Well now I just have 2 SSDs on my PC:
Samsung 960 Pro 1 TB as main drive
Samsung SM863 1 TB as archive drive
Both very high performance SSDs and I must disable both Prefetch and Super Fetch, I believe!
I don't have and won't use any HDD in the future and am very interested in a reason to keep those services alive!
Decrease SSD lifetime or PC speed?! :)
BTW, this is Prefetch folder:
C:\Windows\Prefetch
Anyone knows where's Super Fetch folder?
Where do you get silly idea that disabling these is a good idea?
Modern SSDs have a much higher resilience to write cycles and turning these off will have no impact on SSD life that you would be able to measure.
Given your other posts about stopping services, it seems to me you are reading stuff on internet telling you to do such things. Well here is the thing - most of the advice is either years out of date, bullshit or just plain wrong, as it is for older less optimised OSs. Windows 10 is well optimised out of the box.
If you do not understand what things like superfetch, services etc. do, then do not touch them!
You are more likely to break things in attempt to optimise things like a bull in a china shop which will give you limited benefit if any at all.
If there is one piece of advice you SHOULD listen to is "Learn how to make image backups", then you can experiment safely knowing you can revert.
To the OP. I also have an ssd and I have noticed A STRONG DECREASE IN PERFORMANCE when Prefetch/Superfetch are disabled.
Leave them as they are. W10 is built with SSD support in mind. You can do any other things if available to increase life spam of ssds:
Move temporary files to an hd. Move or disable web browsers caches. set %TEMP% and %TMP% variables to another drive (I have mine pointing to an HD). Etc.
EDIT: If you are unsure about default configuration, issue an WINSAT -FORMAL -RESTART command to reset configuration.
Prefetch and Superfetch are there to increase performance. As for Samsung 960 Pro, make sure you install newest, v2.3 driver. Prefetch folder is self cleaning in W10 and it will not grow indefinitely. Even after many months, mine is still 1.6MB. Not much writing even for oldest SSDs.
Disabling Prefetch & SuperFetch will actually slow your boot time down specially if you have Fast Startup turned on in Power options, and it will also negatively effect the new feature, where if you do not close a program before shutting down/restarting Windows at boot/reboot it will open those programs you had open before hand.
Sorry I'm a Windows Platform Developer / ISV since 2002, and I will test these settings later to check their effect on my high end development PC.
Maybe I am writing a commercial application though for an organization and I have to do such things :)
Thanks for your note, I will perform some full tests later.
SSD is so common, we have cheap low performance SSDs and enterprise grade data center SSDs as well like my Samsung SM863 1 TB which has a huge lifetime, much more than me even, and Samsung 960 Pro which is one of the fastest ones on the market now.
Maybe a Sata II or III SSD really needs Superfetch or Prefetcher, but I'm not sure if Samsung 960 Pro with a high config PC without any Sata drive configuration need it, but I will do some benchmarks before and after disabling it, will post back the results, thanks ev1 :)
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