- Set a fixed size for the swap file and/or place it on a regular HDD. If you have enough RAM, it will rarely be used anyway.
- Disable hibernation, it requires a large amount of writes by definition and regular sleep mode is usually good enough.
- (Windows 7 only) Disable scheduled disk defragmentation because it's not smart enough to know SSDs don't require it.
- Disable prefetch and SuperFetch, the performance advantages are not worth the extra writes.
As of Windows 10, both reenable themselves when turned off via the registry, so disabling the SysMain service is the only way. Unfortunately that also kills memory compression and ReadyBoost, so it's a tradeoff. Also note using Enable-MMAgent on PowerShell immediately reenables and starts SysMain.- Disable ReadyBoot (not ReadyBoost) for the same reasons.
- Disable search indexing for the same reasons.
- (SATA SSDs only) Make sure AHCI mode is enabled.
- Do overprovisioning, i.e. don't partition the entire drive to leave unused sectors and therefore trade capacity for longer life. Note many drives do this on firmware with a hidden block of spare sectors, so it may not be necessary (but the benefits will stack).
- Run these commands as administrator.
Code:rem Enable TRIM fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0 rem Disable short filename generation fsutil behavior set disable8dot3 1 rem Disable NTFS encryption (some SSDs compress internally, but encrypted data is highly entropic) fsutil behavior set disableencryption 1 rem Disable paging file encryption fsutil behavior set encryptpagingfile 0 rem Disable NTFS last access timestamp (default as of Vista, but just in case) fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1- Disable all disk-related OS power management settings like spindown timeout, standby timeout, APM/AAM, DIPM/HIPM, etc. Those are either inapplicable to, or have negligible impact on, SSDs.
- Install the latest firmware and regularly check for upgrades.
- Install the manufacturer's disk controller (AHCI or NVMe) drivers unless there are specific reasons not to.
- Install the manufacturer's management software, it's usually fluff but sometimes unlocks vendor-specific features.
- Use a mechanical HDD or make a RAM disk for transient stuff like browser caches and temporary files.
Feedback is welcome, especially regarding items specific to non-Windows systems.
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