Hackszine.com: Making Windows XP play a little better with solid state drives

Making Windows XP play a little better with solid state drives

disable prefetcher

I tried getting Windows XP running on my 20GB EEE PC 900, but out of the box, it's pretty sluggish. The problem may be that Windows XP is not being optimized for solid state drives (SSDs). Posting on the OCZ (maker of SATA SSD drives) forums, Tony has written up a HOWTO on making Windows XP play quite a bit better with SSD drives:

Cheaper SSD drives like our Core V1 and Core V2 series have limitations with random writes filling up the write buffer on the drive and causing the SATA controller to pause while this is flushed. The reason for this is Nand MLC drives at present have to erase before they write...hence you get added latency. So every bit written to the drive has to be preceded by a bit erased, the drive can not write over the top of pre written data.
What we are trying to do here is limit how much XP writes to cache/database. many apps within XP do this, apps you add also do this (such as outlook)
The tweaks you will see listed may help with this, SSD's do not take well to lots of tiny random writes.

I gave these a try on my EEE PC today, and they made things quite a bit faster. I'm still getting the occasional freeze, but that only started happening after I put some files on the 16GB secondary drive in my EEE PC. As long as I stuck with the faster 4GB C: drive, these tips made a world of difference in performance. My next step is to try formatting the D: drive as FAT32 to see if that makes any difference at all.

Making XP pro SSD friendly

Posted by Brian Jepson | Oct 4, 2008 04:00 PM
Windows | Permalink | Comments (0)