I hope everyone knows that SSD drives, although fast, are sensitive to frequent writes. Therefore, in order for the SSD to be system disk worked for as long as possible, you can minimize the write load on it.

This is achieved through various settings systems, which I will discuss in this post.

Important note. Before choosing Windows optimizations recommended reading. Choose optimizations depending on your needs. You don't need to do them all. For an inexperienced user, the use of absolutely all optimizations can cause a drop in performance and other problems with the system. If you don't know what you are doing, don't do it.

Here are some tweaks that can help extend the life of an SSD and possibly increase performance:

• Switch to BIOS settings SATA controller to AHCI mode.
  If you haven't already done so for Windows 7 with SATA drives, then it's high time to do it, especially with an SSD. Switching this mode to an already installed Windows system lead to its inoperability. To switch to a live system, it's worth reading this.
• Enable disk write caching.
  In the device manager, select the SSD and configure accordingly:
  
  
  Those who have a UPS can also enable the second option. For lack of it, I did not turn it on.
• Turn off search indexing.
  Attention. This optimization makes sense only if you rarely use Windows search.
  In the properties of the partition located on the SSD, remove the checkbox that allows indexing.
  
  Click on "Computer" right click, select the second item ("Manage" in the English version), and disable the service there Windows Search.
  
  
  If Microsoft Live Desktop or Google Desktop is installed on the computer, it will be useful to demolish them, because they themselves are regularly indexing.
• Disable scheduled defragmentation.
  New systems Windows type 8 should adapt to SSD by default. Therefore, it is not recommended to disable defragmentation, since in this system the TRIM optimizer will be used instead of the defragmenter for the SSD.
  Open the Windows defragmenter through Start and disable scheduled work there.
  
  
• In the same place where the indexing service was disabled, we disable the defragmentation service.
  
  
• Disable Prefetch and Superfetch.
  Windows 7 is designed for SSD drives and disables Superfetch for them. If you want to make sure that this is really the case, then you can check the correspondence of the following values ​​in the registry:
  Key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters, meaning EnableSuperfetch must be zero, the value EnablePrefetcher should also be zero.
• Disable swap file.
  An SSD is best used with a lot of random access memory. In this situation, you can disable the swap file, which slows down and wears out the SSD.
  Right-click on "Computer", select properties, select " Extra options system", go to the "Advanced" tab and select the performance settings. There on the next tab "Advanced" go to the settings virtual memory and remove the paging file from all disks.
  
  After disabling the paging file on each partition, do not forget to click the "Set" button. If you have little RAM and you really need a swap file, then it is better to move it to a partition that is not on the SSD. To apply these settings, you may need to reboot, about which the system will notify you.
• Disable System Restore.
  Not recommended for users who use System Restore. The recommendation is relevant for those who use partition images or third-party software.
  In the same Additional settings system” select the “System protection” tab and disable redundancy on all (or only on SSD) disks.
  
• Disable hibernation (Hibernate).
  In "Start" enter cmd, right-click on the cmd icon and select "Run as administrator".
  Enter the following command: powercfg -h off
• Enable TRIM.
  Windows 7 and 8 should include TRIM for SSDs, but this can be verified. To query the status or set options for using TRIM, you need a command line with administrator rights, just like disabling hibernation.
  Query the current status: fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify

  If the value is zero, then TRIM is enabled. If not, then you need to enable it:

  fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0

• Setting up the file system.
  To increase the performance and resource of the SSD, you can disable the recording of the last access time to the file.
  Open regedit (Start->Run or just hotkeys WIN + R) and in the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem change or, if it is missing, then create a DWORD value " NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate» equal to one. You can also disable this feature in command line: fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1

  
  If your system does not use old DOS applications that require old short filenames, you can disable the storage of DOS 8.3 format filenames. To do this, set the parameter NtfsDisable8dot3nameCreation equal to one.
  It will also be useful to increase the available memory for the file system by installing NtfsMemoryUsage(DWORD) to "2".

