Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
So you want to take the plunge to Solid State Drives? Well.. so do I?
VooDoo_Papa
Member UncommonPosts: 897
I started doing some research after making the decision to go SSD, especially considering the last one I installed at work gave us zero performance increases. During my research I learned that SSD's work optimal when you set them to AHCI.
Well, this is where my curiousity began to create a snowball of SSD information. Something I thought would be so simple as to - Install hardrive and install windows has turned into quite a few optimizing tweaks, registry mods and even a 2 year old tweaking program.
Until now, I never heard of having to do this. However it would explain why I saw no performance increase in our windowsXP OS at work. I have to question those of you here (who according to the feedback should be many) who use a SSD on windows 7, do you follow these tweaks?
First up, about a dozen steps on installing a SSD on windows 7. How much of this is currently relavent and how much is necessary?
http://ssdtechnologyforum.com/threads/781-Windows-7-SSD-Installation-Procedure
Next up, tweak towns 8 page SSD optimization article, incuding a sugested tweak application that is suppose to set up most of the tweaks to increase the performance of a SSD
http://www.tweaktown.com/guides/3116/tweaktown_s_solid_state_drive_optimization_guide/index.html
What I dont understand is that couldnt most of these tweaks apply to a normal hard drive?
At any rate, Im about 2 days away from building my next system with a 120gig SSD and a 1tb WD black and Id like to know how much of these guides should I really pay attention to, and how much if any did the rest of you do?
Comments
I would say turning on AHCI is important. Even if you are just using a sata hdd. Make sure you turn it on in bios before you do the windows install. If you forget that and install windows then later enable ahci, you will ikely get a stop 7b blue screen.
I tend to make it a habit going through all the options of the bios. For instance, on my latest motherboard had to look for 2 settings to optimize my speed with my SSD. At first I thought I only needed to enable AHCI, then realized after it booted and showed my SSD as an IDE I needed to change another setting to make it listed as SATA. Luckily I caught it on a fresh install.
I doubt you will have any troubles once you spend some time going through your bios. After bios settings, I never really did any registry tweaks or anything like that within the OS. It is a pretty top of the line computer as far as ram, and cpu, and mobo go though... so maybe those tweaks would help If I noticed any sorta diminished speed.
For AHCI, IDE, or whatever, it varies by OS, SSD controller, and firmware version. Consult with your SSD manufacturer and whatever they recommend for the particular SSD you have is more important than some generic recommendation. If they don't say anything at all, then it probably doesn't matter what you do.
Otherwise, just install Windows 7 on an SSD like you would on a hard drive. The only particularly important tweak that makes the SSD different is that you should make sure to turn off disk defragmentation for the SSD, and only let it run on the hard drive. You can consider resizing the recycle bin if you're running out of room, I guess.
I'm currently running an OCZ Vertex 2 Extended (120GB)
Installing windows 7 was as easy as, setting AHCI mode in my bios before starting the installation, popping in my windows CD (or you can put it on a flash drive and install it from that if you prefer) and starting the setup. The setup automatically loaded up all my drivers and I finished the installation without a problem.
My windows 7 boots up within 20 seconds to desktop, and i have a shit ton of programs that launch up.
Games installed on the SSD do benefit from it, but not as much as i thought they would (granted I am not really playing a MAJOR MMO at the moment.)
and to tweak windows i used the OCZ forums,
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/content.php?306-SSD-ABC-Guide
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?248-Sandforce-Vertex2-LE-Pro-Agility2-Vertex2-Agility2-EX-Drives-REVO-and-HSDL-drives
ya according to what I initially read about windows 7 is that it recognizes the SSD and disables certain things such as defrag and enables certain things such as trim on its own.
then I started getting deeper into researching it and thats when this list of tweaks popped up. I felt like I was going back in time and doing registry tweaks to my 56k modem.
