I installed Windows 10 and a bunch of games on a 500 GB drive. I also have a spare 64 GB SSD lying around. Can I use the SSD as an automatic cache? If so, how? I have looked around a fair bit, but most answers seem to be for Windows 7 or 8, or otherwise outdated. What's the best way to have an SSD cache on a modern Windows 10 computer?  I do not have Intel, so SRT is not an option. This question is not a duplicate of  because Dataplex is not supported on my SSD because it is a standard SSD, not a specialized "cache drive", and FancyCache is only supported through Windows 8, and not on Windows 10.
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My motherboard is Asus P8B75-M. It doesn't have Intel Smart Response. But recently I bought a SSD. Since I mostly use linux I have Linux installed in it. But can I use it to speed up Windows also? How? I don't have Smart Response... (I run Windows 8.1). The SSD is only 64GB.
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With the new Windows 10 coming out soon as a free upgrade, I'd like to know if and how I can install the upgrade on a new HDD. I assume the files needed for Windows 10 are only for upgrading an installed copy of Windows 7 or 8 and not a standalone installer to use on an empty hard drive. Or is this assumption wrong?  I have some issues booting (an older non-working version appears in the list of OS's to choose from) and I'd like to replace my current SSD, which is too small, with a new larger capacity one, while keeping my other drives intact. The old SSD will then be removed.  If more information is needed, please let me know.
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I had a RAID0 array that for all intents and purposes went to hell. I put a new SSD (same on-board Intel controller) and installed a new copy of Windows on it and all the drivers (Intel Rapid Storage, etc.). I failed to change the SATA type from RAID to AHCI when I did this though.  I have removed the old SSDs that were in RAID0 and if I change the SATA type to AHCI in the BIOS, Windows will not boot. It tries and fails. It then goes into the whole 'let me fix your woes' routine, only to tell me it cannot fix my woes.  The only help I could find was the following:     Locate and then click one of the following registry subkeys:   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\IastorV   In the right pane, right-click Start in the Name column, and then click Modify.   In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.   That is going from SATA to AHCI I think, but either way my values are already 0.  It seems to work okay, except for the fact that I'm running a 256K Samsung 830 and my read speeds are 226MB/s which is about half of what I should be getting...  Any help would be great. I would REALLY love to not have to reinstall Windows and all apps again...
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I am using Windows 7 64 bit with 8G ram. After some use, I feel Windows is getting sluggish. The drive is thrashing. When I look at the resource monitor and disk activity, I see a few instances of use of the page file (c:\pagefile.sys). I check the physical memory and I see about 2.3G available memory and 700M free memroy.   Why doesn't Windows use more of the free memory and less of the page file? Does it need to leave some x amount of free ram, how much would that be? Is it a percentage of physical ram?  My plan is get more ram and an SSD for the main drive. Meanwhile I am suffering from slow performance.
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Is it possible to install the Windows system files on a small SSD and have all important folders (C:\Program Files, C:\Users) on a 2TB data drive?  I assume this is how one would use an SSD to achieve higher performance
10398
I have a similar issue as . You can pretty much take his screen shot and apply it to my issue: Windows 8.1, 99% disk usage or in that vicinity for a longer period of time (minutes). Yet the individual disk usage stats don't add up to more than roughly 1MB/Sec. I have an SSD disk capable of much higher throughput.  The question I linked to doesn't provide much answer, but one comment hints to low free disk space. That is an issue with my disk. I have only ~1GB left of free space on my C drive. But my follow-up question is why would that matter? Windows does pre-allocate 6GB of virtual drive, doesn't it? At least that's how I interpret "currently allocated" in the Virtual Memory settings screen under System Properties &rarr; Performance options.  I've tried to use the  to gain some information on what's using the disk, but the amount of data logged in just a couple of seconds is so vast that I don't know where to start. The only thing I see is that service.exe accesses the registry a lot... But I guess that's normal? If anyone care to take a look, the log dump is  (19MB)  To summarize:   Does the disk usage really go up when free space declines? If so, why? Can anyone deduct from my Procmon log file what program or process causes 99% disk usage?   edit: To comment on the "malware"-answer in the other post: I'd like to know, not guess. I doubt it is malware in my case, but if it is, my logs should show that.  update: Similar case just happened. Any clues from these two ResMon screenshots?      "System" doesn't really tell me much.