• Reconfigure the browser cache to RAM or another HDD.
  Opera allows you to simply disable the disk cache:
  
  
  Firefox requires a slightly more complex setup: type in address bar about:config, double click to select browser.cache.disk.enable and switch to False. Right click anywhere, select New, Integer, create the option " browser.cache.memory.capacity” and enter the value of the option in kilobytes. 32768 for 32 megabytes, 131072 for 128 megabytes, etc.
• We move temporary folders to another partition.
  In the "Advanced system settings" on the "Advanced" tab, select the environment variables ("Environment Variables") and set the user and the entire system variables TMP and TEMP so that they point to a directory that is not on the SSD.
  
  After that, you can clean up the directories in which the temporary files used to be.
• We transfer user folders to other drives.
  Almost all user folders, such as "My Documents", "Desktop", "My Music", etc., can be transferred to other drives. To do this, just create the appropriate directories on another drive, then go to C:\Users\%Your_User%\, right-click on desired folder and move the folder to another location. After selecting the target directory, the system will offer to transfer the contents there as well, so as not to copy manually.
  
• If you have a lot of RAM and want to speed up the work of programs that use temporary files, or your browser cannot be configured to use only cache memory, then you can move temporary files and browser cache to RamDisk. If you move temporary directories to RamDisk, then you need to make sure that it is large enough to unpack large installation packages and is available immediately after system boot (before user login). So, if RamDisk is not available before login, installing updates with a reboot may fail.
  In addition, not all RamDisks provide a noticeable performance boost.

To find out the health status of your SSD, you can look at

So you've got a brand new SSD. You installed a system on it, armed yourself with an optimization guide found on the net, and after a couple of hours you did everything possible to ... slow down your work in the system!

Don't believe? Think about what constitutes high performance. Advantages SSD speeds you can experience in three categories:

• system, for example, the speed of its loading and operation
• programs, including web surfing and working with documents, images and media files
• your actions, including disk navigation and copy/move files

How myths are born

I'm pretty sure that your SSD tuning measures have negatively affected at least one of these components. You will learn why this happened next, but first about the reasons for this optimization.

If you read the inscription "buffalo" on the cage of an elephant ...

There are tons of guides and even tweaks on the web to optimize your SSD. In fact, the same information is used everywhere, and:

• obsolete, since it is aimed at saving disk space and reducing the number of rewrite cycles, which is irrelevant for modern SSDs in home PCs
• useless, because Windows itself takes care of what they offer to configure
• harmful, because it leads to a decrease in the speed of work - yours, programs and system

look critical to your guide or tweaker and think about which items fit into one of those categories!

There is another problem - bad presentation of information including misplaced accents.

If you have an HDD alongside an SSD, measure the speeds of both drives and keep the picture in mind. I will return to her, and more than once!

Special Notes for Dissenters

After the publication of the material, I decided to specifically clarify a few points so as not to repeat them regularly in the comments when answering opponents.

In this article:

1. All myths are considered solely from the point of view of speeding up the system, programs and user. If a measure is declared useless or harmful, it means that it does nothing to speed up the work.
2. Reducing the amount of disk writes is not considered as an optimization measure due to the irrelevance of this approach. If this is your goal, myths 3 - 11 are for you, as well as storing an SSD in a sideboard.
3. RAM disk usage is not considered as it is not directly related to SSD optimization. If you have an excess of RAM, you can use the RAM disk regardless of the type of drives installed in your PC.
4. All recommendations are given taking into account a wide audience, i.e. most users. When analyzing tips, keep in mind that they may not match your tasks, work skills, and ideas about the optimal and competent use of the operating system.

Now - let's go! :)

myths

1. Disable SuperFetch, ReadyBoot and Prefetch

This advice: controversial, can slow down programs, and in Windows 10 - increase the amount of disk writing and reduce the overall performance of the OS when there is not enough RAM

The speed of launching programs from the hard drive

When each program is launched, the prefetcher checks for the presence of a trace (.pf file). If one is found, the prefetcher uses MFT metadata references file system to open all required files. It then calls a special memory manager function to asynchronously read data and code from the trace that are not in memory on this moment. When the program is started for the first time or the startup script has changed, the prefetcher records new file trace (highlighted in the figure).

