Just got a and interested in running Windows 7 within Parallels. I understand Windows 7 optimises itself for running on SSD's by disabling various bits etc* (see below extract from wikipedia). What I wanted to know is if your running Windows 7 as a virtual OS on a Macbook Air with SSD will it realise its on a SSD? or will the emulated drive be seen as a traditional HDD in Windows 7? Thanks! * Windows 7 is optimized for SSDs as well as for hard disks. The OS looks for the presence of an SSD and operates differently with that drive. If an SSD is present, Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation, Superfetch, ReadyBoost, and other boot-time and application prefetching operations. It also includes support for the TRIM command to reduce garbage collection of data which the OS has already determined is no longer valid (without TRIM the SSD would be unaware of this data being invalid).
from what i can tell, no. it only sees the virtual drive as an ATA device. i did a few things that might help a little since i just upgraded to an SSD. ( keep in mind this is running as a virtual machine with a file, not under bootcamp ) - disable defragmenter (administrative tools -> services -> disk defragmenter) - disable superfetch (also in services, called Superfetch) - disable indexing (also in services, called Windows Search) - disabled system restore (right click computer -> properties -> advanced system settings -> system protection tab -> configure -> Turn off system protection ( and delete the restore points ) - disabled hybernate ( start -> run -> cmd -> powercfg -h off ) in parallels i also disabled "Automatically compress virtual disks" and made sure SmartGuard was disabled i wonder if parallels is working on implementing any SSD optimizations. also, what is the purpose of the .mem file? is this something that can be disabled since it's a large file ( 1.4 gb for me ) that gets deleted when the VM is shut down and recreated when it's started back up. i assume it's some sort of swap file that parallels uses...
