[quote name='yayece']Honestly, all the SSD setup and "precaution" stuff like disabling prefetch and indexing etc. isn't really necessary. The idea behind it is that NAND memory in a SSD will wear out after you do so many writes to the drive. Prefetch, indexing, etc is supposed to cut down on unneeded writes.
Let's put things into perspective though. Here's the spec sheet for the Intel 320:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/solid-state-drives/ssd-320-specification.html (You can probably find similar specs for other drives). Under the reliability section, it says "The SSD will have a minimum of five years of useful life under typical client workloads with up to 20 GB of host writes per day."
5 YEARS if you write 20 GIGABYTES per day
How likely is that anybody will actually hit that?[/QUOTE]
If you notice it actually says "5 years writing
up to 20GB per day." which is one of those phrases that aren't absolute. It's like when you rent internet access from your internet service provider and they say "Up to 10Mbit/sec.", however you're not guaranteed that will be the case.
Also, Intel is in the forefront of SSD technology with their extremely large R&D budget. They test/implement features before everybody else in a majority of cases and make use of existing things with new technology faster than others. If he bought an Intel SSD, I could say that he could forget about prefetching as Intel has fixed it to work more efficiently with their SSDs. I can't say the same for other manufacturers and my information is dated a year old so I can't say with certainty as he bought a newer SSD. Though each manufacturer you will want to make sure you're optimized for their own SSD. Intel even has a tool for this (not surprising):
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=18455
Finally, none of the stuff I mention is particularly a bad idea to use, however it does
not increase the amount of writes to the SSD. I don't know where you're getting that information but that simply isn't true. The only thing on that list looking back at it that I disagree with is probably disabling write caching. Though like I said it's entirely optional.
[quote name='epobirs']NTFS is subject to fragmentation. It's just that the efficiency of the built-in Windows defragger since Vista has been such that the need to invoke it manually should be very rare.
This was driven home by the drive that was the storage location for all of my t*rrent activity. Under XP regular defragging was a must. Under Windows 7 it never gets worse than 5%, which is hardly noticeable.[/QUOTE]
Correct. However, the reason Windows 7 doesn't get above 5% is because it's a scheduled task that's on by default and will defrag every wednesday if I remember correctly. If you turn that off then it's an entirely different story.
Also I believe the next iteration of NTFS was said to not require defragmentation, but I could be wrong (Probably am now that I think about it). That might have been the other new file system that was recently made announced in the last half a year or so.