It is unlikely that SuperFetch is capable of speeding up the launch of programs from an SSD, but Microsoft does not disable the feature, given the presence hard drives in system. If a proprietary SSD manufacturer's utility (such as Intel SSD Toolbox) recommends disabling SuperFetch, follow its advice. However, in this case it is more than logical to keep all programs on the SSD, which will be discussed below.

Compress memory in Windows 10

This aspect is covered in a separate article Nuances of disabling the SysMain service in Windows 10. Earlier on this page there was an excerpt from it, published impromptu.

2. Disable the Windows Defragmenter

This tip: useless or harmful, may degrade disk performance

One of the functions of the CheckBootSpeed ​​utility is to check the status of a scheduled defragmentation job and the Task Scheduler service. Let's see how these parameters are relevant for the latest Microsoft OS installed on the SSD.

Windows 7

Windows 7 does not defragment the SSD, which is confirmed by the words of the developers in the blog.

Windows 7 will disable defragmentation for SSD drives. Because SSDs excel at random reads, defragmenting won't provide the same benefits that it does on a regular drive.

If you don't believe the developers, take a look at the event log. You won't find any entries there about defragmenting an SSD volume.

So when the SSD is the only drive, the scheduled task simply doesn't run. And when the PC also has an HDD, disabling a task or scheduler deprives HDD worthy optimization with a regular defragmenter.

Windows 8 and newer

In Windows 8, the place of the defragmenter was taken by the disk optimizer!

Optimizing hard drives, as before, comes down to defragmentation. Solid state Windows drives no longer ignores, but helps them by sending the controller additional a set of TRIM commands for the entire volume at once. This happens according to the schedule as part of automatic maintenance, i.e. when you're not working on a PC.

Depending on the SSD controller, garbage collection can be performed immediately upon receipt of a TRIM command, or delayed until a period of inactivity. By disabling the disk optimizer or task scheduler, you reduce the performance of the drive.

3. Disable or move the paging file

This tip: useless or harmful, reduces the speed of the system when there is not enough memory

The hardware configuration must be balanced. If you don't have much RAM installed, you should add more, as an SSD only makes up for some of the lack of RAM by speeding up swapping compared to a hard drive.

When you have enough memory, the swap file is practically not used, i.e. This will not affect the life of the disk in any way. But many people still turn off paging - they say, let the system keep everything in memory, I said! As a result, the dispatcher Windows memory does not work in the most optimal mode (see #4).

In extreme cases, the paging file is transferred to the hard drive. But if suddenly the memory is not enough, you will only benefit in performance by having pagefile.sys on the SSD!

AT Q: Do I need to put the swap file on the SSD?

O: Yes. The main operations with the swap file are random writes of small volumes or sequential writes of large data arrays. Both types of operations work great on an SSD.

Analyzing telemetry focused on evaluating writes and reads for the swap file, we found that:

• reading from Pagefile.sys prevails over writing to pagefile.sys in a ratio of 40:1,
• read blocks for Pagefile.sys are usually quite small, 67% of them are less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% are less than 16 KB,
• write blocks in Pagefile.sys are quite large, 62% of them are greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% are almost exactly 1 MB

Generally speaking, the typical swap file usage patterns and SSD performance characteristics are a great fit, and it is this file that is highly recommended to be placed on an SSD.

But in practice, the desire to extend the life of an SSD at any cost is indestructible. Here is a blog reader shaking his SSD, transferring pagefile.sys to the hard drive, although he himself even sees with the naked eye that this reduces performance. By the way, my netbook cannot install more than 2 GB of memory, and with a solid state drive it became much more comfortable than with a standard 5400 rpm HDD.

Finally, don't forget that completely disabling the swap file will prevent you from performing critical error diagnostics. The swap file size can be flexibly configured, so you always have a choice between disk space and performance.

