How to optimise Windows XP for SSD (solid state disk) operation

Optimise Windows XP for SSD drives

I have been searching a lot on this topic and found tons of information. I am giving a brief summary, hoping someone will find it useful. Being an electrical engineer, I feel confident in sharing valuable information. First of all, if you have not installed XP yet, read below about partition alignment and file system settings. Forget about all those people asking you to upgrade to a Windows release newer than XP. Feasible SSD “support” in Windows XP is likely not as bad as many claim. There is one thing missing tough, which is native support of the SATA TRIM command in Micosofts file system drivers. And I do not expect them to add it ever. TRIM helps telling the SSD which file system blocks are no longer in use, so that its internal mechanisms can work more efficiently. Google if you want to learn more about this topic. The garbage collection integrated into most SSD drives will eventually reclaim those at some point, tough. Some vendors provide tools that give some sort of TRIM support (Intel: SSD Toolkit, OCZ , Samsung: SSD Magician) . By the way, never use defragmentation tools on SSD media, it is absolutely futile! Second, there is lots of potential to improve Windows XP behaviour. At its time of creation SSD drivers were basically unknown. We need to tweak just a few settings and XP will play much more nicely with SSD drives. You basically disable all extras that were brought in place to speed up data access on mechanical hard drives, because it hampers with the nature of SSD drives. Alternatively, you can use some freely available programs like SSD Tweaker. They basically do the same settings.

Now, lets get to business: adjust system settings

The quickest way is to do the steps below is by downloading my optimisations from this location (Windows-XP-SSD-optimisations.zip). Save the file somewhere, unzip it, and then double-click on the .reg file. You will need to confirm the changes to the system registry. It will do below four crucial settings in the Windows registry in one step. Or do them manually. Open the Windows registry editor (Start->Run->”regedit”) and set the following keys (If you are not familiar with using the editor, please use your favourite Internet search engine and read about it. It is not difficult at all.):

• Disabling background disk defragmentation

Key Name:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction\ Name: Enable Type: REG_SZ Value: N

• Disable Background auto-layout:

Key Name: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OptimalLayout Value Name: EnableAutoLayout Type: REG_DWORD Value: 0

• Disable update of filesystem’s “last access timestamps”

“Key Name: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem Name: NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate Type: REG_DWORD Value: 1

• Disable Prefetch

Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters Name: EnablePrefetcher Type: REG_DWORD Value: 0

• Optionally: Go to the system settings and disable the swap file (pagefile) unless you are very low on system memory, and disable the system restore service unless needed. You can also move the temporary and log files directories away to non-SSD media if available, see below.

Now, close the registry editor, reboot and you are done. Easy, wasn’ t it? Remember not use defrag utilities on SSD disks! For additional details, please refer to – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms912916(v=winembedded.5).aspx  — Some of above information is collected from there.

Partition alignment

Align your partitions so that they start and end at 4k disk blocks. E.g. read this post on Anandtech. Any modern partition tool will do this automatically. I recommend GParted. However the Windows XP partitioner is old and will do this wrong in most cases. The reason is that modern drives, including SSDs and hard disks, operate on 4k data blocks at a time. If the partition is misaligned all partition blocks stretch across disk blocks. If a partition block is processed the drive will need to actually process two disk blocks! This slows disk operations down.

File system settings

If you format the partition, make sure to set the file system allocation block size to 4k. For XP, it is best to choose NTFS as the file system and 4096 as the Allocation Unit Size, check Quick Format, and hit “Ok”. Am I missing something crucial? Please tell me, it will be appreciated.