Is Superfetch really safe to stop?

f14tomcat said:

If you're using an SSD, Superfetch is perfectly safe to disable. Adds virtually no added benefit speed wise, and contributes to wear and tear on the SSD.

I don't have an SSD drive. I just have a standard hard drive. Is it still safe (or beneficial) to disable?

f14tomcat said:

Yes, but in your case any benefit would outweigh one service not running. Pre-fetch and Superfetch were designed with hard drive head seeking and transfer rates in mind. Keep in mind, you will not see any immediate gain having any fetch service running. They learn to cache your frequent activity over time. If your drive is highly fragmented, it will only add to the overhead. It's a case-by-case basis most of the time.

More info: What Is SuperFetch and Do You Need It on Windows 10?

Thank you! Well, I guess it really is a case-by-case basis as to whether or not it will be beneficial, but it sounds like disabling it is safe enough to at least try out. I'm not a gamer, which is what the article seems to indicate would be the biggest beneficiary of disabling SF. We'll see if it affects other things as well.

Delly10 said:

I don't have an SSD drive. I just have a standard hard drive. Is it still safe (or beneficial) to disable?

It is safe but I bet you a (imaginary) dollar it will not be beneficial. Most likely if you notice a difference at all disabling it will make things (marginally) worse.

It was after all designed to preload things you use often to improve performance where HDD was the bottleneck in the system. It certainly wasn't designed to deliberately make Windows go slower - that would be silly.

Anyway, when you enable or disable it, run it for a few days each way and see which works better for you. When running it needs to learn your typical patterns - whether you tend to boot up and open your email and Word for example or instead open Twitter and VLC; what time of day you do it (email in the morning VLC in the evening) and so on....

Brink said:

Please let us know how it went.

I guess it didn't go very well. I disabled Superfetch along with a bunch of other services and didn't notice any difference. Then I restarted Superfetch and didn't notice any improvement. My unreliable internet connection doesn't make it easy to tell if something speeds up or slows down my computer though. I guess it's safe to say that there hasn't been any big difference either way.

f14tomcat said:

Yes, but in your case any benefit would outweigh one service not running. Pre-fetch and Superfetch were designed with hard drive head seeking and transfer rates in mind. Keep in mind, you will not see any immediate gain having any fetch service running. They learn to cache your frequent activity over time. If your drive is highly fragmented, it will only add to the overhead. It's a case-by-case basis most of the time.

More info: What Is SuperFetch and Do You Need It on Windows 10?

Thankyou for that link! My "superfetch" utilizes at least 90% of my hard drive for 5 minutes after a restart, or startup. Seems to get worse with each major Win10 update. It's now disabled. Thanks again!

Just a shot in the dark: You could try empyting the windows\prefetch folder contents to force Superfetch to create indexes from scratch. Just wait a few days after that. I will slow things down a bit.