Tricky question: what was my swap file size when i took the task manager screenshot?

Special Note

On the Internet (including in the comments to this entry) you can often find the statement: “The paging file is not needed if you have installed N GB RAM. Depending on fantasy N takes the value 8, 16, or 32. This statement does not make sense, because it does not take into account the tasks that are performed on a PC with a given amount of memory.

If you set yourself 32GB, and 4-8GB is used, then yes, you don’t need FP (but then it’s not clear why you bought 32GB RAM :). If you have purchased such an amount of memory in order to use it as much as possible in your tasks, then the FP will come in handy for you.

4. Disable hibernation

This advice: vague and harmful to mobile PCs, can reduce battery life and speed of your work

I would put my advice like this:

• stationary PCs - shutdown is normal, because you might as well use sleep
• mobile PCs - turning off is not always advisable, especially when the battery consumption is high during sleep

However, people have disabled, are disabling and will disable system protection regardless of the type of disk, this is already in the blood! And no, I don't want to discuss this topic in the comments for the hundredth time :)

6. Disabling Windows search and/or disk indexing

This tip: useless, slows down your work

This is sometimes argued by the fact that SSDs are so fast that the index will not significantly speed up the search. These people just never really used real Windows search!

I think it's pointless to deprive yourself of useful tool, speeding up the performance of everyday tasks .

If you have fallen victim to any of these myths, tell me in the comments if I managed to convince you of their futility or harm and in what cases. If you don't agree with my assessment of "optimization", explain what is the benefit of these actions.

You can mark fragments of text that are interesting to you, which will be available via a unique link in the browser's address bar.

about the author

Vadim, in recent days I have bought 4 SSDs for installation in all my computers. Let's just say... life has changed :-)

I also thought for a long time whether to buy a laptop with an SSD or a hybrid drive, the second one won, I chose 340GB + 24 SSD. Surprised that standard installation Windows 8 was on a 5400 drive but not an SSD. After suffering for a long time, I moved Windows 8 to an SSD and went a little nuts, because. about 3 GB left on the SSD. Knowing that over time W8 will swell and will need to fight for space, I returned everything back, transferred TEMP and Page file to SSD, plus I put frequently run programs.

Still, you just had to buy a laptop with an SSD and not soar your brain. They gave me an SSD for NG and now I'll stuff it into an old netbook, install W8 and be happy.

Thanks for the articles about SSD, we have the whole department reading.

Alexei

You, Vadim, have gone through SSD myths very well, we can hope that now there will be fewer fans of SSD perversions. I have Win8 on an SSD, as I installed it and it plows, I’m satisfied and don’t bother my head with all sorts of optimizations, the exhaust from which is doubtful.

PS: Answer to the question: 1Gb.

• Alexey, thanks for the response. You can’t put your head on everyone, but I don’t try :)

  The answer to the question is incorrect. How did you come to him?

madgrok

Before buying an SSD, I read a mountain of forums, benchmarks, etc. And I came to the conclusion that all tweaks are in the furnace.
Why do people buy their own SSD? Of course, what would be faster! :) And most of the optimization tweaks basically negate the entire performance gain, which Vadim wrote about.
I use my Vertex 4 256 GB as a regular disk for the system. Bought somewhere in the fall. The flight is excellent, health is 100%
An excellent article, I will recommend it to all my friends, friends for reading so as not to suffer. :)
And in general, thanks to the author for a great blog. I really like the fact that the topic is trying to "disassemble the bones."

Andrew

Vadim, at the end of the article there is a survey about the presence of SSD on our computers, I think that this topic is still relevant - there are those who are not going to, at least in the near future, acquire a solid state drive for a number of reasons - someone does not see the point of installing it on an old one they save up a computer for a new one, or, as in the polling point, arranges an HDD, or this is how Pavel Nagaev thinks for a long time which one to prefer ....
What would you advise? Is it worth moving the OS to an SSD for "increasing system performance", so to speak?

Andre

Hello Vadim, I think a lot of people are now looking at buying an SSD, and it would be very cool if you wrote an article on choice of SSD !

