Documents and Settings, temp data, and various subfolders.

CaSCaDe711

Good evening

I have an SSD for my C, and D (Programs) partitions, but am now thinking it may be getting far too many unnecessary writes, thus shortening its life, as I regularly use programs like CCleaner and Glary, and have Firefox set to delete-on-exit etc.

Have a large HDD for everything else, and now after moving the Firefox Cache folder to that was wondering is it possible to move others, especially those that hold temp data which CCleaner and others would generally delete from?

Would be very appreciative of any info on this

Thanking you in advance,
CaSCaDe711

Torqay

Use sandboxie, create a RAM disk, move the sandboxie container into the RAM disk and run your web browser sandboxed (which also adds another security layer). All write access from the browser will happen in the system memory, which also beats the heck out of the SSD re write speed.

You can also use the the RAM disk for your temp folder (may cause problems if, for example an installer requires a restart and the installation source has "disappeared").

I've got 2 Windows machines here with SSDs and plenty RAM, both run entirely without swapfile, no problemo. And if anyone says, that heaven will fall down when you disable paging, it's not true. Worst thing that can happen that your system may not run stable, remember it's only a few mouse clicks away, if you want to reenable it.

Oh, and I'm not using indexing, system retsore or hibernation either.

Plenty more tweaks here, if you're really serious about reducing write access to your precious SSD.

CaSCaDe711

Cheers Torqay, I'll look into that this weekend. Was recently reading about HDDs and SSDs so of course am a bit (more) paranoid now about the drives health. It's becoming nicely fragmented (close to 40% now) so even though I'd love to run Defraggler on it, I know I shouldn't

Only have 2GB RAM in my desktop, limited by this board (P4i65G), do you think that's enough to run and use Sandboxie nicely?

Torqay

Looking at the specs of the board (a Prescott at best) I suppose, you're using XP. Then 2 GB is perfectly fine. Create a RAM Disk of 256 or 512 MB and you still have plenty physical memory to disable paging.

Defragmenting an SSD is indeed nonsense. Since XP doesn't support Trim, you should run Ccleaner with "Wipe Free Space" (single pass) every now and then which has a similar effect. Indilinx offers a Trim tool for XP/Vista, called Wiper (download).

Torqay

And if the old paranoia is getting the better of you, you can always grab Windows XP Embedded which will be loaded entirely into the system memory as an SDI image, now that will keep your SSD neat and tidy

CaSCaDe711

Thanks for the info Torqay. Have installed Sandboxie now, will keep various apps bordered-yellow

That Wiper app, is it ok to use on any brand SSD? (Have an OCZ Vertex 2)

Torqay

CaSCaDe711 wrote: »

Thanks for the info Torqay. Have installed Sandboxie now, will keep various apps bordered-yellow

That Wiper app, is it ok to use on any brand SSD? (Have an OCZ Vertex 2)

Yea, I believe it was actually first published on the OCZ website.

Torqay

Wiper.exe 0525 has proven very safe with both 32bit and 64bit windows OS's, it is a tool supplied to OCZ by Indilinx ( the manufacturer of the SSD controller within the drive) and is free for use by OCZ customers.

More about it here.

Torqay

CaSCaDe711 wrote: »

Have installed Sandboxie now, will keep various apps bordered-yellow

Sandboxie alone doesn't do anything in the way of reducing write access, you will need a RAM Disk for that.

If you're using Gavotte RAM Disk (which I have linked above), do the following:

Run RAMDISK.EXE

1. Click INSTALL RAM DISK

2. Choose the size and drive letter

3. Use FIXED MEDIA (default)

4. Click OK



Now change the sandbox container folder accordingly:

CaSCaDe711

Am very surprised how little is happening with the C partition now Set the Sandboxie Container Folder to reside on a HDD partition, haven't got round to setting up a RAM disk just yet, will do once I have my usual free time tomorrow. Had a quick session on Google Earth tonight (as I know that dumps loads onto the HD every time), then let CCleaner analyze the drives, almost nothing showed up on the C. Checked the size of the Container Folder on the HDD (I:), nearly 200mb files added from Google. Already the SSD is working a lot less

Thanks again for the info Torqay.

Torqay

Ah, you do have a platter hard disc as well. then you won't need a RAM Disk (although they're quite useful for a variety of purposes).

One thing about sandboxie on a hard disk, in such a scenario I create a separate partition which I can easily reformat if required. Sometimes files can lock up in Sandboxie if the NTFS limit for path length is exceeded, which can happen because "Sandbox\Username\Defaultbox" are automatically added to the respective path. That's never a problem in a RAM Disk as it will be cleared with each shut down anyways but it's different on a hard disk.

Oh, and of course you can run Google Earth inside a sandbox as well: right click the GE icon and select "Run sandboxed".