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:
“O God, that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness, melt itself
Into the sea.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“You sell a screenplay like you sell a car. If someone drives it off a cliff, that’s it.”
—Rita Mae Brown (b. 1944)