Alexey Matashkin

Vadim, thanks for the article.
In my practice, I did not have to deal with these myths, I only heard some advice separately, so I read it with pleasure.

I don’t quite get into the survey :) The main PC is not home, and it has an SSD. And at home, there is still enough of the usual.

There is nothing to add on questions, because I don’t use tweaks, all installed SSDs work normally with the system.
Although, an important detail is updating the firmware on the disk. In my practice, there are 3 cases of serious failures that were eliminated with firmware version updates.

Valentine

Pavel Nagaev,

Your 24 SSD was most likely designed for caching, which is why it is so small, maybe you needed to use it as a cache, in which case you get the benefits of both media - volume and speed. Vadim, do you have an article regarding hybrid hard drives or combining HDD with SSD? I think many readers might be interested in such an article. I consider the topic of 12 myths very useful, as I have many acquaintances who consider themselves experts, but make such mistakes and impose these mistakes ordinary users, thanks to the link to this article, it will be possible to convince them to make such mistakes

Vadims Podans

Nice and good article.

Sergey

Yes, indeed, people are surprised who buy an SSD to speed up work, but then they themselves transfer everything and turn it off and lose performance again ..

MythBusters in action! We went through all these myths with a skating rink.

Alexey G

At first I fell for disabling hibernation, but then I realized that it was inconvenient.
I remove labels 8.3. Because I use new versions of the program, and I don't need it)

From life: when I build a PC with an SSD, I transfer user files to the HDD. If the PC for unknown reasons (playful hands, viruses) starts to fail to boot, then if I'm nearby, then I will restore the customized image installed system(thanks to the blog), but if a person called another “master”, then the first thing he will do is format the disk: (Unfortunately, I haven’t seen a smarter way in my city. So this is a forced need to save the user’s files.

Answer to the question: 2834mb?

Dima

Thanks Vadim.
As always intelligible and with a light sense of humor.
As promised, I part with the myths easily and see you off on your last journey. I'll turn everything back on.
Sincerely, Dima.

PGKrok

I agree on all points, but I myself had to transfer the index files, some programs and personal photo-videos to the HDD, because. SSD - only 60 GB (which one I mastered :))
For comparison (to the question of "keeping the picture in mind")
Result CrystalDiskMarc (HDD)
http://pixs.ru/showimage/HDD1301020_6347406_6812031.png
Result CrystalDiskMarc (SSD)
http://pixs.ru/showimage/OSZ3010201_4238885_6812055.png

controller SATA-3 SSD - SATA-6

Dawn

I bought a 60gb ssd, left only Windows 8, program files, appdata, program data on it. The rest is on hdd.
Reason: growing too fast system partition, and look, the place will go to zero.
When buying, there was one task: to speed up the cold boot of the system. What he achieved - 8 seconds.
Vadim, the article is a test, thanks!

Ruby

About transferring TEMP and cache - I stupidly put them on a gigabyte ramdisk - this is a real speed increase, incomparable with SSD.

Denis Borisych

I have been working in IT for a long time and still do not cease to be surprised at the grief of optimizers.

I have had an ssd in my home computer for a year now and everything is in a bunch. 7 starts in 10 seconds, programs load quickly and easily without any optimizations. Well, except that the folder of necessary and important documents is not on ssd (its size is over 500 GB). And in the folder "My Documents" there is usually a routine.

As a person, well, I am very close to IT, sometimes I am not enthusiastic about the innovations of MS (only the inability to use Explorer without a mouse is worth something). But I must objectively admit that in terms of optimizing the operation of the OS on ssd and stability of work, they are undoubtedly great.

Ruby

I would also transfer the search index, but on the Windows blog they write that it is still kept in memory, so it makes no sense.

SuperFetch is needed in any case, it preloads files into RAM in advance, increasing speed and reducing the number of accesses to the drive.

