From file wrangling to housecleaning, these tips will help you get the most out of your supercharged storage. BY CHRIS HOFFMAN

How to build, maintain, and fix your tech gear.

HERE’S HOW

The ultimate guide to SSD management

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F YOU’RE STILL using a mechanical hard drive, you might

consider upgrading to a solid-state drive—it will give your PC

a speed boost (go.pcworld.com/ssdboost) on everything from

boot times to game loading screens.

SSDs aren’t the perfect replacement for mechanical hard drives just

yet, however, due to their far higher per-gigabyte costs and a few

quirks. Read on to learn how to put that rip-roaring SSD to best use.

Move programs and gamesYour SSD should hold your Windows system files, your installed and

regularly used programs, and any games you’re currently playing.

On the SSD, they’ll load lickety-split.

If you’re retaining a mechanical hard drive to serve as wingman, it

should store your media files, documents, and any files you access

IFor Steam games, open

Settings, select

Downloads, click

Steam Library

Folders, and add

a new folder on a

different drive.

infrequently, as these items don’t benefit from an SSD’s blinding speed.

When you’re installing a program, choosing its destination drive is

easy. Moving applications after the fact is trickier. You can move your

entire Steam folder, for example, to a new drive and simply run the

Steam.exe file to launch it and then play your games. Most programs,

however, will display errors if you attempt to drag and drop their

folder elsewhere. You’ll either need to uninstall the program and

reinstall it to the new location or use symbolic links.

With symbolic links (aka symlinks), you can move a directory but

make Windows perceive it at its original location. To create a symbolic

link, you use the mklink command in a Command Prompt window.

(Search for cmd.exe in Windows’ Run box to bring up the Command

Prompt. To create a link outside your user folder, you’ll need to open

the Command Prompt window as an administrator.) To move C:\

Example to your D: drive, you’d first drag the C:\Example folder over to

Here’s what to

type to create a

symlink from an

‘Example’ folder

on the C:\ drive

to D:\Example.

D:\Example in Windows Explorer, and then you’d run the mklink /d

C:\Example D:\Example command. Afterward, whenever a shortcut,

Registry entry, or any other component of Windows looks up C:\

Example, the pointer transparently redirects it to D:\Example.

Arrange Windows system foldersYou can move your main user-data folders easily. For instance, to shift

the Videos folder over from your main system drive (the SSD) to your

secondary drive (the mechanical one), first locate the Videos folder

within C:\Users\yourusername. Right-click it and choose Properties, and

then open the Location tab and select a new place for it. You will still

see a folder at C:\Users\yourusername\Videos, and that folder will

continue to appear as part of your Videos library, but its contents

will reside on the other drive. This arrangement also works for your

Music, Pictures, Documents, and Downloads folders.

In addition, you can choose the drive on which Windows is installed.

If you’re setting up the computer from scratch and installing Windows

HERE’S HOW

Windows makes moving user data

from a hard drive

to an SSD simple.

Just click the

Move button.

yourself, click the Custom option in the installer and choose your SSD

as the destination. If you’re buying an SSD later, you can move the

operating system to that new SSD with a drive-cloning program, or

just reinstall Windows (after backing everything up).

Keep some space freeSSDs slow down as you fill them because the drive ends up with a lot

of partially filled blocks, which the drive writes to more slowly than it

does empty blocks. Plan on using a maximum of 75 percent of the

drive’s capacity for the best performance.

With storage at a premium, you’ll want to eliminate

junk files regularly. For example, Nvidia’s graphics

driver updates leave an unnecessary folder under

C:\NVIDIA after you install them. This folder contains

the installer files, which you would require only for

reinstalling or repairing the driver. They take nearly

500MB of space that you could put to better use.

A utility such as the free CCleaner (www.piriform.com/ccleaner)

can scan your drive for unnecessary temporary files and delete them.

And the WinDirStat tool (windirstat.info) can help you figure out

where your storage space is going.

Should you reduce writes to your SSD?SSDs can accept only a limited amount of writes before they start to

fail. Sounds scary, yes—but don’t sweat it.

You’ll get many years of use out of an SSD without hitting its write-

cycle cap, especially if you store media files and documents on a

mechanical hard drive. And even if you don’t do that, you’ll likely buy

new hardware long before your SSD gives up the ghost.

You could avoid saving temporary files to your SSD—you could, say,

redirect your browser cache and Photoshop scratch disk to a regular

hard drive. Doing so, however, will lead to slower performance when

your PC needs to access those files. You’re probably better off tolerating

the greater amount of writes for the increased performance.

With storage at a premium, you’ll want to eliminate junk files regularly.

Don’t defrag your SSD! Avoid defragmenting a solid-state

drive. Period. On an SSD, shuffling all those bits around

wouldn’t improve performance, but it would involve many

extra writes and therefore reduce your drive’s life span.

Let TRIM run wildSolid-state drives can write data only to empty sectors. If

an SSD needs to modify a filled sector, it has to read that sector, note

the contents, modify them, erase the sector, and then write the

modified contents. The extra steps take time.

An operating system typically deletes a file merely by marking its

data as deleted and erasing the pointer to it; that old file’s data still

exists, and the OS overwrites it only when that space becomes

necessary for writing new files. The TRIM command, however, tells an

SSD to erase and consolidate cells that are no longer in use, so writing

to those sectors in the future will be as fast as when the drive was new.

In Windows 7 or later, TRIM is enabled by default. TRIM doesn’t work on

Vista or XP. (If you’re an XP holdout, see go.pcworld.com/endxpnow to

learn why you should upgrade.) On older OSs you’ll need to use a third-

party SSD management tool (such as Samsung’s SSD Magician or Intel’s

SSD Optimizer) to force TRIM, or follow the trick outlined in our guide to

restoring an SSD to peak performance (go.pcworld.com/ssdpeak).

Unless you need to force TRIM, skip “SSD optimization” software.

Newer operating systems use TRIM by default anyway, and your

SSD’s firmware already includes “garbage collection” tools that

perform housekeeping tasks. There’s no evidence that any extra

utility can improve on those operations.

HERE’S HOW

To confirm that TRIM is

enabled on your WIndows

7 or 8 PC’s SSD, open the

command prompt and

type ‘fsutil behavior query

disabledeletenotify’

(without quotation marks

or end punctuation). If

'DisableDeleteNotify = 0'

appears as a response,

you're set. If not, confirm

that your SSD’s drivers

are up-to-date.