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Last year when Windows 7 was released, it arrived with full support for Solid State Drives. At the time however they were in little use but we did see some examples of how quickly Windows 7 could boot up using SSD drives by taking advantage of the technology.
But as I mentioned above, not many people were able to take full advantage of SSD’s, but now Corsair Memory and OCZ Technology Group, two of the leading suppliers of DRAM- and flash-based memory used in the making of solid-state drives (SSDs), have issued firmware updates to add a feature that will boost the performance of Windows 7 on a SSD.
This feature is known as “TRIM” Windows 7 shipped with support for this feature but none of the SSD’s at the time supported it. Intel did release a TRIM update in August but it had to be withdrawn due to data corruption issues.
The problem with SSD’s is that overtime their performance degrades. That’s because unlike a traditional hard drive, when you delete data from an SSD, the contents in the cells aren’t truly deleted, but are rather marked as being disposable and can be overwritten. So when new data is written, the old data had to be physically deleted first. As a result the drive would take longer to write data.
This “TRIM” update prevents this from occurring. When you delete data, it actually deletes it and frees up the cells for immediate data writes. This is done when the drive is not otherwise in use. It’s one of the many features that Microsoft were working on under the hood of Windows 7.
The OS also disables disk defragmentation, Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching when an SSD boot drive is detected. All of these technologies were designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could be a bottleneck. On an SSD, random read speed is its forte.
Windows 7 tends to perform well on today’s SSDs, in part, because we made many engineering changes toreduce the frequency of writes and flushes. This benefits traditional HDDs as well, but is particularly helpful on today’s SSDs
Wrote Michael Fortin on the Microsoft engineering blog
Both Corsairs and OCZ’s updates require a full disk format. Intel re-released its update in December but made no mention of a full disk format, but they do recommend you backup your data.
Do any of you guys use Solid State Drives with Windows 7? Have you noticed any significant increase in performance?
Let us know in the commments
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