Valery

Vadim, I read your articles quite regularly and often put the advice from them into practice.
Having bought an SSD (Intel 520 120GB), I also first read about all sorts of optimizations and even applied some, but now I left only the indexing transferred to the HDD and Intel's recommendations for their disks, and here some of your advice and recommendations from Intel diverge:
http://123foto.ru/pics/01-2013/42746566_1358157387.jpg
Whom to listen to?))

Alexei

Vadim Sterkin,

Came by typing :-)
My swap file takes up 1 Gb per 16Gb of RAM (the size of the system's choice). Moreover, the system monitor shows almost zero% load. I decided that 8Gb should have at least 1Gb.

Oleg

Hello Vadim. I always look forward to new articles from you, this article was VERY useful for me and for my friends. To my regret, my arguments and advice do not reach some friends, for some reason they trust more forums where they do not always write useful information.
I hope this article will convince you.

I will wait for articles about choosing an SSD.
Thank you.

George

Thank you for the article.
To be honest, I didn’t quite understand about Superfetch - what is the increase in performance on an SSD?

And about the size of the swap file, the answer seems to be this: 10.7 GB is written in the allocated line. From this figure, you must subtract the amount of RAM.

Alexander

Recently Bought SSD Kingston Hiper X 3K 120gb. I installed Seven sp1. I did not see any increase in download speed and program operation.
Previous configuration: Asus P5Q, 2 WD 500Gb Raid 0, DDR2 2 1GB each.
My conclusion: when connecting an SSD to the “slow” Sata 3Gb / s port, the increase in system performance, compared to that installed on stripping, is negligible. You will have to upgrade to a motherboard with Sata 6Gb / s and at least 8GB DDR3 memory.

GlooBus

Pavel Nagaev,

From 16-32 GB SSD disks soldered on laptop motherboards, there is no sense. The best thing in this case would be to take a laptop in a simple configuration with an HDD and upgrade it yourself. I did just that, took the ASUS X301A with 2 GB of memory, 320 GB of HDD and upgraded to 8 GB of memory and 128 GB of SSD. The laptop worked in a completely different way! Loading the computer from pressing the button until the password entry window appears is 6-7 seconds. I didn’t do any tweaks, except that I turned off indexing, tk. I don't use search.

Alick

The other day I installed VERTEX 4 128Gb Win 8 on it, applied optimizers, and after a week I realized that it was in vain, incl. will have to be reinstalled. And here's another great article.

Michal

Vadim Sterkin,

I think this is due to the fact that most people simply have not yet had a specific practice in using an SSD, like you have.
and there are many myths.
for example, I'm from Uzbekistan, we have SSDs here that have just appeared.
no experience with them yet. yes, and very expensive.
I read your article, I realized that in vain I transferred the swap file.
thanks for the article, I hope not the last :)

I specifically searched for this topic on Habré, but found only a recipe for a ready-made portable Firefox.
Its disadvantages are known - it is not official, therefore it is updated with delay, up to the omission of some intermediate versions.
So I decided to write about my little experience. Already done at home, on a laptop, at work - it works great.

The task was to transfer the FF itself and the profile to a virtual disk, for the fastest possible work.

I will describe the home version as the most sophisticated.
On the machine (win 7) there is a virtual disk from DATARAM, 1 GB in size - just for such purposes - to speed up and partially encrypt.
Image virtual disk lies on an encrypted (true type) disk.
Once a day, the virtual disk image is dumped into a backup. Also, the virtual disk is saved when the computer is turned off.

The very first option, which I did a year ago, is simply to transfer the folder with the profile and the folder with Firefox itself to a virtual disk, leaving ntfs links on it. A solution in 5 seconds, but it does not attract by the fact that when working with files (for example, a cache with a bunch of small pictures), it will still constantly pull the hard drive from which the path begins.
Well, constantly remembering about links is also not good.