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I'd like to use SSD as ReadyBoost cache disk. However, ReadyBoost can work with pluggable USB drives only (AFAIK). Is there any way to avoid this limitation?
3639
I'm a web developer and I have Windows 10 installed on a very small SSD (128GB).  The problem is, when I want to save my file to a cloud service, I need to store the files on my computer, so that the OneDrive or the Google Drive client can synchronize them.  My free space is very low, so I can't afford that.  Is it possible to save files to the cloud (directly), without them needing to first download them to my computer?
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My laptop has a built-in hard disk (HGST 500GB). I want to use SSD as boot/C: drive. I mainly use windows 8.1 (I may need to install ubuntu alongside it). My laptop model is HP Pavillion n004tx.   Is it possible to install SSD on caddy(CD drive replacement) and use it as C drive? Which would be more efficient SSD in place of my existing Hard Drive or SSD in the caddy(CD drive replacement)?
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What is the most efficient way to transfer a large number/amount of data, such as 430-450 GB, from one Windows 10 laptop to another?  Could someone guide me visually using a short yet comprehensive tutorial? And which connector/cable should I use to transfer between two internal HDDs?  I think all the laptop specs are fairly standard and fairly inexpensive. The laptop internal HDD data interfaces are both SATA.
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I recently bought a Samsung 840 EVO 500 gb solid state drive for my laptop. There's a feature (disabled by default) called RAPID (Real Time Acceleration Processing of I/O Data) Mode. From what I can tell, this mode will use more memory/RAM to facilitate better/faster read/write speeds. A white paper on this feature can be found .  What is RAPID mode? RAPID mode is paired exclusively with Samsung 840 EVO SSDs and available as a feature of the accompanying Samsung  SSD Magician Software Toolset (version 4.2 and later). When enabled, RAPID mode is inserted as a filter driver in the Windows storage stack. The driver actively monitors all  storage-related activity between and among the operating system, user applications and the SSD. The RAPID technology  analyzes system traffic and leverages spare system resources (DRAM and CPU) to deliver read acceleration through intelligent caching of hot data and write optimization through tight coordination with the SSD.  So is it really worth enabling this feature? I have 8 gb of installed memory on my laptop (max that I can install). Is it worth this trade off of using some memory to improve speeds?
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I have a windows 8.1 32bit installation with 4GB of RAM and a x64 capable CPU. I've upgraded the RAM to 8GB and want to do the Windows 10 upgrade... as far as I'm aware the upgrade will do a like for like (32bit to 32bit)... If I do this and let Windows 10 activate... then do a clean x64 Windows 10 installation... will this work and activate correctly or does the hardware id hash contain architecture information (32bit x64 etc) and not allow this?
28532
I was wondering if anyone had any specific experience using Intel DC3700 SSDs (or similar) in the HP (DL380p) Gen8 servers?   I'm upgrading a set of database servers that use direct-attached storage. Typically, we use HP-branded everything in our server configs, and beyond a few SSD'd desktops (all of which have worked flawlessly), I have not otherwise used SSDs - certainly not in a server.   The servers we're upgrading run SQL Server (2005) on Windows. We're moving to SQL 2012. Current boxes host a single 200GB database on DL370 G6 provisioned with 72GB 15K SFF drives in RAID 1+0 as follows: OS (2 spindles), tempdb (4 spindles), t-logs (8 spindles), data (20 spindles). Performance is not an issue (CPU load is typically 20% / peak 30%, disk queues are typ = 1). The data volume disks are running in MSA50s off a P800 - so there's probably 5K IOPS there tops. The hardware is approaching 4 years old, and so it's time for a refresh.  Data usage, as reported by the individual hard disks, shows write volume of &lt; 100TB since deployment on the data volume; &lt; 10TB write on the transaction log volume; and ~ 1TB on tempdb.   That's the use case. Now consider a new, identical disk subsystem. It's going to run ~ $15K per server (34x 15K HDD @ $250 + 2x D2700 shelf + Smart array P421 for the external storage).   Consider a similar SSD deployment, say 6x 200GB SSD for the data volume, and 2 each (100GB) for OS, tempdb, and logging. Perhaps overkill, but using Intel DC S3700 for all with a second array card brings me in around $5K per server. Plus, it fits in one 2U box (use the expansion cage on the DL380p) and saves several hundred dollars in electricity every year. With the increased SSD performance, this might even cover some sloppy queries ;-).   