Quicken Slow on Flash Drive

I can only say that when I tried to keep my quicken file on a removable drive (for my work computer), it was so slow that I ended up putting it on the hard drive and backing up to the removable drive instead.

Uhhhhh no.

Stubby wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@z18g2000yqb.googlegroups.co m:

That is an absolutely incorrect statement.

Comparing a jump drive to a hard disk, there is some validity to your statement, but that's is really comparing the SATA or IDE controller to a USB controller - the hardware between the computer and the actual medium - flash memory or rotating magnetic discs.

SSD drives have some pretty sophisticated hardware/firmware managing the device that further widens the speed difference between flash memory and rotating memory.

Questions for the OP: Did you just install the SSD and install/migrate your operating system to the drive? If that's the only thing you did, then it is possible for you to experience what you are experiencing. Where is your paging file? It should be on rotating memory, not SSD. SSD has only a finite number of times it can be written to, paging will significantly shorten the life of the SSD drive.

Where are your Internet Temp/Temp files? These tend to clog your "disk" space, especially if you haven't limited the amount of space they will occupy.

I don't have it available, but check the Computer Power User website. They did some articles over the past year on how to get the best performance out of your SSD drive, including those tricks to minimize the device writes so as to increase the life of the device. They also discuss the version level your firmware should be, depending on which controller you have on your device. It's well worth your time.

I think I've answered my own question.

Mine is an early SSD. Read time is comparable to hard drives (200 Mb/s), but write time is much slower (30 Mb/s).

My Quicken data files are huge - 12 years - and my impression is that Quicken rewrites entire files when changing, rather than just tacking on. (Any confirmation of this?) That's why Quicken is so slow.

Maybe it's time to get a newer SSD; they have much better write times, comparable with reads.

Evan Platt wrote:

Walt Bilofsky wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

With files that size, it is typical in a system with SSD and hard drives to use the hard drive for what they call 'bulk' storage - files not used very frequently. The ideal configuration would be to have the SSD containing your Windows files, the Progran Files folder, and static files with all your other files on the HDD (there are exceptions,of course). This is, among other reasons mainly economic, why SSD's do not have the capacity of HDD's (now 1,2 or 3 TB). Have extremely fast access to the loading of programs, including BOOT UP, and your system will seem een quicker thatn it really is.

Pay greater attention to the type of controller on-board, as well as the drive's performance in standardized testing. See Computer Power User Pg 18 September issue at

This and other issues are on-line with navigation aids built into the viewer. Just click the issue and go from there.

Sorry for the soapbox lecture, but I learned a lot when I was searching for my SSD, and if not for CPU, would have made a very poor choice in my selection.

I have a 20GB SSD integrated onto the motherboard (-iSSD series from gigabyte). Quicken (HB 2011) is blazingly fast to load even though I have a 15yrs of data.

In this configuration the SSD is run as a non-volitle cache and probably the program and the data are in it, but I am not sure how to tell.

Modern, good quality SSD can take a lot of write cycles these days. Cheaper ones use a different technology that is not as robust.

Swap files are on a spinning drive, as are large infrequently used programs (to conserve SSD space).

There's an article at

I turned off the swap file years ago. It was a nice performance improvement.