Therefore, we make the most complete transfer:

Porting the executable:
When installing new Firefox, everything is extremely easy - immediately put it on a virtual disk.
When transferring - copy the folder " x:\Program Files (x86)\ Mozilla Firefox\ " to our virtual disk, and just run firefox.exe from him. He will immediately offer us to become the default browser. We say “Yes” and edit the call shortcuts where we have them (desktop, panel quick launch, etc.).
We go through the registry and correct the path in several places. It seemed to me that most of the keys belong to outdated versions, and the most necessary ones updated themselves when we reassigned the default browser, but I still recommend checking the registry - you can search directly for the full path " x:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox".
Rename the old folder, for example, to "Mozilla Firefox.old", when the experiment is completed successfully, it can be deleted.

Now profile transfer
In this folder ("x:\Documents and Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox") is profiles.ini, which describes what profiles there are and where they are located. It was not possible to transfer the profiles.ini itself so that nothing but the virtual disk twitched when starting FF :(. But you can specify firefox.exe -Profile in the launch shortcut (thanks)

After editing, profiles.ini looks like this:

StartWithLastProfile=1 // start with the last launched profile(1), or open the profile manager window (0)

// profile0, profile1, profilexxx
Name=USER // profile name
IsRelative=0 // path to the profile is relative or absolute. We put 0
Path=V:\Profiles\Mozilla\user // set our profile path
Default=1 // this profile will be called by default

The profile itself is in %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles, in fact, we copy it to our virtual disk, and the folder %APPDATA%\Mozilla rename to %APPDATA%\Mozilla.old. We will remove it completely later.

Testing
It starts almost instantly, before that it was still running on the desktop for 3-5 seconds.
The entire cache is stored on a virtual disk, respectively, hdd (sdd) do not twitch during surfing - for those who do not need a speed boost, but it's a pity SDD, you can also take note.
My Dataram is configured to drop the backup image once a day - more than enough for me.

In the process of moving, I found a bunch of outdated profiles, either from old versions of Mozilla, or something else, although I am extremely careful about what I put on my machines, and for a moment I was embarrassed that the transferred profile was much less than those that have not been used for a long time, but all the necessary information (tabs, bookmarks, passwords, settings) was correctly transferred, therefore, in addition, it also cleaned unused garbage. Now the profile takes at most 50 megabytes, plus 50 megabytes itself FF, so especially for surfing, the size of the virtual disk can be made much smaller.

After the test, you can delete the .old folders.
For a while I was afraid of virtual disk glitches, so I have old folders hung for several months, but never needed.

P.S. By the way, the Opera was transferred in the same way, but for some reason it continues to open for several seconds. With what it is connected - I do not know.

P.P.S. "Portable" in the subject is specifically indicated in quotation marks. because the migration process had to get into the registry, and therefore this option is not purely portable. But if you mean only the profile, then it's not a question.

Solid state drives have finally become affordable for most laptop and PC users. They have many advantages, the main of which is high performance, but there are also disadvantages. The disadvantages include less wear resistance (recording resource) compared to HDD. True, modern solid-state drives usually have a lifespan that exceeds obsolescence.

The solid state reveals its full potential as a system disk. In this configuration operating system and applications installed on the system drive read and write data to the SSD. How , Mozilla browser Firefox writes a relatively large amount of data every day, which kills the SSD resource.

Most PC users know that browsers write a lot of data to the hard drive or HDD. But how much exactly? Sergei Bobik thought about this, having installed on his computer free version SSD Life. This software allows you to evaluate SSD state and shows the approximate lifetime of the drive.

For two days Sergey did not work with anything except the browser and Email. And I was very surprised when I found out that 12 GB of data was written to the SSD on one of these two days. Since he did not download any large files, and working sites could not give a cache of such a volume, it was decided to find the cause of what happened.

Sergey Bobik monitored the statistics provided by the application for two weeks. As it turned out, even when the computer was not working (but not turned off), large amounts of data up to 10 GB were loaded onto the SSD.

The main culprit of the incident was the Firefox browser. It downloaded from 300 KB to 2 MB every second. The recording was done in a file called recovery.js. As it turned out, this backup copy Firefox sessions. It is used if the browser or operating system crashes. This is a useful but resource intensive feature. And considering what the SSD has limited resource, then here you already need to decide for yourself what is more useful - a working disk or restoring the current browser session after it crashes.

