Optimum operation configuration for x201s with SSD...

[Gary Miyakawa]

Has anyone set this up for what they believe is optimum? I know the SSDs should not have Indexing set and we can turn off the "air bag" stuff...

Any other thoughts ?

Cheers,

Gary Miyakawa

[jvarszegi]

Has anyone set this up for what they believe is optimum? I know the SSDs should not have Indexing set and we can turn off the "air bag" stuff...

Any other thoughts ?

Cheers,

Gary Miyakawa

Yep, you should turn off the "air bag" feature. You should also disable defragmentation. The random-access speed of an SSD means it's not necessary, and you want the data being shuffled around as little as possible to prolong life of the drive.

I always turn off hibernation, which saves some space. I never use that feature; I prefer to use standby/sleep mode instead, which really involves minimal power drain. If the laptop would be off for a long time, I'd just shut it down-- but that never happens.

I also disable the page file. This saves a bit more space, and also means that the disk will not be used for paging at all. IIRC some people don't recommend doing that, or at least recommended against it in the old days. All I can say is that all of my machines run fast with it turned off. Paging is first and foremost a mechanism to get around insufficient system memory.

I did a fresh install of Windows 7, to avoid a possible problem with alignment of the data on the storage medium (Win7 will recognize it's being set up on an SSD and align things properly, apparently). A fresh install of Win7 should also result in its turning off features like ReadyBoost, if it determines they are not necessary due to speed of the drive.

Depending on the SSD, you may need to update the firmware. Doing this from a thumb drive was the toughest part of my install, if I had to pick one. But instructions abound on the web.

Depending on the driver, you may or may not need to run TRIM on the drive occasionally. Windows 7 has built-in TRIM support, but for various reasons I am using the Intel driver, which means I plan to run TRIM manually every so often.

I have turned off the PC Doctor system scan, which degrades performance while it's running and unnecessarily stresses the drive. In general, I also tend to turn off things like System Restore, since I do manual backups occasionally anyway.

[zverg]

The SSD Lenovo equips the X201s with is an end of life Samsung that doesn't support TRIM from what I've read, sadly.

I used HDDerase to do an "enhanced secure erase" of the drive before I installed Linux on it. I had to turn off the hard drive password and put it in legacy (ATA) mode for hdderase to work at all.

[lordt8]

http://memory.dataram.com/
go there, download their RAMDisk driver, i have 4gb of ram and made 512MB as a page file, so i have a page file inside my ram crazy but there are program that don't want to run without a PF, plus i made an extra 512 MB a place to put all working data sets for all programs, so basically i have ultra fast 64 gb ssd, 1 gb of ram disk, and the thing is while surfing around the ssd isn't working at all!

my 0,99$

[ThinkRob]

I have 4gb of ram and made 512MB as a page file,

What the ... wh... Why?

[jvarszegi]

I think there are some very old programs that will refuse to run without a page file. I think I had a really old game that was that way. I guess to satisfy those old clunkers a ram disk might be a good option, since it would keep the SSD from churning or even being accessed for virtual memory. I don't know if I'd dedicate 512 megs of RAM to such a thing, though.

Huh... virtual virtual memory!