Solid State Drives, SSDs, are now becoming cheap enough that our corporate customers are ordering them with their new PCs.  The first Windows operating system to support SSDs*, was Windows 7, in July 2009.

Microsoft have no intention to backport SSD support into Windows XP.  But they do provide some advice on how to tune Windows XP for use with SSDs.

And that boils down to six important things:

1. Turn off the Winows Prefetcher.
   (support.microsoft.com/kb/307498)
2. Turn on Large System Caching
   (support.microsoft.com/kb/895932)
3. Disable the Last File Access attribute
   (support.microsoft.com/kb/150355)
4. Disable 8.3 Name Creation
   (support.microsoft.com/kb/121007)
5. Disable System Restore
   (support.microsoft.com/kb/310405)
6. Apply the latest SSD firmware, and run it’s “Trim” utility.

A registry file to do the first four items, can be found here.

* – ie. have the ATA TRIM command built into the operating system.

Update: 7 Nov.  Added to the list, after performing some testing.

Related posts:

Performance: Windows XP, the now “Classic” OS and Solid State Drives. Windows System State Analyzer – Windows 7 “Access database in an inconsistent state”

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