On Sat, 24 Mar 2012 15:34:47 -0700, Drew <(E-Mail Removed)>
wrote:

>On 3/24/2012 2:28 PM, Loren Pechtel wrote:
>> On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 22:20:48 -0400, Yousuf Khan
>> <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>>
>>> Okay, got myself an SSD now. So I want to migrate my Windows boot drive
>>> to it. I have access to a couple of cloning utils that can properly copy
>>> system disks and make them bootable, so that's not a problem. However,
>>> I'm wondering if it's really that simple? I understand that there are
>>> some tuning that needs to be done to SSD's, such as setting its cluster
>>> sizes, etc. Also there is something called TRIM support that Windows 7
>>> needs to implement. Is this something that's built into Windows 7 right
>>> away, or is it something that needs to be installed? Anything else?
>>
>> Windows 7 supports trim, no problem.
>>
>> The issue that matters is that a simple copy onto the drive will
>> produce a misaligned layout that will be bad for performance. There
>> are programs out there that will take a drive and correctly align the
>> data, I have never looked into them.
>
>Not trying to be argumentative but wondering where you got that info. My
>ssd scores a 7.2 (older motherboard does not support higher speeds) on
>the WEI and I would think that is pretty good for a 6 year old system. I
>am running a Intel 320 series 120gig drive and my old Intel x25 40 gig
>had the same score. Running any programs or even everything open and
>doing any work is like changing channels on a tv, it is instantaneous.

The alignment problem only affects writes.

Allen Drake wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Mar 2012 14:19:06 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
> > Cloning can create a new partition instead of using the existing
> > one, depending on what cloning tool you use.
>
> Exactly and depending on how you have that application set up. All in
> all I have been satisfied with the speed of my SSDs as I gradually
> replaced the HDDs and had no idea of the alignment issue until I
> stumbled on some threads related to that subject. I plan on a clean
> install of Windows 7 to new SSDs sometime soon. That will take care
> of any misalignment.
> The biggest gain I see in speed are the systems that actually have
> SATA III motherboards.

I mean you can follow the instructions to create an alligned partition and
it's all for nothing. I think Acronis can do what you want, although I'm
not sure how to verify that other than by dumping the MBR before and after
the clone to see if the table changed.


--

Reply in group, but if emailing add one more
zero, and remove the last word.

On 25/03/2012 4:30 PM, Loren Pechtel wrote:
> With a spinning drive you simply write new values into the magnetic
> domains, the old values are irrelevant. SSDs don't work that way,
> though. You can only write 1s to a block, a zero can't be written.
> Instead you have to erase the whole block--and erasing a block makes
> spinning drives look downright speedy.
>
> If the block consists of all zeroes it can be written rapidly. If
> there are 1s in the way you have to copy everything out of the block,
> erase it and then write the good data back.

Good explanation of why the entire block needs to be erased first rather
than just overwritten on the fly.

Yousuf Khan

On 27/03/2012 7:54 AM, Yousuf Khan wrote:
> On 25/03/2012 4:30 PM, Loren Pechtel wrote:
>> With a spinning drive you simply write new values into the magnetic
>> domains, the old values are irrelevant. SSDs don't work that way,
>> though. You can only write 1s to a block, a zero can't be written.
>> Instead you have to erase the whole block--and erasing a block makes
>> spinning drives look downright speedy.
>>
>> If the block consists of all zeroes it can be written rapidly. If
>> there are 1s in the way you have to copy everything out of the block,
>> erase it and then write the good data back.
>
> Good explanation of why the entire block needs to be erased first rather
> than just overwritten on the fly.
>
> Yousuf Khan



Yep. Interesting explanation and somewhat similar to what happens to a
CF memory card.

I use 32Gb CF cards and every now and then will have corrupt files which
pickup other bits and can have two pictures in one, segmented,

I would not like this happening to data.

On 25/03/2012 12:19 AM, Flasherly wrote:
> On Mar 24, 5:56 pm, Yousuf Khan<bbb...@spammenot.yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Should I use the Intel drivers even for a non-Intel SSD (I got Corsair
>> Force 3 240GB).
>
> Yes. . .
>
> /
> 5. Install the latest storage driver. If your system includes an Intel
> SATA controller, you should use the most recent version of the Intel
> Rapid Storage Technology driver, which is located here. Currently
> (updated January 2012), the most recent version is 10.8.0.1003.
>
> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/windo...eaks/2910?pg=2
> /
>
> unless of course yer' MB isn't a Dell Latitude equipped w/ RST.

Well, it's neither an Intel SSD, nor an Intel chipset: it's an AMD
chipset, and a Corsair SSD.

Yousuf Khan

On 25/03/2012 4:21 PM, Allen Drake wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Mar 2012 14:19:06 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
> <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>> Cloning can create a new partition instead of using the existing one,
>> depending on what cloning tool you use.
>
> Exactly and depending on how you have that application set up. All in
> all I have been satisfied with the speed of my SSDs as I gradually
> replaced the HDDs and had no idea of the alignment issue until I
> stumbled on some threads related to that subject. I plan on a clean
> install of Windows 7 to new SSDs sometime soon. That will take care
> of any misalignment.

Well, initially I was having a bit of a problem with my imaging software
(Macrium Reflect, in my case). When it was restoring the image to the
SSD aligned to a 31KB boundary, rather than a 1024KB boundary that is
suggested. The 31KB boundary is known as the older XP alignment scheme,
geared towards CHS hard drives.

