AOMEI Partition Assistant
SSD Hard Drive Optimization: Improve Your SSD Performance
How to perform SSD hard drive optimization to get a better performance? Please refer to this article for the detailed actions.
By Tina / Updated on May 12, 2023
Does SSD needs optimization?
" I have an SSD which I installed to replace my laptop's HDD about a month ago. I’ve been told not to defragment it since that puts unnecessary wear on it. However, I've read that make Windows SSD optimization is a good thing. So I opened the optimizer in Windows and it shows that my SSD "Needs optimization". Does SSD needs optimization? How can I do it?
- Question from tenforums.com
Why your SSD slows down?
Because of the advantages including security and performance, many Windows users will choose to use SSD. However, sometimes they find that the SSD is not as fast and smooth as expected. The TRIM command is not turned on, SSD space becoming full, a problem with the SATA port, etc., can be the causes.
Therefore, in order to speed up and improve the performance of your SSD, performing SSD hard drive optimization is very necessary. Read on and get some methods to optimize your SSD.
How to perform SSD hard drive optimization
From the above, you may have learned the importance of optimizing SSD, especially when SSD becomes slow. Next, we will share 5 ways to effectively speed up your SSD.
│Method 1. Enable AHCI
In AHCI mode, SSD can obviously reduce the number of useless seeks of the drive, improving its work efficiency. Besides, this mode also provides more new features to improve the SSD read and write performance. The detailed steps to enable AHCI are as follows:
Step 1. Press "Win+R", then type "regedit" and hit "Enter" o open Registry Editor. In the Registry Editor window, find out the location:
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStorV", then input "Start" to modify it, change the Value data to "0". Finally, click "OK".
Step 2. Find the location
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStorAV\StartOverride", then open the 0 file to change the Value data to 0.
Step 3. Find the location
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\storahciz", then open the Start file and change the Value data to 0.
Step 4. Close Registry Editor, then restart the PC and turn to BIOS. Locate SATA settings and select the mode of memory devices. Then switch them to AHCI Mode, save settings and reboot your PC.
│Method 2. Check TRIM
Since SSD stores data on blocks, deleted data on pages is not actually deleted but marked for deletion. Therefore, you need to use the SSD trim command to completely delete the marked data.
Step 1. Press "Windows+ R" simultaneously, then type "cmd" and press "Enter" to open it.
Step 2. In the CMD window, input "fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify" command to check the status of the Trim feature, whether it is on or off.
✦ "DisableDeleteNotify = 0: TRIM" indicates that the Trim function has been turned on.
✦ "DisableDeleteNotify = 1: TRIM" indicates that the Trim function has been disabled.
Step 3. If the previous command is useless, please type "fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify" and press "Enter" to enable the Trim function.
│Method 3. Set the power plan to high performance
Generally, since Windows uses the Balanced power plan. When you are not using the OS hard drive, the drive power is automatically cut off to save power. In order to optimize your SSD, please follow the steps below to switch power options:
Open Control Panel, click on "System and Security" and "Power Options", then select "High Performance" to convert the power plan to high performance.
│Method 4. Completely clean the SSD
Poor SSD performance may also be caused by insufficient free space, so you can try to clean up your SSD. If you don't know which files should be cleaned up, you can try the best free software to optimize SSD hard drive - AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard.
You can use its "PC Cleaner" function to fully scan your SSD, all junk files will be found out. You can remove all found junk files from your SSD in just a few clicks.
Let's enjoy the charm of SSD hard drive optimization together.
Step 1. Download and open AOMEI Standard, click "Free up" and "PC Cleaner".
Step 2. In the interface, click "Start Scan" to scan for your SSD.
Step 3. The founded junk files on your SSD will be listed, choose some junk files and click "Clean All".
Step 4. Click "Back" when the task is finished.
Note: Common disk managing functions are also provided, including Clone data disk, Resize partition, Shred files or folders, Wipe hard drive, etc.
│Method 5. Align partitions on SSD
If a few small files take up a lot of SSD space, there're may be something wrong. Since SSD uses 4K sectors to store data, while the 4K allocation units are not aligned with the 4K pages in the SSD, the performance of the SSD will be affected.
In order to get the best performance of SSD, you can turn to the Professional Version and use "Partition Alignment" to complete the 4K partition alignment task with some simple clicks. You can try the Demo version of this SSD optimizer to see how it works.
Step 1. Right-click a partition of your SSD, select "Advanced" and "Partition Alignment" in turn.
Step 2. In the new popped window, select "8 Sectors" and click "OK".
Step 3. Click "OK" and "Apply" to align the partitions on your SSD.
Verdict
How to perform SSD hard drive optimization? In this article, we shared 5 ways to optimize your SSD. Through comparison, you can also feel the power of AOMEI Partition Assistant. In addition to the above functions, you can also allocate free space, migrate OS to SSD, move applications to another drive, etc. By the way, if you want to optimize SSD on Windows Server, you can try Server Version.
