Open the command prompt and type fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify (without any end punctuation). Windows 7 and 8 should detect an SSD and enable TRIM automatically if the drive supports it-but it’s a good idea to check anyway. The TRIM command steps in a little ahead of time and instructs the operating system (supported by Windows 7 onward) to erase data blocks that are no longer in use, preparing them to be written to directly without further ado. But the erasure process can slow the drive’s write performance if managed on the fly. As noted above, when a block is written to, the entire block must be erased before it can be used to store new data. The TRIM command solves a performance problem that eventually crops up in SSDs over the course of continued use. If you have hard disks that would benefit from a good defragging, you can run the defragmenter on a schedule for those particular disks.īonus tip: optimizing performance with TRIM To turn off your disk defragmenter, uncheck the Run on a schedule box in the defragmenter program.

You should defrag only your non-SSD drives. In fact, defragging makes numerous small, unnecessary, device-killing writes to the SSD-reason enough to eliminate it from your routine. Because there is no moving read-write head, and because of the nature of flash memory and controllers, fragmentation as you understand it does not exist with SSDs.

Don’t obsess over every single write cycle-a few of our later tips are best suited for such tendencies-but do check out the following techniques for minimizing unnecessary writes to the drive.įirst and foremost, your days of worrying about fragmented files are over. Nevertheless, every time you write something to the drive, you bring it a little closer to its demise. You’d have to work hard to reach the P/E cycle limit for an MLC-based drive, let alone an SLC-based one.

Windows 7 ssd laptop