X25-M (SSDS) and Superfetch

J

jjz-

Limp Gawd
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Nov 18, 2008
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It was hard to decide whether to post this in Data Storage Systems or Operating Systems. I have decided to post it here, since it deals more with hardware wear than software performance gain.

Anyway, the question I have is, why disable superfetch?

Does it make enough writes to the ssd to change the lifespan significantly?

There are, in my opinion, performance gains to be had by keeping superfetch on, even with an SSD.

First of all, you are using ram that would otherwise be sitting idle, and I like that idea.

Second of all, RAM is still an order of magnitude faster than an SSD. Although there might not be a tangible performance gain, when seen by the human eye, there is still a performance gain. Why sacrifice this, unless the ssd lifespan is being reduced significantly?

Anyone have any insight?
 
I'm going to revive this thread since I'm interested in the same questions the original poster asked.
 
There is no reason to disable it. Windows 7 seems to leave it on, despite what the Windows 7 team blog mentioned.
 
the service stays running, but I get the feeling that it just doesn't "superfetch" stuff that's loaded on the ssd.

which means it may actually harder then first impression to actually enable it.
 
Hm.. that is a possibility. Do you have proof (i.e. monitoring Superfetch at startup and seeing it only fetch files from hard disks?)
Defrag is the same case, in that it stays enabled (i.e. scheduled), but doesn't run on the SSD. The windows 7 team is less than clear on this.
 
I also agree that common sense would dictate that prefetch would provide some benefit, it mainly just READS information into memory. I have 12GB of memory, and at any given time use less than three. So why not use the other 9 for something?
 
In vista, its best to manually disable superfetch if using a SSD, if using windows 7, then the superfetch service is still enabled, but it wont actively run on a drive that is picked up by the OS as an SSD drive.

So their is no reason to manually disable the superfetch service in windows 7, as the OS will by default not allow superfetch to run on a drive that is known to be a SSD drive.
 
TehQuick said:
According to bit-tech, Superfetch should be disabled.
Click to expand...

They also say that the Search and Indexing services only have a slight impact on system performance. Everything else I've read indicates otherwise and many people here disable them. Conflicting info ftw!
 
You should never worry about the write life of a modern SSD. They will last until you throw it away.

Superfetch should be disabled, since all it would be doing is wasting IO and CPU time. You have to understand that superfetch is trying to hide the latency of HDDs and latency performance is exactly what SSDs excel at.

So while yes, superfetch would still help, it won't help very much when using a SSD. Just leave it off and there'll be less things to go wrong.
 
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