Because SSDs don’t have motors and spindles and platters and magnetic heads, they don’t benefit from those features and need to be handled differently. Features like Superfetch and Prefetch and ReadyBoot are designed to monitor files you access at startup and when you launch programs and then arrange them on the disk for optimal access. That’s because Windows has evolved over many years with features that specifically target the behavior of conventional hard disks. In the first installment of this series, I gathered the numbers to show just how much faster you can expect an SSD to perform in the real world.īut you might need to jump through some setup hoops to get top performance out of an SSD-equipped PC running Windows 7. SSDs start and shut down fast, and they perform read operations (especially random reads) at speeds that blow the doors off conventional hard drives.