Okay, so you just picked up a brand spankin' new solid state drive with its dive in prices over the last few months, but did you know there's methods to properly calibrate it for your operating system? Whether you're a Mac or a PC user, we suggest trying out these 5-10 minute tricks that may save your SSD a couple thousand hours or more.
[Thanks for the feedback folks! We agree - the correct term is 'optimize' rather than 'calibrate.']
FOR PC USERS:
To this day, most folks out there still don't know that solid state drives (due to their flash based make-up) aren't meant to be defragmented like regular hard drives. It's a hard habit to break, but because Windows has it built-in, we recommend going in there to make sure that it's off. Here's how to do it:
- Open Start Menu, type dfrgui.exe
- Right-click it and select Run as Administrator
- Select your SSD
- Click Configure Schedule and make sure Run on Schedule is not checked
On the other hand, if you're the type that enjoys poking around in motherboard's BIOS, we suggest going into the settings and turning on AHCI support. After doing so, Windows 7 should detect your drive as an SSD and disabled defragmentation automatically.
FOR MAC USERS:
We've found that Lion for OSX unofficially supports TRIM technology (explained here) that keeps your SSD nice and healthy. However, from what we've seen, the steps to enabling it are often confusing and convoluted. But - if you're up for the task, you can follow the instructions over at Grant Pannel's blog.
The alternative would be to trusting third party coders to do the dirty work for you. Trim Support Enabler 2.0 essentially does just that, but don't say we didn't warn you.
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Really? Calibrating an SSD is pretty much turning off defrag for Windows when you're running your SSD in IDE mode?
This type of article seems to be posted just to meet a daily quota and is a big turn off.
And yet, given the current prices of SSDs, and the fact that they have a limit (though a high limit) to the number of write cycles per memory cell, it's useful to know how to protect and extend your multi-hundred-dollar investment.
I agree with tekcor. This is not a "calibration" of an SSD, this is more of an "optimization". When you calibrate something you configure a device so that it meets a higher set standard, when you optimize something you configure a device so that it performs as effectively as possible. Also, not sure how disabling defrag in Windows constitutes a calibration of the device for the OS, it's more changing the OS to suit the device.