Sony VAIO P and the Solid State Disk (SSD)

As I mentioned yesterday a hard disk drive (HDD) is very different than a Solid State Disk (SSD). Yes, both are used to store data, but they do it in different ways which means that the operating system needs to take that into consideration when performing write operations. When Windows Vista was developed the cost of SSDs was prohibitive and very little went into adding features to fully support SSDs. Now that the cost have come down in Windows 7 Microsoft has added logic to recognize SSDs and adjust how writes are performed.

HDDs are mechanical devices which use a magnetic field to record data (Wikipedia), while SSDs use memory technology with flash cells which have a limited number of erase (write) cycles (Wikipedia). So the bottom line is that you want to minimize the number writes to an SSD or in reality you want to use a more intelligent approach to writing like caching the data until the application is ready to commit the write. I was surprised to learn that the slim type 128GB Samsung SSD (mmcqe28gfmup-mva) in the VAIO P uses the Multi-Level Cell (MLC) design which has a lower number of erase (write) cycles than the Single-Level Cell (SLC) design. Wikipedia mentions that the MLC disadvantages can be mitigated by the internal design structure. The reason for their use is cost. Let's hope Samsung and Sony did their homework. I decided to take some steps on to mitigate lifespan and performance issues.

These are the steps I have taken on the VAIO P:

1. Disable all defragmentation operations. A common performance problem with HDDs is data fragmentation (Wikipedia) which is minimized by using defrag.exe (comes with Windows) or an advanced application like Diskeeper. I used it on all of my PCs with HDDs, because it runs quietly in the background like a virus scanner.
2. I used this post by Tony on the OCZ Technology (a leader in SSD design) forum to fine my system:
   1. In the system's registry
      1. Disable prefetching and superfetch .
      2. Enable clearPageFilesAtShutdown, LargeSystemCache, and add the processor's L2 cache size to SecondLevelDataCache. The VAIO P VGN-P698E 1.6GHZ processor has a 512KB L2 cache.
      3. Disable NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation.
      4. Increase NtfsMemoryUsage file cache to 2.
   2. Remove indexing, the SSD is fast enough where you do not need indexing
   3. Enable all caching feature on the disk.
   4. Since the VAIO P only has 2GB of memory, I decided not to get rid of the paging. Instead I use the ReadyBoost (Wikipedia) feature with a 2GB SD card (moves the paging file to the SD card). I have seen some posts about not using ReadyBoost since the SSD may be faster but having the paging file on the SD card minimizes writes to the SSD. I could be wrong on this one (more research required). The Wikipedia reference mentions that ReadyBoost is disabled when the system disk is an SSD but I can vouch that is not the case, my ReadyBoost drive shows activity.
   5. I did not disable hibernation since I find that it boots the system much quicker and I like the functionality of saving my work without using battery.