Free utility speeds up SSD writing on XP & Vista 32-bit

MLC based Solid State Drives all have one problem in common in that they have rather poor random write performance.  As a result, operations that involve a lot of small random writes such as browsing websites with multiple tabs open or moving e-mail between folders in Outlook will often result in the system stuttering and stalling as it carries out the slow write operations.  As some SSDs such as SSD’s Core series have very fast sequential write performance, one way to dramatically improve SSD write performance is to convert all write operations to an SSD to sequential writes. 

Microsoft has a free utility called Windows SteadyState which is designed to protect files on a Windows hard disk volume from being modified, such as when sharing a PC with others without worrying about what they try installing or modifying.  It does this by diverting all write operations to the protected volume to a cache file.  The contents of this cache are either committed to disk or discarded during the next restart of Windows, depending on how SteadyState is configured.  However, one interesting side effect of this cache is that all write operations are sequentially written to this cache file on the volume being protected.  So on an SSD drive, this dramatically improves write performance as one OCZ forum member discovered. 

To see how much of an effect SteadyState has on write performance, this user carried out tests on two identical laptops with 30GB OCZ core drives and mirrored a hard disk image containing Windows XP and a variety of applications with a virus checker and system restore enabled.  When SteadyState was placed on one laptop, it improved performance by up to four times when carrying out tests such as file compression/decompression operations, copying folders containing small files, multi-tab browsing, intensive Outlook 2007 operations and installing software.  Unlike the other laptop without SteadyState, there was no noticeable stuttering or stalling either.

Due to the nature of SteadyState, before one decides to try it out, they are strongly advised to make a full backup of their system and to pay very close attention to each step of the installation of SteadyState.  The current version 2.5 of SteadyState has a known issue of completely losing all cached data for the current Windows session in the event of a power failure or total system lockup, so users are advised to store important information such as documents, photos and Outlook ost/pst files on a separate partition that will not be covered by SteadyState’s protection.  Another thing to watch out for is that SteadyState requires Windows to restart each time the write cache has filled up, however, the cache size can be changed, e.g. to 10GB to minimise the likelihood of it filling up before the user needs to restart the system for some other reason.

This OCZ thread gives some useful info on how to go about installing and setting up SteadyState.