How much host writes does Windows 8 Fast Start feature use?

Windows 8 has a cool feature called Fast Start. When you enable it from Power Options dialog, it uses the hiberfile.sys to save part of the running state when you shutdown. So when you boot into Windows, it loads that part it saved to the hiberfile.sys directly to memory, instead of doing the full blown loading process. Like you expected, shutting down takes some time because it has to save whatever it needs to the disk before switching the power off.

At first, I thought this Fast Start feature saved only a small amount of information to the disk. But it turns out, it saves a considerable amount of information to the disk. I checked this by monitoring the amount of host writes to my SSD.

Previously I monitored the amount of host writes as at 27th of March to be 0.8GB. Then today (7th of May) I measured it to be 1TB. That’s roughly 200GB (it could be more or less depending on how Samsung Magician software rounds it off) in a span of 40 days. During that time, I only installed Octave and VMware Player to the SSD. It would have totaled to about 500MB. Maybe give another 10GB for temp files, browser cache, mail cache, Windows updates, driver updates and few other not-so-important things. Surely, it all wouldn’t take up 10GB. That’s all. The rest of it has to be those writes related to the Fast Start feature. So it’s roughly 5GB/day.

And I don’t even turn off my PC that often. On weekdays, I would do it twice. On weekends, only once. Restarts don’t count because then it does not save the state. So in total, it would come to about 70 shutdowns. OK, call it 100. Doesn’t matter how much it saves per shutdown. What matters is how much it saves per day. In total, that’s about 5GB per day. That’s a lot!!! That’s a lot of SSD wear and tear.

So, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to disable Fast Start and monitor for month and see how things progress. Since I haven’t done a properly controlled test, you can always argue these results are not valid. But it’s for your SSD’s own safety. Disable Fast Start if you value your SSD. Heck, you are only saving a couple of seconds of boot time. You can always use Standby. :)

How to improve/restore your Samsung 840 Series SSD’s performance

Remember that I bought a Samsung 840 series 250GB SSD about a month ago? Remember also that I told you I would be closely monitoring the degradation? This is the report after a month of moderate use.

 

On a fresh Windows 8 Pro x64 installation, the Windows Experience Index rated the SSD at a score of 8.1. But over the past month, I installed a lot of applications and huge games and now the SSD is 30% full. (Yeah, just 30%!) Once even I mistakenly copied my entire iTunes music collection to the SSD. Then I downloaded a whole 10GB file to the SSD without knowing that it was being downloaded into the SSD. I also did not do any of the space-saving tricks discussed here either. I'm using the default temporary folders. However, I do not let those temporary folders to fill up. Everyday at 10PM, a scheduled CCleaner cleanup job gets executed and all the temporary files get purged.

 

The Windows Experience Index score for the SSD quickly dropped to 7.9 after a couple of weeks. I wasn't happy about it because that's what I got with my old SSD as well. I waited a week or so hoping that the original performance would be automatically restored, but it didn't happen. I felt as if I was cheated.

 

The SSD comes with a maintenance / management tool called the Samsung SSD Magician.

 

 

You can perform various tasks in it.

• Benchmarking (Sequential read/write speeds + IOPS)
• Performance Optimization (garbage collection?)
• Data migrating (cloning from a old drive)
• Secure erasing (resetting the bits either to start fresh - kinda like a manual trim, if you are going to sell the drive.)
• Changing the amount of default over provisioning (how much space is reserved for wear leveling)
• Optimizing the OS settings to get the best out of the SSD (things like disabling indexing service and hibernation)
• Firmware update

I'm not actually sure what Performance Optimization does, perhaps some sort of garbage collection, but that is what we are interested in. Last night I ran it to see if I can get back the score of 8.1 in Windows Experience Index. It didn't take long. It originally predicted a running time of 6 minutes, but it actually finished within a minute. Thus I wasn't expecting any miracles. But that's what I got. A miracle.