Migrating to an SSD

[Yousuf Khan]

Follow The Below Steps To Increase The Life of Your SSD Drives On
Windows 7

http://www.computerforums.org/forum...-life-your-ssd-drives-windows-7-a-208106.html


This guide is a year old so I would suggest reading as much as
possible from different authors.

Although there is some good info here, it sounds like he's just giving
general advice on how to improve Windows responsiveness. My
understanding is that SSD's are pretty sensitive to writes, but there's
never a problem with reading from an SSD. But this article seems to give
advice on how to minimize reads too.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Flasherly]

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/windows-7-and-ssds-setup-secrets-and-tune-up-tweaks/2910?pg=2
/

unless of course yer' MB isn't a Dell Latitude equipped w/ RST.

 

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

Yeah, longevity is my major concern here too, so should I avoid putting
anything that has too much writing happening to it? As for Trim, it's a
command that tells the SSD that a sector is no longer in use, so it can
go in and erase that area during idle moments in the background.

Yousuf Khan

I'm not understanding what you mean by "erase" here. Are SSDs different
in some way, i. e. aren't bits erased anyway when overwritten?

 

[Dave-UK]

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.

Yousuf Khan

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/

 

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

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/

Interesting. Two things I note from that site:1. The software (ssd-life) doesn't actually do any tests; it just
reports SMART data from the drive in a friendly way (including making
note if you run it two or more times and predicting a life from that).2. I hope I've got this wrong, but it seems to imply that once an SSD
has reached the end of its life, which seems to be decided _by the SSD
itself_, it switches to read-only.Oh, and a third thing: individual cells can be written to about ...
originally, 10,000 times; recently revised down to 5,000. With the wear
levelling that's (I think) built into the drive's hardware (more likely
firmware), this translates to 20G writes a day for 5 years for some
Intel drive (it gives the model number but not what size it is).

It seems to me, though, that as SSDs become more common, there needs to
be a tweak to OSs, such that frequently-written files - the registry,
page files, etc. - are treated differently by the OS. (Though if SSDs
are expected to last five years, that'll probably not happen, as OS
manufacturers want us to replace the OS - and by extension the computer
- more often than that. But that's just me being cynical.) Actually, I
think this sort of behaviour - commonly-modified files being treated
differently - should have been around long ago anyway.

 

[dweebken]

My ssd scores a 7.2

My SSD scores 7.5 on a laptop on the WEI.

 

[Tom Del Rosso]

You can simply clone your system drive as I did at first when I
upgraded all my systems but that is not always the best option. You
need to know about SSD partition alignment
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/113967-ssd-alignment.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/70822-ssd-tweaks-optimizations-windows-7-a.html

Cloning can create a new partition instead of using the existing one,
depending on what cloning tool you use.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

1. The software (ssd-life) doesn't actually do any tests; it just
reports SMART data from the drive in a friendly way (including making
note if you run it two or more times and predicting a life from that).

I don't think it needs two or more times, it's just a simple
extrapolation of life used vs time in service.

2. I hope I've got this wrong, but it seems to imply that once an SSD
has reached the end of its life, which seems to be decided _by the SSD
itself_, it switches to read-only.

Yup. When it considers all sectors to have reached their write limit
is no longer has anyplace to write to and it becomes read only.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

In

What are you using that tells you what the wear level is?

SSD-Life.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I'm not understanding what you mean by "erase" here. Are SSDs different
in some way, i. e. aren't bits erased anyway when overwritten?

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.

Thus the drive maintains a pool of empty blocks to be used for writes,
blocks that are released are queued for erasing as the drive gets the
time to do so. If you manage to write so much to the drive that you
deplete this pool you'll see your write performance plunge until it
catches up.

The drive maintains the pool by two methods. Part of it is that the
drive is actually a bit bigger than they tell you. If the drive is
listed at 100gb it's probably something like 105gb in reality. The
second part of it is the TRIM command. Windows tells the drive what
areas aren't being used, the drive can respond by erasing them against
future need. This is why TRIM support is considered a very good
thing.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

 

[Tom Del Rosso]

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.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

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

 

[Rob]

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.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

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/windows-7-and-ssds-setup-secrets-and-tune-up-tweaks/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

 

[Yousuf Khan]

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

 

[Yousuf Khan]

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

 

[Yousuf Khan]

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

 

[Dave-UK]

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.

 

[Ryan L.]

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.aspx?gclid=CIPFoaTgj68CFcXc4AodO3-xvA&cpe=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