Tip: Optimizing Windows for SSDs

ajoy39 · June 15, 2013

So I actually figure this out on my own, but I figured I'd post it here for anyone experiencing a similar issue because if it weren't for WinDirStat i never would have figured out what the problem was.

I have Windows 8 installed on my 64 GB SSD (at the time, 64 GB was around $100 so it was the best option for me) and I noticed that, even after moving nearly all of my programs and 100% of my games to a secondary hard drive I still only had 2.3 GB of free space. The issue was two fold, and both had to do with recently upgrading to 16 GB of RAM.

You see, when Windows sets aside memory for hibernate mode it does so based on the size of your systems ram. 75% of it to be exact. It basically takes a snapshot of whats store in your RAM and stores it to your primary hard drive. so when I added an extra 8 GB of ram to my system, I effectively took 6 GB off my SSD.

If you are using a laptop and like fast boot, then you probably want to leave this option on. If you have relatively small amount of RAM, it's not a huge issue. But since I was running out of space fast and also never use hibernate as the only time this system isn't fully powered on (I run a minecraft server off it) is when it's restarting to install updates. The solution was to use administrative command prompt to disable hibernate and delete the hiber.sys file that was taking up 16 GB of space on my hard drive.

The following process works for Windows 7 or Windows 8, and it would appear they both store hibernate information in a similar way.

1) Open up the start menu, or modern UI and type in CMD

2) Right Click on the command prompt exe file and select run as administrator

3) type in

powercfg -h on

and hit enter.

That's it if you want to completely turn it off and get rid of the whole thing. alternatively you can also limit the size of the hibernate file using the command

powercfg -h -size

followed by either a percentage or a number of bytes.

The second issue was with my page file, and again the size of the page file is set by how much RAM you have. To change this like I did open up control panel and go to system -> Advanced System Settings .and click the settings button in the Performance box.

In the new window changed to the advanced tab. The second box contains information about your systems virtual memory. There you can see how much hard drive space is allocated to your page file. To change it, click the change button. Uncheck the box that says automatically manage the page file for all drives and then select the custom radio button. For the initial size, you can choose any number you like. I used the recommended size from the bottom box of the window. Set the maximum to twice the initial.

That's it. I know a lot of you probably already knew this, but I just wanted to clear it up for anyone having a similar problem. By doing both of these things I actually freed up 23.3 GB of space on my SSD so you can imagine how thrilled I am about that. Since I hardly ever turn this system off I won't miss fast boot, but decreasing the size of the page file could lead to a slight decrease in overall system speed. Until i get a bigger SSD that's a trade off I'll have to make though.