An equivalent "no-worries" HP SSD solution is going to run ~ $10.5K. Twice the price with less warranty, lower endurance, but guaranteed performance and manageability.    Certainly, there are loads of in-between solutions that could work. I'm also quite aware of the vendor supported solution vs. 3rd party trade-offs. What I don't have is experience integrating these specific products to help quantify those trade-offs. I'm hoping someone out there does, and is willing to share his experience.   Questions that come to my mind are:  Does the S3700 play well in the Proliant environment with the Array P42x/P822 cards? If using the S3700, would there be an advantage to using a 3rd party card, say the LSI 9270-8i? How (well, easily) are firmware upgrades or management alerts accomplished with the third party solution as I've outlined?  If there are particular issues with the assembly, how have you worked around them - assuming you have?  With the changes that SSDs has introduced into the storage arena, storage solutions are way less straightforward than even a few years ago. I'm sure they will be very different in another few years, and we had expected to wait another cycle before seriously considering using SSDs in any server application.   Before I head too far down this road, is there anyone who would share their relevant experience with any of this? Please tell us why we're smart, crazy, or something in between.
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I noticed that my Windows 10 laptop takes around 6 seconds to go to sleep, and during these six seconds the SSD's activity LED is on. I imagine that Windows is writing something on the SSD before going to sleep.  I remember my Linux systems going to sleep instantly when I pressed the sleep button, which makes me wonder if I can do the same on Windows.  Given that Hybrid Sleep is disabled, what does Windows do with my drive before sleeping, and is it necessary ?
67862
My SSD died yesterday. I have made regular backups using Acronis True Image Home. I've restored the image onto a new SSD which I have purchased and installed. I have verified it is there. It also contains that small hidden partition at the front of the disk.  However, for some reason, the system will not boot that disk.  I have used a Win 7 System Repair Disk, which I previously made, to try and "repair" the problem - to no avail.  How can I get my system (tower, not laptop) to boot this new SSD that contains my restored Win 7 installation?
103032
I am looking for a solution to [dramatically] improve an enterprise database performance on a system that needs to support thousands of transactions (inserts &amp; large selects) per second. Besides the database/queries optimization, we are also looking for hardware improvements, too.  I need someone with experience in database administration that used SSD drives to store databases. What RAID configuration did you use? RAID1 looks like a good choice maybe combined with another redundancy-focused configuration, also SLC technology would be preferred for SSD drives I suppose.  The questions are: what type of SSD drives are you using (make, model)? How are they organized in RAIDs, what improvements did you achieve and how many (major) issues did you encounter? How much are you worried about the reliability of current SSD drives? Would you recommend using them for database (meaning critical) storage?  Also, what was the approximative price (at the time you implemented the solution, of course) of the implemented solution?  Maybe this post can also provide hystorical data about how SSD+database relationship has evolved over the time.  PS: If important, we are currently using SQL Server 2008 R2. Database size: over 400GB at this time, but my question is not only related to my specifics.  Thanks.  An interesting article found here:
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Defragmenting an SSD drive is a bad idea and Windows 7 is (should be?) smart enough not to schedule defragmentation on such drives.  However, I've opened up Disk Defragmenter on my system and found, to my surprise, that my SSD has indeed been defragmented... recently!  Then I checked the disks selected for the scheduled defrag (I have one SSD and one normal disk), and there the list correctly shows only the non-SSD drive.   MSDN forum post seems to suggest that, at least on Windows 8, defragmenting an SSD drive will just cause the TRIM command to be sent to the drive, but there's no word on what actually happens if you try to defrag an SSD drive on Windows 7 (aside from the fact that it shouldn't happen automatically).  What happens in Windows 7 if one chooses to defrag and SSD? What could possibly have been the reason my SSD drive got been defragmented?  EDIT:  I just remembered - I've moved some folders (Users and ProgramData) from my SSD drive to my normal drive using junctions.  question suggests that this shouldn't have any effects at all on the defragmentation process, but could it have an effect on the "last run" in Disk Defragmenter?