Turn off Fast Startup from Windows. I do it by disabling Hibernation, that also gains 1x memory of disk back - removes hiberfil.sys.
How to Turn "Fast Startup" On or Off for a Hybrid Boot in Windows 8 and 8.1
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/6320-fast-startup-turn-off-windows-8-a.htmlUnconfigure Windows Indexing Items in Control Panel, then disable Indexing by drive/device. I leave Windows Indexing / Search process running for normal search within Explorer.
uncheck indexing



Click Ignore All

You can also turn off Pagefile to save more disk space - if you have 8GB or more of memory and don't push the limits of what you have. If an app needs it it will complain if it isn't enabled - very rare, never happened to me. Set for 1GB if you do have an app that needs it. Or if you need to debug Windows crashes - enable 1x memory sized pagefile while debugging.




And disable Prefetch / Superfetch
How to Disable Superfetch and Prefetch in Windows 8
http://www.tekrevue.com/tip/disable-superfetch-prefetch-windows-8/Reformatting re-enables all the Windows features for a drive, re-installing returns all Windows settings to defaults, you need to reconfigure from scratch to get performance back. Re-install all your tools for performance tuning and re-configure OC + Tunings.
Have fun
🙂