I sent a tech support message off to them, and they were kind enough to
show me some advanced option switches that allowed it to be aligned to a
1024KB partition. They call this alignment scheme the Vista/7 alignment,
geared towards not just SSD's, but also modern Advanced Format hard drives.

> The biggest gain I see in speed are the systems that actually have
> SATA III motherboards.

Well, I got it up and running. It's only got SATA II controllers, but
I'm seeing a Windows Experience number of 7.6 (out of 7.9) on the disk!
Outstanding, all of my system components are now over 7.0. The disk was
the only thing holding me back at 5.9 previously. Things do pop up much
faster now.

One thing to note, when I initially transferred the system over, I
didn't do any changes to the setup to improve performance other than
align the partition. Once I turned the Windows indexing off on this
drive, it immediately picked up from 6.9 to 7.6.

Yousuf Khan

On 30/03/2012 3:56 AM, Allen Drake wrote:
> I can tell you that just now I replaced an SSD in one system that has
> a SATA III mobo with a cloned HDD and the (Seagate Barracuda XT
> ST33000651AS SATA 6GB/s) brought down the rating from 7.6 to 5.9. I am
> not sure if the SSD is even aligned correctly and I haven't yet turned
> off indexing.

You replaced your SSD with another SSD or with an HDD? It's not entirely
clear to me from your quote above.

> I simply need more time to spend on this issue. Hopefully this
> weekend. I appreciate you sharing your results and comments.

I'm really pretty happy with how the SSD is performing now. I did my
first system image of the SSD, and it took just 6 minutes to do a full
backup! The same thing used to take 1 hour previously with the previous
HDD.

The responsive of the whole system finally seems commensurate with the
processor, RAM, and GPU that are already on the system, but were being
brought down by the hard drives.

Yousuf Khan

On 25/03/2012 5:30 AM, Dave-UK wrote:
> "Yousuf Khan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
>> No, I'm not worried about space, I bought one big enough to
>> accommodate everything that I have in my current boot drive. I'm more
>> worried about writing too much to the SSD. My understanding is that
>> SSD's wear down with too much writing to them. Thunderbird and the
>> swapfile would be some major recurring write events.
>
> I think you are worrying too much about wear and tear on an SSD.
> This will tell you how long you've got left. :-)
> (There's a free or pro version)
> http://www.ssd-life.com/

You're right, I was probably being pedantic about getting all write
operations off of the drive. Thunderbird, although it writes a lot to
disk, it doesn't really do anything too randomly or constantly. Most
writes are sequential since they happen to single database files, and
they happen maybe once every few minutes, not constantly. Thunderbird
does popup up really well when its database is located on the SSD.

However, I have taken the suggestion to remove the swapfile and disk
index from that drive seriously. Removing the disk index by itself
resulted in a 0.7 point increase in speed for the SSD (went from 6.9 to
7.6). That's probably a 9% increase.

Yousuf Khan

"Yousuf Khan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message news:4f75ff66$(E-Mail Removed)...
> On 25/03/2012 5:30 AM, Dave-UK wrote:
>> "Yousuf Khan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
>>> No, I'm not worried about space, I bought one big enough to
>>> accommodate everything that I have in my current boot drive. I'm more
>>> worried about writing too much to the SSD. My understanding is that
>>> SSD's wear down with too much writing to them. Thunderbird and the
>>> swapfile would be some major recurring write events.
>>
>> I think you are worrying too much about wear and tear on an SSD.
>> This will tell you how long you've got left. :-)
>> (There's a free or pro version)
>> http://www.ssd-life.com/
>
> You're right, I was probably being pedantic about getting all write
> operations off of the drive. Thunderbird, although it writes a lot to
> disk, it doesn't really do anything too randomly or constantly. Most
> writes are sequential since they happen to single database files, and
> they happen maybe once every few minutes, not constantly. Thunderbird
> does popup up really well when its database is located on the SSD.
>
> However, I have taken the suggestion to remove the swapfile and disk
> index from that drive seriously. Removing the disk index by itself
> resulted in a 0.7 point increase in speed for the SSD (went from 6.9 to
> 7.6). That's probably a 9% increase.
>
> Yousuf Khan

As I said before I had to stop Win7 from running the defrag schedule
but Win8 looks much better regarding SSDs.
The defrag option is now called ' Optimize and defrag drive' and
the 'Defragment now...' button is labelled 'Optimize'.
On running Optimize it takes about 2 seconds to 'trim' the drive (120 G/B).
Optimization is scheduled to run weekly by default.

On Fri, 30 Mar 2012 19:25:34 -0400, Allen Drake <(E-Mail Removed)>
wrote:

> I reconnected an HDD that sits in a bay on a system that has that
>drive installed as a backup. I did it so I could get the SSD ready for
>either a clean install of W7 or alignment. At this time I am still not
>sure what way to go. I have a total of 10 SSDs so far so I have to
>plan on how I am going to use them. Some I may just keep as spare
>hardware. I also bought a Crucial Adrenaline to play around with
>sometime when I get the time.
>
>http://www.crucial.com/store/ssc.asp...e=pd_google_us
>
> I haven't really decided where to put it so it too sits on a shelf
>along with several unused Crucial 256GB SSDs, a 90GB OCZ and a 128 GB
>Kingston.

You're old, right? When you die, can I come and rummage through the
stuff on your shelves? You seem to have more stuff than you have time
to use. No hurry, I can wait a bit.

/back to lurk mode