How to take care of a SSD?

[AkG]

Where you have an Intel SSD....their "ITGC" out and out stinks. According to your sys specs you are running on a nForce 790i mobo....which doesn't support TRIM as its controller is a shall we say "less than optimal controller" when it comes to standards compliance. This means you probably are NOT imagining things. Your drive is most likely in a degraded state.

Luckily the fix is easy. Download Intel's SSD Toolbox, and run a manual SSD optimization on it. Set up a weekly schedule so it runs once a week every week. You then should be good to go. IF you notice it getting slow run it every 3-4 days. This assumes it the newer Gen 2 X25-M and not the older gen 1. IF its an older gen 1 there are ways of fixing it but its more work. I would assume its the gen 2 as the gen 1 went EOL a nice while ago ;)

[BrianHanna]

Guide * Windows 7 Ultimate Tweaks & Utilities *

i find this is the best guide available for ssd's, and windows 7 tweaks in general

[ultraman7k]

is there any reason why OCZ says don't use up more than 80% of the drive space?

[AkG]

The less space you leave free the less room the wear leveling algos have to work with. Basically, if you leave only say 10% of room that 10% will worked twice as hard as if you left 20% and thus the 10% free NAND cells will wear out twice as fast as they would have IF you had left 20%.

Its funny but I usually say 15-20%, other experts say 10% so I guess OCZ is just being EXTRA conservative. :)

[ultraman7k]

thanks AkG! Always helpful, now if you don't mind, I'd like to pick your brain again!

Now just out of curiosity, I'm wondering where ~5gb went to on my SSD. I've already disabled hibernation, system restore, indexing...and I know had ~12gb free on the weekend, and am suddenly down to 7.8gb free. Does this have anything to do with the extra 4gb of ram that I installed today?

[AkG]

Easiest way to find where (and what) your space is being used is SpaceMonger. Download it run it...and see.... as it could be ANYWHERE! :)

SpaceMonger

[ultraman7k]

aha! this program is amazing. so it turns out that pagefile.sys is taking up 8gb of my ssd!!! Did some reading, turns out i'm reading conflicting ideas that turning it on/off is a good/bad idea....any first hand experience with this file?

[AkG]

I wouldnt turn it OFF but I would set it up to run on a dif drive (say a fast HDD like a WD Black) and set it a static size. ;)

[ultraman7k]

awesome. thanks AkG. that was tremendously helpful. Moved the pagesys to my old drive...and doubled my available space!

[AkG]

NP. Glad I could be of help. :)