*edit* one more thing, as far as firmware goes do these updates wipe SSD's or does the firmware update not effect installed data on the drive?
a lot of the tweaks are because of the small space of "affordable" SSD. say you buy a 30gb SSD, you need to get rid of hibernate which takes up 8 gigs or so supposedly. as well as moving your pagefile to another drive which is something you would want to do if you have multiple drives anyways(the way the pagefile works you want it on a drive other than your main OS/app drive). i've heard of people getting their windows7 install down to 5 gigs or so if you don't include multi language support and things like that.
I do not have a SSD but am in a similiar place to you where i've been reading up so i know what to do when i get one. I do just want a small drive for my windows install and perhaps a game or two. with another drive for the rest of my apps and a 3rd for storage.
die.
Windows 7 is supposed to disable defrag for SSDs, but it doesn't. I haven't let it run long enough to see if it would really try to defrag the SSD or not. But for both the OCZ Agility 120 GB in my desktop and the Crucial RealSSD C300 64 GB in my laptop, after Windows was installed, defrag said it was set to run on the SSD once per week at such and such a time.
There are some tweaks that can make slight differences, though sometimes the tweaks only affect drive benchmarks, which Windows is not optimized for. But most of them aren't terribly important.
As for firmware updates, whether it wipes the SSD or not depends on the particular update. It wouldn't hurt to install the latest firmware before installing Windows 7, as wiping an empty drive is harmless. If you're getting an SSD that has been on the market for a long time, you can check to see how recent the firmware that ships with it is, and if it's several months after the drive launched, it should be mature and there's no real need to do further firmware updates unless you run into problems.
cool thanks all of you for the feedback. Looks like some of this is overblown but I still need to verify certain things that /should/ be off are off among a few other things.
thanks
After an unexpectedly generous paycheck, I've decided to maybe tip-toe into SSD territory a little myself, either with something in the 60-120GB range. MY gut instinct was to purchase a Crucial C300 128GB unit, but then I remembered that my motherboard is an older unit (Asus Crosshair III), and only has SATA II, so I only need a SATA II drive, so I'm looking at either the OCZ Vertex 2's or the G.Skill Phoenix Pro drives (whatever works out better for price).
Among other things (MMORPG usage; Aion seems to do a fair bit of disk accessing), a friend and I are modding an old RTS game for fun, and a lot of it involves thousands of tiny little C++ scripts. Right now, the folder has something like 14,000 files, mostly 1-10kb, and at times I have to copy large chunks of it around. An SSD would absolutely fly through that, instead of making me wait half an hour to transfer 50MB of files like my hard drive. Will that sort of thing wear out an SSD though?
Reads don't wear on an SSD at all. Writes do, but you have to constantly be writing to it to cause problems. It's total capacity for writes that is the problem, not the number of writes. If you write several GB per day, that's not enough to ever cause problems. If you write several hundred GB per day, which would be extremely unusual for a home user, that can wear out an SSD in a year or so.
SSDs have a lot more variety on read/write speeds, both in random access and throughput. If you see very little performance increase, especially in boot times, you likely have just a crappy SSD. You have to do the research and look at the specs if they are available.
As for pagefile and vram, you want both on your SSD, as those are two major things that can (at least in some circumstances) improve performance.
If the endurance of SSDs hinges on volume of data, isn't a page file about the fastest way to kill one?
I mean, if not, then it would be a good way to buy oneself a bit of performance, but it seems like something I'd by wary of.
I know OCZ agrees with you and recommends against placing your swap file on an SSD. Theoretically, they should hold up just fine (many laptops with SSDs, for instance, don't have any place else to put their swap file).
SSDs in general are made such that under "normal" use, you won't see any size degradation for about 5 years. As cells go bad in an SSD, the internal controller will flag them as bad and automatically relocate data around the damaged cells. They also have an internal "load leveling" feature, so that no few cells get written to more than other cells (this is largely why defrag doesn't do anything on an SSD, because the internal control defeats it). So even if you do get bad cells (which will happen eventually), the internal controller works around them.
