’ behavior with SSDs. It turns out it’s just a graphical front-end for a tool Windows already comes with called fsutil. But it’s a good reminder of how to optimize Windows for SSD use, the caveat being it works well on conventional hard drives too.
The pros and cons of tuning Windows for your SSD
The tool I saw on social media lets you change half a dozen settings, but that’s problematic. Changing defaults just for the sake of changing defaults causes problems. There are two setting worth changing because they reduce random write operations, the thing both hard drives and SSDs are particularly bad at.
SSDs are no worse at random writes these days than hard drives are, and that’s been true for more than a decade now. But SSDs are worse at random writes than everything else. So letting them spend less time doing what they’re worst at improves performance. And reducing extraneous writes increases the life expectancy of your drive as well, so that’s a pleasant side effect.
There are two settings you want to adjust, and you can adjust them without any additional tools.
Tune Windows for your SSD without additional software
So what are the two settings?
The creation of 8.3 filenames and updating last access time stamps. Here are the two commands to run from an adminsitrative command prompt:
fsutil behavior set disable8dot3 1
fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1
Disabling 8.3 filenames is an old trick. Those filenames are only needed for compatibility with very old software, software that in many cases won’t run under 64-bit Windows anyway. Disabling these was standard practice most places I’ve worked. The last time I saw a problem with it was in 2009, so it’s been a while.
The caveat with disabling last access date is that certain defragmentation software likes to know the last access date so it can move frequently used files to the front of the disk. But defragmenting SSDs is a bad idea anyway. I’ve never had a problem with this particular change.
Both of these are settings I’ve been using–when possible–since the days of Windows NT 4.0, though the tool to do it hasn’t always existed. They made a bigger difference in the days of 100 MHz CPUs and 5400 RPM hard drives, but they still help today too. Who doesn’t like their system being a little less laggy?
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.