Solid State Drives are widely used in modern computer/laptops due to their fast read/write speeds in comparison to HDDs. If you have a SSD installed in your computer then most probably you will have installed Windows on it and the HDD is being used to store data. The tips given here will help you improve the performance of your Windows system and also ensure less wear and tear on your SSD, increasing its lifespan.

Move your Cache folder to HDD

SSDs have a limited number of writes. You can extend the life span of the SSD by moving temporary files and caches to the RAM disk. This will ensure the SSD does not wear out faster.

Steps to change default location of cache

1. Open Windows Explorer
2. Navigate to the partition where you would like windows to store the temporary files and cache
3. Create two folders named “temp” and “cache” For example, g:\cache and g:\temp
4. Within the cache folder, create one folder for each browser installed on your system (For example, ie– for Internet Explorer, ff– for Firefox, and chrome– for Google Chrome)

For Google Chrome

1. Right-click on shortcut icon on the desktop
2. Click Properties
3. In the next dialog box, add the following to the end of the “Target” textfield: –disk-cache-dir=”g:\cache\chrome” –disk-cache-size=314572800
4. Set the cache size to 300MB

This will set the cache to the newly created folder.

For Firefox

1. Launch Firefox
2. In address bar, type “about:config”
3. Click “I’ll be careful, I promise”
4. In filter search box, type “parent”
5. Look for preferences named “browser.cache.disk.parent_directory” and double-click on it
6. If you do not see such an entry, right click within the page and click “New” and then “String”. Press Enter
7. Set the Preference name as “browser.cache.disk.parent_directory”
8. For the “Value”, enter the directory location, which is G:\cache\ff
9. Click OK
10. Restart Firefox

For Internet Explorer

1. Launch Internet Explorer
2. Click Tools
3. Click Internet Options
4. In the General Tab, under Browser history, click “Settings”
5. Click “Move folder”
6. Browse to new location you want to set for temporary files such as g:\temp
7. Click OK in each dialog box to confirm the change of location of the temp folder
8. Restart Internet Explorer

Move your temporary files location to HDD

Steps to change default location of Windows temporary directory

1. Right-click on the My Computer icon
2. Click Properties
3. Click Advanced Settings link on the top-left
4. In the next dialog box, click the Advanced Tab
5. Click Environment variables
6. You should see two different areas; System variables and User variables, both of them have entries such as temp and tmp that point towards the current temporary contents directory
7. Right-click on each of these four entries and point it to the new location. For example, G:/temp
8. Click OK on each of these four dialogs to save the changes

Use Hibernation instead of Sleep

Hibernate mode uses less power than Sleep mode. However, it takes a bit long for the computer to get to normal state from hibernation mode. With SSD fitted in your computer, the process of returning to normal state becomes faster due to faster read speed of the SSD. Besides this you also save valuable power. You can switch on hibernation mode by following the steps set out below:

1. Click Start
2. Open command prompt as an administrator
3. Type “powercfg /hibernate on”