How to more efficiently use SSD?

1

Background: I am using a standard used laptop which I have upgraded(SSD and RAM) to reduce bottlenecks in performance.

Problem: The CPU has become the main bottleneck now, but what I have noticed is that even when using very I/O intensive tasks, disk usage rarely exceeds 10% according to Task Manager(I am using Windows 10). I have seen tasks such as the Windows Search Indexer get as high as 50% disk usage, so 10% is not some kind of limitation.

Question: How can I make more efficient use of the SSD? This includes general tweaks, Windows specific tweaks, anything related to process/thread management, optimizing software, etc.

Regards.

Damien Golding

Posted 2019-02-13T20:41:48.330

Reputation: 115

If anyone knows about ways to cache and index as much of windows as possible, now's the time to comment. – BlueDrink9 – 2019-02-13T22:04:29.543

How much space is in use on the SSD? Have you disabled hibernation and the page file? Please define efficiency for your purposes: are you concerned with primarily SSD longevity, stasis, overall performance, or some other purpose? Any recent SSD is designed to provide write caching in order to minimize writes, so even device indexing and other heavy data operations will have minimal writes in order to preserve SSD life. Large file writes will spike the disk usage, but small files will group writes together so each block is only written when it will be fully utilized. – shawn – 2019-02-14T07:52:19.507

@shawn Around 250GB out of 500GB. I haven't touched the default Windows 10 settings. I want to improve raw performance so I can perform code building faster. I have noticed that CPU usage goes up a lot when doing any kind of I/O operation. It is starting to look like CPU usage is becoming the bottleneck in my case even for basic I/O operations. I only have 2 CPU cores and it looks like at least one core is being almost fully used when doing I/O operations. – Damien Golding – 2019-02-14T09:12:06.357

If you don't need it, disabling Cortana will make the biggest CPU-performance difference. – shawn – 2019-02-14T16:34:52.810

Answers

0

For a general suggestion, you can change the windows indexer to index more folders. It's got a quite conservative default. That will help with general file locating operations.

From here

  • Click Start and in the search box type in Search
  • From the menu click on Indexing Options
  • To add a new location, click on the Modify button
  • Now you can check off any drives or folders that you would like to index

BlueDrink9

Posted 2019-02-13T20:41:48.330

Reputation: 369

Asked: 2019-02-13T20:41:48.330

Viewed: 35 times

Active: 2019-02-13T22:06:40.380