(Using the TRIM command allows the system to properly erase blocks of data in the background for an explanation, see this excellent article by Anand.) Windows 7 supports the TRIM command natively earlier Windows versions don’t. That update had to come from Dell, and as of last July, it wasn’t available.Ī third-party utility, CrystalDiskInfo, confirmed that this disk did not offer support for the TRIM command, which is one of the key requirements for proper SSD operation. The problem was that the hardware-a Samsung PB22-CS3-needed a firmware update to work properly with the advanced disk-handling features in Windows 7. I did a little research last summer and learned that a lot of Dell customers were experiencing the same disappointment with this particular hardware combination. Disk performance was reasonably fast, but it certainly wasn’t jaw-dropping, and the disk score in the Windows Experience Index was stuck stubbornly at 5.9. One of the first things I did was to replace the Dell-supplied copy of Windows XP Professional with Windows 7 Professional. My own personal experience bears this out.īack in October 2009, I bought a Dell Latitude XT2 with a 256GB SSD. Part 3: Windows 7 and SSDs: Cutting your system drive down to size Part 1: Windows 7 and SSDs: Just how fast are they? Skip any of those steps and the results can be disappointing. In fact, there are a series of steps that must be performed before an SSD can perform to its full potential on a Windows PC. Because SSDs don’t have motors and spindles and platters and magnetic heads, they don’t benefit from those features and need to be handled differently. Features like Superfetch and Prefetch and ReadyBoot are designed to monitor files you access at startup and when you launch programs and then arrange them on the disk for optimal access. That’s because Windows has evolved over many years with features that specifically target the behavior of conventional hard disks. In the first installment of this series, I gathered the numbers to show just how much faster you can expect an SSD to perform in the real world.īut you might need to jump through some setup hoops to get top performance out of an SSD-equipped PC running Windows 7. SSDs start and shut down fast, and they perform read operations (especially random reads) at speeds that blow the doors off conventional hard drives.
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