alienware
Banned
I have some time on my hands so I figured I would put down some good advice and tips on running and maintaining an SSD, even a small one.
Firstly let's cover some FAQs, if you will.
Q - How big does my SSD need to be?
A - This varies. A 30-32gb SSD, for example, is enough for Windows 7 X86. However, the 64 bit versions of Windows have two program files folders which use up more space. A 60gb SSD appears to be the norm now for storing Windows and applications, with larger ones being good for storing Windows and more applications. Currently unless you are very wealthy it's not the best of ideas to buy a "one for all" SSD. They are very expensive per GB.
Q - Should I get the one that looks the fastest on paper?
A - Absolutely and uttterly not. Figures are often skewed to make SSDs appear better than they are. There are numerous tests an SSD is put through to decipher how good it is, and the bad areas of it can be easily veiled behind an overall speed. At the speeds SSDs operate you would be hard pushed to spot the difference in the real world between one that reads at 270mb p/s and one that can read at 350 mb p/s. It's akin to running a 4ghz AMD compared to a 4ghz Intel. The Intel _is_ faster. But, you would be hard pushed to spot it during normal use and, tbh, even in gaming. Unless of course the lesser one stuttered during that game.
Q - What is important when choosing an SSD?
A - The controller. That is the single most important part of _any_ SSD. Some are fast but have terrible controllers that lead to stuttering and incompatability. Be sure to do your reading and check out _more than one_ review. Again, reviewers use different test set ups, chipsets and motherboards. Try to find a review where the test setup ghosts yours as much as is possible. TRIM is the absolute be all and end all on an SSD, though. And it should NEVER be ignored for speed.
Q - I have heard that Raid on an SSD is absolutely amazing and offers incredible performance. Is this true?
A - Yeo. There is no short answer to that. At a quick glance the answer would be yes, most certainly. Benchmarks will increase by huge margins. However, much to everything in life there are downsides, and they outweigh the benefits. Firstly as was pointed out above once you hit a certain speed you would have to be Steve Austin to pick out the difference. A split second between loading, say, Photoshop will not be noticable. The biggest problem with RAID on a SSD is that you forfeit your TRIM, which is not an option. Please see below for an explanation of what TRIM is, but in short the TRIM command is sent by Windows 7 only and can not make it past RAID controllers. When the command is sent it gets to the RAID controller's bios and gets spat back.
So, what is TRIM then?
TRIM is a command that Windows 7 sends. An SSD is not made up of sectors, but rather cells of NAND memory. Let's make this simple. An empty cell will be a 0. A full cell will be a 1. When you delete the 1 it does not go back to a 0, rather becoming messy. The more messy the cells become the more the drive performance degrades. The only way to restore the performance without using TRIM is to wipe the drives and perform a secure erase, this will then refresh the cells, allowing them to perform at their original speeds. TRIM is also known as garbage collection. It rewrites 0s to the cells on the fly to keep the performance of the drive optimal. Forfeiting TRIM is not a good idea. If you want to see just how quickly an SSD degrades then I invite you to perform the following tests.
1. Download ATTO disk benchmark.
2. Run it, continually, for a few hours.
3. As massive chunks of data are written to and subsequently deleted by ATTO your drive will begin to degrade. Not over a space of days, months or weeks, but under constant pressure within a day. By the end of the day I guarantee your performance will drop.
IMO RAID on an SSD should only be used if you absolutely must. For day to day usage it is useless unless you want to -
1. Break your RAID array, seperating the drives.
2. Boot into Gpart and run Diskpart from a Linux disc.
3. Hot plug your SSD to unlock it (power out power back in, meaning taking apart your PC).
4. Run a secure erase.
5. Format it.
6. Either reinstall or run a cloneback of Windows.
Even in the best possible situation the quickest I could perform the above (I had a drive pre TRIM) was around 40 minutes. And, it relied on me continually running clones on the SSD to make sure I got back to where I was pre cleanup.
You can add the Revodrive to that too. Basically a Revodrive is two SSDs sitting behind a RAID controller in RAID 0. Because the TRIM command can not make it past the controller neither can firmware updates for the drives themselves . Meaning even if OCZ came up with a way to make their drives TRIM in RAID you wouldn't phsyically be able to implement it.
The choice of course is yours, but just know the hassles involved.
Now let's move onto the tips and tricks of running and maintaining an SSD.
Firstly as soon as you hit Windows after the initial install you will want to disable system restore .
Now Windows should, by default, detect your SSD on the way in and disable it for you. Windows System Restore is basically a weak crappy image of your install. But that's good,right? No it isn't. Sadly security and WSR don't exist. If you get a bad virus or malware on your computer it will simply infect all of your restore points. This means that you have a whacking great chunk of data eating up your SSD.
In my "tool kit" which is like the swiss army knives of SSDs I have Acronis True Image. This software is installed onto my SSD and I take images of my OS with it every week or so. With it you can make a bootable restore image of your Windows installation. Then, you simply boot from a CD you made and browse for the image on another backup drive and simply clone it back. The nice part of it of course is that you can store these images on slower and cheaper moving parts drives instead of it being about as useful as a chocolate teapot and munching your SSD space.
So now we have Windows System Restore banished to drive hell let's move onto the other important things shall we?
