Hardware SSD performance tweaks for Vista

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/08/27/ssd-performance-tweaks-for-vista/1

SSDs are great, but Windows Vista wasn't designed with them in mind. If you want to get the best from your SSD, you'll need to perform a number of tweaks and fixes to not only improve performance, but keep your OS from needlessly thrashing your drive. We show you how.

 

Only had time to breifly glance at this - you say TrueImage is a good bit of software, but it refuses to image my drive, doesn't bring up any useful error message other than "Failed". Was hoping to image the drive so I can try out Win7, and return to WinXP 64 if I hated it.

 

You won't hate it

Just a quick look at this (As a don't have a SSD, I'm poor) but looks like these kind of things 'Tweaks, tips' need to be on BT more!

 

if the drive has up to date firmware most have self heal now, vertex based (any that have cache) and samsung based (corsair) norm after some time will will clean up the drive

but you must not fill the drive to the point it runs out of space (keep 20GB free on SSDs) or you have to use the Wiper tool (Samsung/intel you Have to use HDDerase bit lame as i used CCleaner free space erase and forgot to stop it dam program noobed me SSD write speed access times {corsair S128} was working fine for 2-3 months before i ran that)

all going to be pointless soon any way if your an windows 7 user with 1 Firmware update (when they get it working) you have TRIM command sent to the SSD so it can do it later on when its idle (but sooner then self heal, as Self heal fails when drive has been filled to the point it runs out of space as it does not recover on its own doing an full format on windows 7 with Trim support Sends the Trim command to the SSD it self that supports it so no more low level format)

 

In your second paragraph you say "drives become defragmented", that should be fragmented not defragmented. Same thing for the first paragraph of the second page.

 

I don't know if it's ever a good idea to turn off your page file. That can lead to some really funky problems.

 

I must agree that disabling the pagefile completely is a bit of a dodgy plan. Not just games, but a fair number of programs don't like it when you have none - and indeed there's no where to dump log files if your system crashes.

I do like the idea of keeping a small one on a spinner though - most with SSD's have a large spinner for storage anyway. My only slight issue would be that spinners are of course a lot slower, but that's life

Interesting point about superfetch. I would have thought that even though SSD's are a lot fast than the traditional hard disk - say 250MB/s, they're still slower than RAM at around 5,000MB/s. Surely for performance reasons you'd want to keep that enabled?


As a side issue, but still relevant to the pagefile thing. I remember back in the day (yarda yarda yarda) when I first upgraded a PC from 16Meg RAM to 32... I was all excited, disabling pages etc etc. I look back now and laugh. I'm pretty sure in 10 years when the 4 or 8 Gig of RAM which is now common seems insignificant, maybe we'll laugh again at how we thought we had all the memory in the world.

 

That's why we also say that if you hit those problems, to move it to a second drive instead.

 

Well, so long as some games/programs are designed to need a page file, I would agree. But if you have a bare minimum of 4GB, you really don't have anything to worry about (unless you want to run said games/applications).

 

Sorry to here that Omni - we happened upon this app when we started imaging our graphics test rigs before each review and have never had any issues with it, either drive to drive or when locking drives and rebooting, across multile drives, mobos and ICH versions. Have you tried switching your SATA ports into legacy IDE mode in the BIOS rather than AHCI or enhanced? I know Acronis offers a free trial if you want to give it another go.

Far from it - most of these tips and tweaks are still valid in Windows 7, especially moving/disabling the page file and using imaging software to create full drive backups.

Self Heal (AKA garbage collection) as it is right now (on the Samsung drives) is very poor (we left a badly thrashed drive idle over night to discover it had recovered a whole 10MB/s average read speed....at the cost of 10MB/s write speed!). While the new Vetrtex firmware's garbage collection looks better from our time with the beta firmware, it's still just that - beta. Even then, taking these steps will still reduce un-necessary drive thrashing and improve performance.

With the Indilinx firmware still in development we're not happy making assumptions on what TRIM will and won't do. The fact that Indilinx has had to compromise and make TRIM only trigger when the recycling bin is emptied (as I understand the is the state of TRIM with Indilinx based drives atm) rather than run as an automatic process, shows it's still early days yet. It's important to remember that not every SSD out there is getting the support that the Indilinx drives are (Hi Samsung!), for which low level drive erasures are much more relevant.

In regards to Superfetch, we advise disabling it simply because when loading the few MB of data involved when loading an application, the speed difference isn't really noticeable and leaving it enabled, again, causes un-necessary drive access, as well as longer boot times. The pros and cons of Superfetch have been much discussed since it's introduction in Vista, and will continue to be for some time, but in our experience, as I said in the article, it's made a bit redundant by the added read speedof an SSD.

In the end it's up to you to decide whether you'd rather have these applications and services running. These are just our recommendation based on using SSDs extensively for the last nine months in both home and work systems.

 

we left a badly thrashed drive, how is that done (just fill the drive to the point it has no free space 2-3 times as doing that once norm requires and HDDerase to bring the drive back to good speed)

superfetch, prefetchers and defrag (on my system on windows 7 only superfetch turned off auto), off maybe page file if you got a lot of ram more then 4gb, page file is hardly used system logs and other things windows and web site use does a lot more (but i got 8gb of ram so i can have it off or just set it to 500mb to an HDD to keep apps happy)

 

We ran our full benchmark suite on it (lots of sequential reads and writes) thrashed it with IOmeter for over an hour before deleting the contents. We did not any any point completely pack out the drive for this particular test completely. The Self Healing on the Samsung drives is poor to say the least, although as i've said a number of times now, the new Indilinx garbage collection looks a much better offering.

 

oh my, looks like i've bought the wrong drive. (Samsung 64GB MLC for £90)

in an attempt to understand SSD performance, surely there's a lower limit, where the performance will not drop any lower and the drive will stay there (both read and write speed) until bad blocks appear

 

Interesting idea there wuyanxu - how slow can you make a modern SSD? hmmmmm. I'm sure a few days being bashed by Iometer would soon provide an answer!

For those looking at getting onto the SSD bandwagon for £not much, I'd recommend the Crucal M225 64GB. It's an Indilinx "Barefoot"Controller (like the Vertex) with 64GB of Samsung NAND flash for just £115 - still pricey (£1.79/GB), but cheaper than identical drives from OCZ/Patriot/G.Skill and with the same excellent Indilinx support.

Drives like Wuyanxu's are based on the Samsung controller, which is much less supported (read: not at at since launch), and as such are a bit cheaper.

 

which version of acronis are you using?

 

We're just using True Image Home at the moment - it meets the Drive copying requirement nicely.

 

One of the most important things (not mentioned in this article) to do before installing the OS on a SSD is to align the drive. In addition, restoring an image to an SSD from a different sized HDD/SDD will cause the alignment to be reset to default values, Thus affecting performance.

Another good idea is to change the Windows temporary directories to another HDD.

 

Forgot link to guide courtesy of OCZ:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?p=325221

 

Microsoft recommend that you leave the pagefile on the SSD:

"In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD."
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

The only place better than SSD is a RAMdrive.

 

Couple of questions on this...firstly instead of turning off pagefile could you not just make a small partition on the ssd to be purely used for page file so it doesnt mess up the rest of your drive?

Secondly would you have to use the secure erase software that was suggested in the article...I regularly use "Eraser" to securely delete important stuff and that doesn't need the shenanekins as described above...I would just run it from a second OS on a separate HDD? Reading some of the previous comments I'm not sure if I should use "Eraser" on an ssd?