Windows 7: How to minimize write to C Drive?

I've been using SSD Life to track read and written data to my C drive, (90GB Corsair Force). Apparently it only reads in 64gb blocks, so I got a big shock when the data written jumped from 64gb to 128gb. I suspect it's partly because a game I've been playing (DoW2, Chaos Rising) required at least 1.5gb system paging file on the C drive (won't recognise D drive page file). I've now uninstalled the game despite not completing the campaign because it's the equivalent of smoking for my SSD drive, it's going to kill it.

Some actions I've taken today are: Set paging file to D drive and not C drive, disabled thumbnail cache. The Firefox cache location was changed when OS was installed.

Anyway, what else can I possibly do to minimise writes to the C Drive?

(PS, I want to start by changing where games are saved. It by defaults saves in C:\UserXX\My Documents\My Games DESPITE the actual games being installed on the D drive)(Changing where temp files are saved would also be a bonus)(change appdata folder?)(change user profile location?)

can someone answer this please?

Welcome to the forums

I don't have an SSD, but maybe these will help:

SSD Tweaks and Optimizations in Windows 7

Show us your SSD performance

SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation

SSD Alignment

Also, I guess you could relocate your User files:

User Folders - Change Default Location

And you could browse the Hardware forum.

James

I think you worry too much. I use SSDs since 2 years (5 right now) and never made any special arrangements of the kind. By the time your SSD will be worn out, you will long have bought a new, faster and cheaper one. All you can accomplish with all those tweaks is to slow down your system.

I do, however, always move my user data to the spinners (except on the laptops). I also get rid of the hiberfile because I do not use it. And Defrag has to be disabled. But that is about all.

I suppose you're right. I re-enabled thumbnail cache when I found loading the pics from my HDD everytime to be annoying. Though the pagefile on D instead of S shouldn't hurt performance much right? I mean I have 8gbs of 1600mhz RAM..

But I did take some of James's advice on disabling some logging and I've realigned my SSD now to an offset divisible by 4, from 31k to 2048. I think it wasn't aligned before because I installed XP on it first.

1. in your case, the page file has quasi no function - except some programs access it even if there is a load of available RAM. But for performance it should not matter where it resides.

2. Good that you aligned the SSD. You can lose up to 300% performance if it is not aligned.

3. Never run anything else but Windows 7 on the SSD - especially not in double boot. XP and Vista have no Trim support and you would slow down the write operations of Windows 7 (by 50%) where data was deleted from another OS.

4. I would not delete the logging files. But that is your call.

i've often wondered about that paragon alignment tool.

if it's so important to have partitions 'aligned', how come only one software manufacturer seems to be aware of it?

plus it's very hard to find on the paragon website - if they had a killer tool that makes your drives 300% faster, i thought they would be advertising it more...

Windows 7 installer is supposed to align the SSD during installation. At least that's what happened to me, I just verified afterward that the SSD is aligned. Hence no need for special software. With regular HDDs I don't think it's an important issue.

I am quite worried by the SSD write cycle myself. I have definitely seen degradation of performance on USB flash drives - I use them regularly to watch videos on the Blu-Ray player and thus fill them up almost completely with new data few times a week. After several month of such use I need to replace the drive - writing to it becomes extremely slow.

So now for my SSD I did make a few "adjustments" - I moved C:\Users folder, temporary folders, browser cache and so on onto the HDD. I also disabled certain logs per advice given in one of the tutorials suggested by James Colbert above (I don't really read those logs anyway). Hibernation is also disabled.

The SSD is new experience to me, I just got the Corsair Force 60 GB recently. It's not the fastest drive around although the manufacturers specs are rather impressive. Still, I ran a couple benchmarks and they are not even close what's written in the Amazon description. Some people in the "Show your SSD performance" thread also show speeds way higher than mine, I guess I've got to learn my way around.

But in any case, I am the kind of person that keeps stuff for ages, I don't expect to ditch this SSD in a couple of years. I guess that's ultimately why the limited write cycles are important to me.

I think it pretty rare that people have SSDs that are not aligned. Only the few who have not studied the intricacies of SSDs would fall into that trap.