Macos – How should the computing tendencies change after installing a SSD

Update: Here are some quotes from an (older) Microsoft presentation on SSDs

It mentions that if the SSD follows SATA guidelines, then Windows 7 is able to recognize it and adjust accordingly. Regardless of being the primary or secondary drive.

SSD can identify itself differently from HDD in ATA as defined by ATA8-ACS Identify Word 217: Nominal media rotation rate

Reporting non-rotating media will allow Windows 7to set Defrag off as default; improving device endurance by reducing writes

From the Windows 7 Storage Logo Proposal:

• If “Trim” algorithm is applied, the “Trim” implementation must comply with ATA8-ACS2 proposal e07154r6 (Data Set Management Commands Proposal for ATA8-ACS2) section 5.3 and section 6.2. The completion time of Trim command should be less or equal to 20ms

• SATA-IO certification is required for Solid State Drive (SSD) connected through SATA interface. More information on SATA-IO testing will be available on the SATA-IO Web site

1 - To verify that TRIM is working, run the following at a command prompt (as admin):

fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify

If it returns 'DisableDeleteNotify = 0' then TRIM is enabled.

2 - The pagefile is used to provide Virtual Memory in the eventuality that you run out of available RAM. As such, as soon as your system begins using it it will be reading and writing to it quite a lot. From the point of view of Windows, its great to have the pagefile on an SSD because its much quicker than running virtual memory from a magnetic HDD. More details can be found over at the Engineering Windows 7 Blog.

From the point of view of your hard drive however, you will be reading and writing to the same section of disk often, which doesn't help its longevity.

Depending on what you intend to use your machine for will somewhat dictate the approach you take. If you're going to be running lots of memory intensive apps, and filling your 6 (or 12) GB of RAM then you're going to be using the pagefile quite a lot.

There's a good discussion thread on neowin about the different approaches to this issue.

Personally, since I don't use up lots of RAM during my day-to-day use, I moved the pagefile off my SSD onto a fast HDD (Spinpoint F3) and have never seen any performance issues.

One final point is that some applications will refuse to launch if it cannot find a pagefile. Even if you never get anywhere near filling up your RAM its prudent to keep at least a small pagefile around to prevent these apps from complaining.

3 - You should get pretty dam good performance with that spec, so other than the standard advice (don't install crapware, run antivirus software, always update your drivers etc etc), you shouldn't need to do much to get good performance out of this machine. That said, there are plenty of sites out there full of advice on specific topics (e.g. this one), so if you have particular performance concerns there's almost certainly an answer out there for you, or somebody here that will know the answer :)