Hardware SSD performance tweaks for Vista

OK, time for another uber post

Not one I'm come across, but seems to make sense, as the cell size of the memory used on a vast majority of drives is indeed 64KB. I'll give it a whirl with a drive in the next week and see how it affects performance.

Yes, amazingly a page file will perform very well on an SSD, simply because it's that much faster than a hard disk drive at those bit writes and small reads. However, As I say in the article, the thrashing from having a page file enabled, and the wear leveling on most drives that will transfer this thrashing to the rest of the disk will needlessly degrade performance. As the SSD is already crazy fast, the relevance of the page file is decreased as long as you have plenty of memory (unless you need those log files). Moving the page file to a mechanical is just an inclusion to solve compatibility issues.

Thanks for the link though - an interesting read regarding Win7 and SSDs

Thats a very interesting idea there, although i'm not sure how the wear levelling would translate across the drive, even despite the partition. I'll give it a whirl on an SSD over the next week and post some results up.

In regards to other erasing programs, there are other options to erase a drive without having to DOS boot and run HDDErase, but we've found it's the only application that reliably erases the contents of any SSD (Samsung, Indilinx, Samsung) and resets the drive back to factory levels of performance. There are other options (OCZ offer a tool called sanitary erase that works well on any Indilinx based drive from a windows executable) but HDD erase is the most reliable and compatible, hence why we chose to recommend using it. It also requires the most number of "are you absolutely sure" checks, to avoid "whoops, I accidentally the whole SSD" mistakes!

 

Quote Baz..."Thats a very interesting idea there, although i'm not sure how the wear levelling would translate across the drive, even despite the partition. I'll give it a whirl on an SSD over the next week and post some results up."

...I've been reading around a bit more about this and I think that wear leveling goes on across the whole drive regardless of any partitions so don't think my idea would work but thanks for showing interest

 

I am running a Toshiba tablet with Vista SP1. I recently installed a OCZ Vertex 120GB and customized Vista with many of the recommendations from here and the OCZ forum site. I also did dump the install onto the SSD using Acronis. I also use the OCZ tool "wiper.exe" to help clean things up. Main point - I disabled my paging file as I have 3.28GB of RAM (gotta love 32bit). My system is running fine - no noticeble performance degredation over time and I have not had one issue with not having a paging file for over 3 months. Now, this is not a gaming system or such, but a general work unit, but very happy with the SSD and no paging file.
Also to note - Windows 7 has corrected the aligment issue pervious versions had and installs on the 64th bit or such. I read some info on another site that tested a Vista install both default and with correct alignment and on a SSD there was a barely noticeable difference. Not a major concern normally except in the case of database system and such where you might have thousands of writes per second. Not having your drives aligned in that case can make a noticable performance difference.

 

but the problem is and know fact that benchmark softwares that do Write tests can really noob an SSD self heal will not work correctly , under norm use you not be the Filling the SSD to the Point of no free space norm as that norm stops the self heal from working (but could happen on smaller SSDs should keep 15-20% free for it to not brake)

and about page file system restore and other windows things that happen does way more activity then your page file does (useing IE/firefox/opera makes more disk writes then page file just set it to 500MB and forget about it as by default its set to the amount of ram you have installed)

alot of the stuff on OCZ forums should be ignored as well as some comments are coming from there, SSD should be fine for 12 years or longer the bigger the SSD is, does depend on how many writes but most spec for 40GB an day that most will not be doing(unless you run Disk write benchmarks 24/7 then it will die very fast)

vista and 7 does disk alignment correctly

each page is norm 512KB in size (if more data needs writing the 512KB page must be erased before an Write can happen) that is split into 4KB slots (128), should keep the cluster size to 4KB or what ever windows does default

samsung drives self heal is bit slow and IOmon most likely makes the self heal stop working (be nice if samsung would give us an wiper tool and even some way to update are firmwares)

 

I just bought a Crucial 64gb m225 disk based on Baz's comments on this forum. I'm going to put it in my laptop in place of its dead/ dieing 3 year old 7200rpm 80gb drive.

its a 3 year old Asus s96j using a Core Duo and 2gb of ram, I have a few concerns that caught up with me later in the day.

1. Is my laptop's bios even going to support it? *how would I know/ find out?
2. Is using a 32bit OS (Win7 RC in this case) going to affect it vs a 64bit OS?
3. Only having 2gb or ram, what should I do about my pagefile? Should I be concerned?
4. All in all, is getting an SSD for this aging laptop a mistake? Should I just plop a 160gig 5400rpm disk in it for $60 instead?


I'm REALLY looking forward to more on SSD's from bit-tech. If my experience is good with this drive I will consider one for my desktop.

Thanks for the read
-EVRE-

 

1. SSDs are designed to just show up as standard hard disk drives, so there's no reason your laptop should have any issue detecting it as a 64GB drive.
2. I shouldn;t think 32/64bit makes much difference when it comes to hard disk drive performance, af any. You'll be fine with Win7 RC 32bit
3. With only 2GB of RAM i'd avoid disabling the page file, especially if you play any games on the laptop as they'll soon run out of memory and crash (personal experiance talking here). Leave it enabled as although it'll slightly degrade performance, the altenative isn't really workable.
4. I don't think so. You'll find your system will not only boot much much faster, but feel much more responsive. Applications will be almost instant to load and if you do play any games, they'll be quicker to load too.

Good luck with your experiances, and keep an eye on Crucial's support forum for the release of the next firmware, which will bring garbage collection to maintain performance and win7 TRIM support too. As the Crucial drives don't have jumpers, the firmware update will be rolled out as a DOS bootable EXE file like the OCZ drives, which is much more convieniant!

 

Nice guide, I agree with most of it except for the bit about disabling SuperFetch. RAM is still significantly faster than any SSD so the benefit of precaching in unused system RAM would still be beneficial, not to mention SuperFetch will still benefit accesses to data that are not stored on the SSD.

Also don't agree with disabling Page File completely, but moving it is probably a good idea for the very reason given, to minimize performance degradation over time. Maybe once Win7 arrives and introduces TRIM, keeping the page file on the SSD will be less detrimental to performance over time, but with 12GB of system RAM the page file's default footprint is huge, 25GB, which is a lot for an SSD.

 

If i understand Windows 7 correctly it'll actually disable Superfetch by default (along with Defrag and a number of other hard disk based optimisations) if it detects you're using an SSD - seems pretty conclusive that even MS thinks that an SSD makes superfecth a bit pointless.

 

The only 'issue' that might arise is if your laptop only supports sata/150 and not sata2/300 (which, tbh, is probably the case). The ssd may underperform. However, it will absolutely crush the speed (or lack of) of your previous spinner, regardless.

 

I am SSD's what?