One question I can't answer, because it varies based on the controller, is when cell degradation occurs, if it also corrupts data. Some drives actually have "excess" capacity so that even after several bad cells, you won't see any decrease in useable drive size until a large percentage of the cells actually go bad.
Now keep in mind this isn't really any different than a normal hard drive: they get bad sectors too, it's just they can't detect it at the firmware level: they rely on the file system to detect and flag them.
It depends on how your page file is getting used. If you're trying to run fairly intensive games on a Windows 7 machine with only 1 GB of system memory, so that the page file gets used vastly more than it should, that might be a problem. But the fix for that is obvious: get more memory. If you've got enough memory that page file accesses wouldn't notably hurt your performance if you had a hard drive, then it's not going to meaningfully wear on an SSD.
If a program is trying to claim too much memory that it won't use and Windows is saying, fine, here's some space in the page file, that doesn't involve any writes at all. If it's something that Windows puts in the page file upon booting the machine and probably won't modify it at all until you shut the machine down, then that won't add up to much, either.
SSD access times are 3-4 orders of magnitude worse than system memory, so Windows is going to put any data that needs to be constantly accessed in system memory, not the page file, if it possibly can. Microsoft officially recommends putting the page file on an SSD, so they don't think it will be a problem.
I just installed my Intel X25-M G2 120GB about a week ago. I have noticed some very nice performance increases. I did not do any tweaking. I did however do the following things:
Removed all other HDDs when setting up and installing the OS.
Enabled AHCI prior to powering down my rig to install the SSD.
Enabled TRIM through the cmd prompt once everything was installed.
And honestly this has given me the biggest performance increases i have seen in my rig for quites awhile, including doubling RAM and a new GTX 560Ti.
Once my system posts it takes 18 sec for me to be fully loaded and ready to go at my Win7 64bit desktop, and this includes loading several apps that run at startup.
Loving mine. Oh and not to mention I got it for $209.99 and it came with a free Total War Shogun 2 download from Steam.
Very happy fragger.
mayh3m
Current: BDO
Looking forward to: Crowfall & Chronicles of Elyria
I applaud you on first investigate and then deside what to do and buy this is always best course and afterwards no whine about it sucks or dont work thumbs up to you:)
Eventually when you set up your new rig a SSD will always speed up things then a 10k HDD its just a matter of transfer data speed and then ssd wins simple as that.
Good luck with your new rig:)
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
I bought a Qosmio X149 not too long ago and the main drive a 64gb ssd was fubared Rather than give me the £ back as they didnt have a replacement Qosmio in stock they cloned a display model they had to a new 128gb SSD and installed that as the main.
Glad they did because I love it like the poster above I have never seen such a performance increase in a long long time.
DA transition in virtually a second rather than the 10-15 of normal a boot with 5-6 things running and I can be in within under 20 seconds and away rather than clicking something and waiting another 20 seconds whilst all those services start.
Well thanks for the info, guys. SSDs are a little outside of the areas I'm familiar with, so this helped me plan things out better. I decided to spring for one of the 3.5in 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 drives.
Alright, well my Vertex 2 came in, and it seems to be working fine. I just want to make sure that I've done everything I'm supposed to:
-Firmware is updated to the latest version (1.32)
-AHCI is the mode for all SATA ports
-Defrag scheduler is off
-Index service is off
Am I forgetting anything?
I'm still debating whether to host the page file on the SSD or not. Honestly, I should end up using it that much anyways.
That's enough to get started with it at least, and honestly, about the only thing I do with my systems on SSDs at work.
Interestingly enough in regards to the page file, one of the developers of Windows 7 on their personal blog (don't have a link, was reading on another computer) not only noted that Intel's testing showed a 40:1 read/write ratio for typical pagefile usage, but said that because of what tends to get read and written, there are few files, if any, that are better suited to an SSD.