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First, The Results WEI score, left side is SSD :) Crystal Disk Mark ATTO Disk Benchmark Boot time (sorry forgot to screenshot the before, it was 82 seconds) : And now, i'll list the operations i've done to optimize my new SSD's performance. I won't go into the reasoning for those steps, they've been discussed time and time again, this post is just to organize the steps to execute them. So here we go: 1. Reinstall windows from scratch. 2. Installing all the drivers, chipset first and then the rest with restarts in between. 3. move c:users directory from my SSD to the data drive using symbolic link 1. Booted with windows 7 Media, chose repair windows 2. choose command prompt 3. copy users to hdd (when booting like that my C drive became E and D remained) robocopy "E:Users" "D:Users" /mir /xj /e 4. rmdir e:users /Q /S (you might want to just rename it in case there are porblems) 5. mklink /J e:users d:users (when booting like that my C drive became E and D remained) restart and you should see your users directory on the data drive Then run services.msc to disable the following services: 1. Disk Defragmenter 2. Superfetch 3. Windows Search Alternatively you can start an elevated command prompt and run the following three commands sc config defragsvc start= disabled sc config SysMain start= disabled sc config WSearch start= disabled OUTPUT FOR EACH SHOULD BE : [SC] ChangeServiceConfig SUCCESS Next, Open my computer, right click on the SSD drive choose properties and remove the checkbox from "Allow files from this drive to have contents indexed..." press Ok, and then choose the recursive option, OK and wait for it to finish. Next i enabled write caching on the SSD drive, for that, we need to go to device manager. (Right click on my computer, Manage and choose device manager). There we need to expand the "Disk Drives" section and select the Intel SSD... device, and right click properties on it, in a window that opens choose policies tab and check the second checkbox that says "Turn on windows write cache buffer..." Disable superfetch and prefetch: run regedit go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetContro lSession ManagerMemory ManagementPrefetchParameters Set 0 on EnablePrefetcher EnableSuperfetch Disable Hibernate : start an elevated command prompt (start, in the search box write cmd, right click the result and select run as administrator) C:Windowssystem32>powercfg -h offFinally disable system restore: Right click on Computer, Properties, Advanced System Settings, select system protection tab, choose the SSD drive (usually C),press Configure and select Turn Off System Protection. Thanks TheSSDReview) Since i have 8 gigs of memory i've also disabled the pagefile. This step is not usually recommended for people with 4 gigs but Les here says he runs fine - test at your own risk :) Comments welcome :) EDIT: Some more tips : LargeSystemCache HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory Management, I change LargeSystemCache from 0 to 1 Memory Usage of the NTFS file system - Looks like it's oboslete, decide yourself HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE System CurrentControlSet Control FileSystem NtfsMemoryUsage = 2 (Normal = 1, Increased = 2; Default = 1) Disable the 8.3 Name Creation on NTFS Partitions HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlFileSystem NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation On the Edit menu, click DWORD. By default, the value for this entry is set to 0. Type a value of 1 in the Data field. Disable the NTFS Last Access Time Stamp HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlFileSystem NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate = 1 (0 = disable, 1 = enable) (Thanks StamatisX)

I decided i'd compare the performance of two famous tweaks done to the OS to improve SSD performance. Those tweaks became famous due to the previous generation of laptop chipsets that were limiting SSD performance to preserve battery life. I'll be comparing a Vertex 3 240GB SSD on SATA III (6 GB/s) interface inside the Alienware M17x-R3. (Note : Even though the tests were made on the M17x-R3 the results are almost identical with the M18x, since they use the same chipset. I confirmed it with [MENTION=5]Brian K.[/MENTION]) I measured the performance with CrystalDiskmark in three cases. Default install without any tweaks JJB processor power state tweaks via windows power management IntelPPM tweak, brought to us by our own @StamatisX which for previous chipset models brought the best performance increase. So without further ado, here are the results. As you can see, no much gain there. Here's another look at the results, the graphs are improvement in percents over the default result in read and and write. We can see that the best performance increase is achieved with the intelPPM tweak, at 4K reads. Rest of the improvements are quite negligible - under 5% in in some cases i even saw a decreased performance. One note about intelPPM, it does seem to disable turbo boost on non-extreme CPUs so, it's quite unusable for most of us. You guys can draw your own conclusions of course, but for me, those tweaks are not worth the trouble. Another conclusion is that the current HM67 chipset does not seem to suffer from bad SSD performance, at least not as much as the previous chipset was. Opinions ?