SSD Drives

[Taxmancometh]

So I'm thinking of purchasing a SSD drive. Particularly this one. Newegg.com - OCZ Agility 2 OCZSSD2-2AGT160G 2.5" 160GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

What do you think of SSD drives. I've read some bad reviews where people reported the drive had failed in a month.

What about firmware BS. Do I absolutely need to mess around with firmware? And what should the BIOS settings be. AHCI has to be on or what?

What I plan to do is clone my current RAID 0 array to the SSD. The RAID has 140 GB of data. I have another SATA drive that I will use in addition to the SSD.

I need a SSD drive that's at least 160 GB.

[GroundZero3]

I am running a 64 GB SSD drive on Windows 7 x64 with no issues at all. No messing around with firmware and I've had it since last Nov 2010!

If you do decide to get one there are some tweaking you will need to do for windows.

Maximize SSD Performance with the SSD Tweak Utility - TechSpot Guides

[Taxmancometh]

Yeah, I saw that SSD tweaker app on Snapfiles.com. I just ran it on the laptop for the hell of it. But after you select the options you want to enable or disenable, how do you apply settings?

[GroundZero3]

By pressing the auto tweak button on the application then rebooting the computer or if you only want to change certain settings, click the settings you want to change, click save and exit then reboot the pc. Presto simpo

[Taxmancometh]

Well, there is no save and exit option, but when I tick or untick an option and just close the app the settings save. So I guess that's how it's done.

BTW- Is your SSD an OCZ?

[GroundZero3]

Nah I have this:

Newegg.com - Kingston SSDNow V Series SNV425-S2BN/64GB 2.5" Notebook Bundle 64GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

When BF3 comes out ill be getting another 64 GB SSD drive to create a raid 0

[JLK03F150]

Thanks for the link to that app GZ3. Do you know if it works with SSDs in RAID 0?

I have 2 SandForce 1222 64GB (Microcenter brand) running in RAID 0.

[GroundZero3]

JLK it should be run on any system that has SSD drives, it doesnt matter what configuration they are in. It disabled certain things in the operating system itself that could lower the life of the SSD drives among other things.

[Taxmancometh]

I was just pondering. In the SSD tweaker utility you have the option to disable clearing the page file at shutdown. Now wouldn't that make the page file grow larger and larger sense the page file isn't being erased? I think when I get a SSD I'll use a dedicated 8 GB USB stick for the page file.

[GroundZero3]

Taxman depending on what you want to do this article suggests changing it to "NO PAGING FILE"

Optimize Windows For Solid State Drives Usage

And from the Windows 7 blog:

Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives - Engineering Windows 7 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that
Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.
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.

It seems there are people on both sides that keep the paging file and some who disable it all together for SSD drives. I guess it depends on the amount of ram you have on your system, I have 24GB so I could probably safely disable it totally and wouldnt run into an issue.

[Taxmancometh]

I have 6GB of RAM. Used to have 8 but that stick was bad, will need to buy another stick or just plain buy 4GB sticks for all four slots. SO I guess when I do buy an SSD I'll disable the page file.

[Taxmancometh]

I was wondering. WIth SATA and PATA drives I know that the actual capacity is not what is advertised. Does this still apply to SSD drives? Because I'm thinking of buying a 128 GB instead of a 160 or 180 GB drive and need to clone 111 GB to it.

I'm thinking a 128 GB SSD is actually 120 GB.

[GroundZero3]

It applies to all hard drives. SSD is just a different way of making a hard drive, its not gonna get around the byte limitation

This will tell you the exact size you will have with a drive after its been partitioned and formatted:
The Tomorrow Times: The Hard Drive Capacity Calculator

[Taxmancometh]

I had to use the calculator in IE, as it did not work in Firefox. It looks like I was close. For 128 GB it's 119 GB.

[Taxmancometh]

Well, here's something I did not know. TRIM! appaerntly my OS (Windows XP 64) doesn't support TRIM, so I am SOL. But I have read that a sandforce chipset SSD has better garbage collection. So it looks like I'm going to buy this drive. Amazon.com: ADATA Sandforce 2.5-Inch SATA II 3.0Gb/s Internal Solid State Drive: Electronics The 128 GB drive. Pretty cheap compared to Newegg. Newegg.com - ADATA S599 AS599S-128GM-C 2.5" 128GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

I have read that there is software that can do garbage collection. What software is that?

[JLK03F150]

From what I have been reading, newer ssd's use firmware to perform garbage collection. All they need is a little idle time. No 3rd party software required.

That little program seems to have done a good job with my Win7 & the array.

[Taxmancometh]

That little program seems to have done a good job with my Win7 & the array.

Thanks for the input. Now, what little program were you referring to?

[JLK03F150]

I am running a 64 GB SSD drive on Windows 7 x64 with no issues at all. No messing around with firmware and I've had it since last Nov 2010!

If you do decide to get one there are some tweaking you will need to do for windows.

Maximize SSD Performance with the SSD Tweak Utility - TechSpot Guides

Thanks for the input. Now, what little program were you referring to?

This one.

[Taxmancometh]

OH....

[Taxmancometh]

Okay, I don't get it. I bought an ADATA 128 GB drive and it says it supports AHCI, but when I enabled AHCI in BIOS the drive won't recognize. I had to disable AHCI and then the drive was recognized and I had to go into computer management / disk drives to initialize the drive and format. Now I'm using roadkil's raw copy to copy C: drive to the SSD. I use a RAID 0 so I hope this works. Roadkil.Net - Roadkil's Raw Copy Program Download

This is very disconcerting sense I think in order to flash the firmware it has to be in AHCI mode.

This is the drive I bought. Amazon.com: ADATA Sandforce 2.5-Inch SATA II 3.0Gb/s Internal Solid State Drive: Electronics