Microsoft Talk Windows 7 and SSD
Microsoft have just published a detailed post about Windows 7 and support for SSD storage technologies.
As a full time SSD owner/user (Laptop/Desktop) i am really pleased Windows 7 has some SSD specific considerations.
Once you go SSD you never want to go back.
The FAQ section covers
Will Windows 7 support Trim?
Will disk defragmentation be disabled by default on SSDs?
Will Superfetch be disabled on SSDs?
Is NTFS Compression of Files and Directories recommended on SSDs?
Does the Windows Search Indexer operate differently on SSDs?
Is Bitlocker’s encryption process optimized to work on SSDs?
Does Media Center do anything special when configured on SSDs?
Does Write Caching make sense on SSDs and does Windows 7 do anything special if an SSD supports write caching?
Do RAID configurations make sense with SSDs?
Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?
Are there any concerns regarding the Hibernate file and SSDs?
What Windows Experience Index changes were made to address SSD performance characteristics?
Windows 7 Engineering Blog Link:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx
My own blogs posts about SSD link: http://www.colindiponio.com/category/ssd-solid-state-drive/
September 4th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
At last I’ve got an official final release of Windows 7 and a spanking brand new “G2″ version of the Intel SSD drive. Looking forward to this nerdy experience for several months I was mortified when Windows 7 failed and/or the SSD drive failed to work properly. Originally the installation went well (I’m sure XP installed quicker onto a mechanical drive than Win7 installs onto an SSD!) but after one reboot the computer failed to recognise a bootable drive.
I had not made any bios changes but the darn thing refused to boot. The Win7 DVD has a handy “repair” tool but after several attempts and an equal number of reboots it made no difference.
So, using the installer I formatted the SSD again to start from scratch. The “completing installation” part of the install was taken over 30 minutes and the mouse pointer had frozen even though the only telling sign that the installer gives you that it hasn’t died – the flashing … (dot dot dot) after “completing installation…” was still flickering. Why was is beyond the Windows 7 team to retain the estimate time to completion notification from WinXP? Or even a slightly more detailed progress bar would have been useful.
Anyway, I had to reboot as it was clearly dead. In my final attempt (some 9 hours later) before committing the SSD drive and Win7 to the back of my “cupboard of stuff I bought thinking it was going to be good but wasn’t”, I decided to unplug every USB device from my PC and unplug a mechanical SATA drive. What the heck, it might work…
…and it did! So far… touch wood… every reboot of Win7 has brought it back up again. It doesn’t seem to load any faster than a fresh XP install on a mechanical drive but I believe the advantage will come once I’ve loads tons of apps and there are dozens of items in the StartUp folder and stuffed into the registry to run at startup. My old PC was taking 5 minutes to boot until the hard drive stopped thrashing.
So, Colin, forgive me for rambling on but I thought an alternative experience of Win7+SSD was warranted. If nothing else goes wrong I’ll stick with 7, although I still think XP is easier to use and more logically laid out and never gave me as much grief on something as simple as an install.
Colin, I hope you’re well? Your not blogging anymore.
September 4th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Hi Gary
I am well thank you.
You never said what PC you were installing onto.
I have been using the RTM version since early August and have logged about 400 hours real world use on various computers using the final code.
I’m having the complete opposite experience. 400 hours and zero problems.
Can you drop me an e-mail about where sourced your G2, I’m looking for one.
Colin
September 7th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
I’m using a self built PC with an Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus mobo. It’s stable now but I am making regular backups. I don’t think much of the built-in backup tool as it only supports disk imaging and if you install stuff onto a 2nd drive Windows 7 will insist that your 2nd drive is also backed up. Rather a problem if you boot drive is a dainty 80GB and your 2nd drive is a hefty 1TB, but your backup device is 200GB.
Have you taken a look at free/cheap backup software recently? GFI Backup is a free file backup tool that works well on Windows 7 (except for scheduling which they will fix soon) and Macrium Reflect Free Edition will do image backups (that you can mount as drives) and the commercial version (£20!) does file backups too. (Google the names to find the websites)
Have you noticed that the option “remember each folder’s view settings” is completely missing from Windows Explorer in Windows 7? When I reboot back into Windows 7 all my previously open folders are stacked on top of each other – a complete mess. Win7 is incapable of remembering the windows’ individual size, position, and layout features. This is a huge ommission and step backwards. How can anyone work like that? I’m considering running a WinXP VM just to use for file management tasks. The new explorer is clumsy. There isn’t even a button to add/remove the naviation pane – you have to do it through a submenu!
September 7th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
I can see your problem with the backups.
I’ve actually used the Disk imaging to backup one install and restore onto a new hard disk on the same PC. It went really smooth. No reactivation or other complications.
Thanks for the backup software recommendations, currently all my data still resides on an XP machine mapped to from the 7 desktop so I use ntbackup, yes ntbackup.
On Explorer I was just glad it was less convoluted than Vista. I had read about the remember settings thing, but its not something I ever did.
Colin