Sergey writes that the problem is not only in one file. In order to study the problem more fully, he performed several additional steps:
1. Set browser.sessionstore.interval to 15000ms and close everything open tabs browser
2. Opened a single tab with Google.com, waited a couple of minutes and closed it;
3. Opened the browser again and checked the size of recovery.js. Its size has been reduced to 5 KB instead of 900 KB;
4. Opened several reviews various devices in two different windows. Looked for reviews and opened search results in new tabs;
5. Opened a third browser window, opened several sites in the tabs of this window;
6. Launched Process Monitor and started monitoring recovery.js and cookies*.

7. Removed event logging in "File->Capture Events". Existing logs have also been cleaned up;
8. Reactivated event logging in "File->Capture Events". Left the three browser windows above open for 45 minutes. At this time, Sergey turned on Chrome for his own needs;
9. Viewed browser statistics in "Tools->File Summary".

As it turned out, during this time Firefox wrote 1.1 GB of data to disk. The main volume is cookies*.

At the same time, after all the manipulations, the file grew to only 1.3 MB.

Sergey returned to Firefox and in one of the windows opened mailbox at outlook.com. Cleared all event logs in Process Monitor and started monitoring again. This time, he left Firefox idle for only 10 minutes. After that, the size of recovery.js grew to 1.5 MB. Cookies again took up many hundreds of megabytes on the SSD.

According to the author of the work, the browser can write a bunch of data to the recovery.js file, cookies, or write information to both at the same time. If we take 1.1 GB of Firefox recorded data as a constant, then we can expect 35 GB of information to be recorded in a working day if the system is not turned off. After measurements, it turned out that the recovery.js file is being written constantly at a speed of 2 MB / s.

What can be done?

If you have normal hard disc, you don't have to worry too much. But if an SSD is installed as a system one, it is worth taking a number of actions that can stop the flow of data generated by the Firefox browser.

The main action is setting one of Firefox's settings, browser.sessionstore.interval. This option is available when you run the "about:config" command in the address bar. By default it is 15 seconds. The time interval can be extended up to 30 minutes. In this case, the amount of data generated by Firefox per day is reduced from 10-15 GB to 2 GB. This is still a lot, but several times less than before the browser settings were performed.

The resource of some consumer SSDs is as little as 20 GB of recorded data per day. Firefox can use half of this resource. If you have a lot of windows open all the time in your browser, and you work with "heavy" sites, then you can expect even more data recorded by Firefox than indicated above.

It is worth increasing the value of the browser.sessionstore.interval parameter even if you have a regular HDD as a system disk. The fact is that constant writing to the disk reduces its performance, and the PC can become a little faster if you remove the constant writing of data by the browser.

Firefox developers say they are aware of the problem, but so far it is not possible to solve it, since it will have to completely change the way the Session Restore function works.

I have a theory. In order to avoid a monopoly, the browsers that are popular today are constantly changing in functionality, one by one becoming worse, only to fix it later, and the most impatient users would switch to another browser. And so without end. Firefox is clearly involved in this, because the other day a specialist discovered that this program clogs up very quickly free place on an SSD.

What does Firefox do?

The development director of an unnamed company, Sergey Bobik, using the SSDLife program, discovered the following. Firefox in a day of active use has created quite big file 12 GB in size, although the user himself did not download anything, especially large files.

After several checks on the Resource Monitor, Sergey was able to determine where the free space goes. The fact is that Firefox wrote every second to the “recovery.js” file from 300 KB to 2 MB, and filled all the allocated space by the end of the day.

That is, the trouble is related to the backup system, from which the browser restores the current session when it suddenly stops working. Initially, in the FF settings, there is a refresh parameter equal to 15 seconds. The specialist recommended finding it at the address "about: config" with the name:

Browser.sessionstore.interval

And set it to 30 minutes. This will seriously reduce the amount of free space that the browser occupies. A similar Google Chrome test is currently being produced.