Windows 7 Windows 7 and SSDs

[tanzanos]

It seems odd that MS has totally disregarded SSD drives by incorporating 'indexing' in windows 7. Anyone using windows 7 with SSD drives is sure to drastically decrease the life of the SSD drive unless the Indexing is disabled.

Since the new GUI requires mainly the use of search as a means of navigating then disabling Indexing will basically make windows 7 unusable. This is where Classic menus would have fitted in perfectly.

MS better add classic menus to win 7 in its SP otherwise SSD users are in for a shock!

 

[Mike]

I have been using Crucial SSDs for some time, and have not had any difficulty, nor am I concerned about drive failure. The Windows Indexing Service actually makes searches less drive-intensive. Since the files in the User folder are indexed by the operating system, and only re-indexed when they are changed, how would this further degrade the life of the disk? I'd like to read your explanation, because if you perform a search, its accessing the index, and not performing a physical search of the drive. It is not reading the entire drive to find the file(s) you are looking for. If there was no index, you would have to search the entire drive, or folder-by-folder, in order to find the files you are looking for. This would result in more reads.

The index can also be disabled. How does this feature differ from something like Google Desktop, which indexes the *entire drive*? They kept the footprint small to make the index manageable. Case in point, you would be using far, far more disk I/O if you had no option to use a search index. You would be running a hard search for files every time. How does this harm someone, with say, 50-60GB of music files in their user folder? The reality is, it doesn't, because those files never change, and are indexed once. This is unless the index is manually rebuilt.

How would reducing disk I/O usage also reduce the life of a solid state hard drive? The life expectancy on the better drives already exceed conventional ones. I don't understand your rationale in regards to SSDs. If you are implying that a search could be instantaneous on a SSD already, I believe you are incorrect. The SSD actually has no knowledge of the file system, and simply follows instructions given to it on a bit-by-bit and cluster level. There is no special feature that lets you find any file on the drive instantaneously that I know of.