Solid State Drives
Over time, several technologies have been incorporated into subsequent versions of Windows to improve the performance of the operating system on traditional hard disk drives (HDD) with rotating platters. Since Solid state drives (SSD) differ from mechanical HDDs in some key areas (no moving parts, write amplification, limited number of erase cycles allowed for reliable operation), it is beneficial to disable certain optimizations and add others, specifically for SSDs.
Windows 7 incorporates many engineering changes to reduce the frequency of writes and flushes, which benefit SSDs in particular since each write operation wears the flash memory.
Windows 7 also makes use of the TRIM command. If supported by the SSD (not implemented on early devices), this optimizes when erase cycles are performed, reducing the need to erase blocks before each write and increasing write performance.
Several tools and techniques that were implemented in the past to reduce the impact of the rotational latency of traditional HDDs, most notably disk defragmentation, Superfetch, ReadyBoost, and application launch prefetching, involve reorganizing (rewriting) the data on the platters. Since SSDs have no moving platters, this reorganization has no advantages, and may instead shorten the life of the solid state memory. Therefore these tools are by default disabled on SSDs in Windows 7, except for some early generation SSDs that might still benefit.
Finally, partitions made with Windows 7’s partition-creating tools are created with the SSD’s alignment needs in mind, avoiding unwanted systematic write amplification.
Read more about this topic: Features New To Windows 7, File System
Famous quotes containing the words solid, state and/or drives:
“A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)
“The great object in life is Sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain; it is this “craving void” which drives us to gaming, to battle, to travel, to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)