Monday, April 30, 2012

Optimize and maintain your SSD drive with SSD Fresh

Optimize and maintain your SSD drive with SSD Fresh:
SSD Fresh Screenshot
If you own a Solid State Drive (SSD), you may be interested to know that there are specific settings that you could use to optimize and enhance it’s performance, and, more interestingly, that many of the practices common to maintaining and optimizing regular drives are unnecessary with SSD drives. For example, did you know that unlike normal drives, there is no need to defragment your SSD drive at all? If you are defragmenting, you may be simply wearing your drive out.
SSD Fresh is a free tool that brings a number of settings that can optimize and maintain your SSD in one place. More interestingly, it is also an educational tool that can briefly and concisely explain each and every setting as you go through the list.
How to use: run the program, go to the ‘Optimization’ tab, and scroll down the list. You could choose to toggle any one setting via the “Optimize” link on the right, while the “Restore from Backup” link on the left will revert the setting back to the way it was before. Note that your settings will apply on all partitions of your SSD. Also check out the little gauge on top which shows the presumed status of your optimizations.
S.M.A.R.T data: in the ‘Overview’ tab, click on the ‘S.M.A.R.T data’ button (bottom right) to see that data for each of your partitions (optional, for geeks only). If you are not familiar with S.M.A.R.T check out this link on Wikipedia.
The verdict: I love this program. So convenient and so informative. If you have an SSD drive you should definitely check it out; your SSD hard drive will be better off for it.
Version tested: 2012.4
Compatibility: Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7. 32 bit or 64 bit.
Go to the program home page to download the latest version (~2 megs).

No comments:

Post a Comment

[Please do not advertise, or post irrelevant links. Thank you for your cooperation.]