SSD's and System Restore

So "they" tell us to always turn System Restore off if you are using an SSD. So what happens if you turn System Restore off and some new program you are installing tries to create a restore point ??? Does that still work ??? And why does system restore hurt an SSD that supports the TRIM operation ????

It doesnt hurt the SSD.

Theres similar thoughts about SuperFetch, when in all reality it makes things faster even with a SSD.

The idea behind all of this is that a SSD has a limited amount of writes, (or more specifically erase cycles) and that you should limit writes to be as minimal as possible.

Quite honestly, its all blown way out of proportion.
Neither System restore nor SuperFetch harm the SSD in any way.


As far as System Restore being off, you will be fine in regards to anything attempting to make a system restore.
All that happens is you get a error log that "creating a System Restore Point failed!", and things move on as normal.

I have mine Off, but only because I make daily system images with Acronis, and would MUCH rather it handle all forms of backup and recovery.
If I must roll the system back to an earlier time, its just as fast & easy for Acronis to Re-image the drive from a Image made earlier in the day, or day before.

However, I would not recommend everyone disable it, unless you have a specific, regular plan of disaster recovery.

Bottom Line, System Restore will not hurt anything left On or Off.
Disabling it for sake of saving writes to the SSD is pointless.

There is alot of literature available with respect to both of these points.

With respect to System Restore, there has been alot of evidence that the was Win7 allocates its restore points severely impairs if not completely shuts down TRIM. I approached Intel with this sometime ago who stated they would look into it and supply response to which their only response was to tell people to shut down System Restore.

I have an article dedicated to it and the way to test for its effects on The SSD Review if you are interested.

With respect to prefetch its really like having an extra unneeded appendage. the purpose of superfetch and prefetch was to speed things up on hard drives, however, they serve no purpose simply because the access speed of a ssd is .1ms and this cannot be improved upon in any way by these two things. Will it reduce your ssd life through excessive writes to the drive? Who knows really as there is no first hand proof but understanding the mechanics would make one believe so.

In fact, the lifespan should even be more of a concern for System Restore as this wreaks havoc on the end life write total.

Hope this helps a bit.

Yup first post...found this on Google and joined to help a bit with the response..

Les said:

There is alot of literature available with respect to both of these points.

With respect to prefetch its really like having an extra unneeded appendage. the purpose of superfetch and prefetch was to speed things up on hard drives, however, they serve no purpose simply because the access speed of a ssd is .1ms and this cannot be improved upon in any way by these two things.

True SSDs are fast. But another side to this debate, Although a SSD is fast, it is still not as fast as RAM.

Also the fact, Superfetch will have preloaded most of the DATA.


So, if you think about it, with SF turned off, the SSD still needs to fetch the DATA and load it to memory.

With Pre-Fetch ON, it Simply launches from memory (Which is faster than a SSD)

thehappyman said:

So "they" tell us to always turn System Restore off if you are using an SSD.

Not sure who "they" is, but I would never tell anybody to disable system system. Even on an SSD. I'm sure the concern here is limited disk space...so go adjust the total amount of space that you would want it to consume. The people who tell you to disable system restore, are most likely the same people who image their computer on a daily basis and will go back to that in the case of a problem. While I do image my computer, i only do it about once per month and have used system restore in the past to correct pesky little problems without having to resort to an older image.

DeaconFrost said:

I have my system restore turned off. It is a feature that gets trumped up by a few reports of it actually working, yet you don't hear of all the other issues (like mine) where it has never worked, ever, since it's inception.

I've only had it NOT work on one computer that I was fixing for a family memory. And it would go most of the way, then blue screen and revert back to where it was...so it didn't make things any worse, but it didn't fix the problem either. Every other time that I have used it on my own personal computers as well as coworker computers it has always worked.