Atelo's SSD Guide

Post by **Atelo** » Fri Feb 05, 2010 6:17 pm

Here's what I've learned from installing my SSD and running Windows 7 on it, for anyone who is considering buying one.

I believe they are worth it. Mine isn't even set up perfectly and I'm getting about triple the data rates of my old WD Raptor.

First when choosing a drive, make sure to choose a second generation drive. In the case of Intel X-25M you're looking for a G2 in the model number.

In the case of OCZ Vertex drives, Vertex by name are second generation however only newer firmware supports TRIM (1.4) and the newest (1.5) supports something called Garbage Collection.

Also if you don't get either Intel X-25M or OCZ Vertex, make sure the one you get has an Indilinix controller. They are far better than the JMicron controllers that a lot of SSDs use.

OCZ Vertex 3rd generation drives will be coming soon as well. This drive will support on-the-fly compression. This means fewer writes to the SSD and a longer life overall. Somehow the company that designed this controller chip managed to implement high compression that doesn't affect your transfer rate at all. It's quite impressive to compress data at 260mb/s with no slowdown on a controller chip (not a cpu).

Things to know:

1) SSDs are much faster but require more maintenance and have a limited life span. You can make it last several years depending on how you use it.

2) NEVER defrag an SSD.

3) Only Windows 7 supports the TRIM command which increases the life of the SSD by a ton.

4) You can run an SSD in Windows XP but without the TRIM command you will have to run manual command line utilities to clean up the drive periodically. Even doing this, it will apparently degrade faster than with TRIM.

5) You will want to reduce the number of writes to the SSD by as much as you can to make it last longer. There are various ways of doing this, usually involving moving your Browser cache to another HD, moving the TEMP and TMP folders, even your user profile among other things.

6) An excellent optimization guide:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum ... tilities-*

7) You need to make sure your partition on the drive is aligned. Basically the file system reads information in blocks and your SSD reads its information in blocks as well. If the blocks are aligned, performance will be maximized. If they are not aligned, performance will suffer. There are various guides to creating partitions that are aligned, however Windows 7 installer also supports this feature and will automatically align the partition for optimal performance.

If you were like me and created the partition in XP first, you can image the drive, create a new aligned partition and restore the image.

8) Windows 7 creates two partitions when you install it for the Bitlocker feature. If you don't intend to use Bitlocker, create your own partition first, otherwise it's more of a pain to have to image two partitions instead of one for backup purposes.

9) SSDs will apparently perform better in AHCI mode instead of IDE mode. Unfortunately I could not test it because my motherboard does not support AHCI when I have >4 devices connected to the SATA ports. Since I have 5 devices, the option is not available to me.

I'm really digging the ~12 second bootup time in Win7, instant application load times and WoW loads up about 2x faster than on my Raptor.

The tweaks I did from the guide listed above are:

Disable Indexing
Disable Hibernate
Firefox Memory Cache instead of DiskCache
Moved TEMP and TMP folders

Post by **Atelo** » Fri Feb 05, 2010 11:40 pm

My SSD is on sale for the local Canadians, I paid $199 after a $30 MIR.

This one is $199 before a $40 MIR, so $159 CDN.

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php? ... omoid=1196

shadowrage · Post by **shadowrage** » Sat Feb 06, 2010 10:28 am

What about running 2 SSDs in Raid 0? Is there anything specail you need to setup to make this work or any certain type of motherborad?

Post by **Atelo** » Sat Feb 06, 2010 12:50 pm

shadowrage wrote:What about running 2 SSDs in Raid 0? Is there anything specail you need to setup to make this work or any certain type of motherborad?

You would only want to do that if you had lots of money and time.

The TRIM command doesn't work yet in raid mode, so the drives would degrade and require command line cleanup utilities to keep them going.

Post by **Antilikos** » Sat Feb 06, 2010 3:53 pm

Are these things some sort of genetically engineered fungus or something? I don't get the degradation thing...

Post by **Atelo** » Sat Feb 06, 2010 4:20 pm

Antilikos wrote:Are these things some sort of genetically engineered fungus or something? I don't get the degradation thing...

As you probably know, your USB Flash Stick has limited writes. Usually around 10,000 writes before it can start to fail. For an operating system constantly writing to the hard drive, this isn't much at all.

To counter this in SSDs, the drive never writes to the same spot over and over. Instead it writes to the next unwritten section. Even if you open a document, add one word and save it, it is not written to the same spot. It goes to the next area that hasn't been written to. Once the entire drive is full, it starts over. This means every bit of flash memory gets used instead of one small section.

Flash memory needs to be erased before it can be written to. Once it starts over, it must erase the old information before it can write. This slows down writing significantly and kills performance. Normally when you delete a file with our current hard drive technology, the file isn't actually deleted. Only the reference to the file is deleted and it is still sitting on your drive, allowing you to "Undelete" so long as the information isn't overwritten. Because SSDs must erase data before writing it, all that deleted information slows it down when it comes around for another pass.

The TRIM command supported by Windows 7 tells the drive to actually delete the file instead of just deleting the reference to the file. This allows the performance of the drive to stay within acceptable limits for longer because when it comes around for another pass, the information is already blanked out.

Basically SSDs are brand new and our current file system and hard drive tech wasn't designed with their requirements in mind. It will only get better from here on.

Post by **Antilikos** » Sun Feb 07, 2010 8:19 am

Atelo wrote:As you probably know, your USB Flash Stick has limited writes.

I had absolutely no clue about this. Thanks for the elaboration.

shadowrage · Post by **shadowrage** » Fri Feb 19, 2010 11:44 am

i found this program called SSD Tweak Utility its suppose to do everhing for you I don't have an SSD so i don't know if it works at all but i thought i would share it.
http://www.techspot.com/downloads/4926-ssd-tweaker.html

Post by **Atelo** » Fri Feb 19, 2010 11:52 am

shadowrage wrote:i found this program called SSD Tweak Utility its suppose to do everhing for you I don't have an SSD so i don't know if it works at all but i thought i would share it.
http://www.techspot.com/downloads/4926-ssd-tweaker.html

Yeah I saw that one, haven't tried it though because I did most of the tweaks myself.

shadowrage · Post by **shadowrage** » Wed Feb 24, 2010 10:34 pm

Question do you put WoW on you SSD or just or operating system? or any other games on the SSD cause if you up date a mod that up take up a write wouldn't it?