Hiberfil.sys is a file stored on your installation. Hiberfil is to do with the Windows Hibernate function. When your system goes into hibernation it stores what you are up to on a great fat file. At initial install this file is around 3GB. As you start to load on the apps though it will grow, and grow, slowly eating your SSD space. Feel free to look into what it does, but chances are if you are running an SSD you will fit into the "I don't need it" category. To perform the disabling of it and removal of the bloat from your system open up the command prompt, like so.
Go to your Windows 7 run box at the bottom left.
Type "CMD". You will then see a small black squared application. Right click it and run as administrator.
Then with the old fashioned black window with text in it in white type -
powercfg -h off
Then press enter. At first nothing will seem any different. Reboot your computer, hello more SSD space.
Checking that Windows has detected your SSD and is sending the TRIM command.
Open up the CMD window again following the steps above.
Type - fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify
If the answer returns as 0 TRIM is enabled and being sent. HOWEVER it does not necessarily mean it is getting there or that your drive supports it. You could run the command on a RAID 0 array and the answer would come back as 0. All it deciphers is that Windows is actually using and sending the command, not that it is physically working.
To make sure it is working and continuing to work then I would suggest downloading the ATTO hard disk benchmark and running it every couple of months.
Don't overdo it ! TRIM does not come along and spit and polish your drive the second you delete something it will do it as and when it sees fit.
Further maintainance.
This one is probably pretty obvious. But, if you're like me and don't have much of a clue of the cool things tucked into your Windows then hey, might come in handy !
Again go to your run box thinger bottom left. Type "Cleanup". You will see disk cleanup appear. Run it, get rid of any temp files or error logs. A friend of mine once installed Win7 pro onto his 40gb Intel SSD.. He had driver issues (tri sli) and by the time he was done he had amassed 9gb of error logs
But yes, I run this about every week and gain back a good 5-600mb. It sounds small, but Windows will continue to pile on the pounds until you are at 50mb free.
And that, mon amigos, should about cover it !
Other more complicated things...
Before buying your SSD check to see if your drive's firmware updates are destructive or non destructive.
Basically let me explain it. On my old Corsair SSD the firmware updates were non destructive this meant that I could flash my firmware and business continued as normal.
However, on a Patriot drive I had the firmware flash was destructive and once performed you would need to run a secure erase, format and complete reinstall (well, unless you follow the advice above about Acronis). This is a major PITA, especially if you opt for a brand spanking new model that may need fixes to the firmware.
Firstly let's cover some FAQs, if you will.
Q - How big does my SSD need to be?
A - This varies. A 30-32gb SSD, for example, is enough for Windows 7 X86. However, the 64 bit versions of Windows have two program files folders which use up more space. A 60gb SSD appears to be the norm now for storing Windows and applications, with larger ones being good for storing Windows and more applications. Currently unless you are very wealthy it's not the best of ideas to buy a "one for all" SSD. They are very expensive per GB.
Q - Should I get the one that looks the fastest on paper?
A - Absolutely and uttterly not. Figures are often skewed to make SSDs appear better than they are. There are numerous tests an SSD is put through to decipher how good it is, and the bad areas of it can be easily veiled behind an overall speed. At the speeds SSDs operate you would be hard pushed to spot the difference in the real world between one that reads at 270mb p/s and one that can read at 350 mb p/s. It's akin to running a 4ghz AMD compared to a 4ghz Intel. The Intel _is_ faster. But, you would be hard pushed to spot it during normal use and, tbh, even in gaming. Unless of course the lesser one stuttered during that game.
Q - What is important when choosing an SSD?
A - The controller. That is the single most important part of _any_ SSD. Some are fast but have terrible controllers that lead to stuttering and incompatability. Be sure to do your reading and check out _more than one_ review. Again, reviewers use different test set ups, chipsets and motherboards. Try to find a review where the test setup ghosts yours as much as is possible. TRIM is the absolute be all and end all on an SSD, though. And it should NEVER be ignored for speed.
Q - I have heard that Raid on an SSD is absolutely amazing and offers incredible performance. Is this true?
A - Yeo. There is no short answer to that. At a quick glance the answer would be yes, most certainly. Benchmarks will increase by huge margins. However, much to everything in life there are downsides, and they outweigh the benefits. Firstly as was pointed out above once you hit a certain speed you would have to be Steve Austin to pick out the difference. A split second between loading, say, Photoshop will not be noticable. The biggest problem with RAID on a SSD is that you forfeit your TRIM, which is not an option. Please see below for an explanation of what TRIM is, but in short the TRIM command is sent by Windows 7 only and can not make it past RAID controllers. When the command is sent it gets to the RAID controller's bios and gets spat back.
So, what is TRIM then?
TRIM is a command that Windows 7 sends. An SSD is not made up of sectors, but rather cells of NAND memory. Let's make this simple. An empty cell will be a 0. A full cell will be a 1. When you delete the 1 it does not go back to a 0, rather becoming messy. The more messy the cells become the more the drive performance degrades. The only way to restore the performance without using TRIM is to wipe the drives and perform a secure erase, this will then refresh the cells, allowing them to perform at their original speeds. TRIM is also known as garbage collection. It rewrites 0s to the cells on the fly to keep the performance of the drive optimal. Forfeiting TRIM is not a good idea. If you want to see just how quickly an SSD degrades then I invite you to perform the following tests.
1. Download ATTO disk benchmark.
2. Run it, continually, for a few hours.
3. As massive chunks of data are written to and subsequently deleted by ATTO your drive will begin to degrade. Not over a space of days, months or weeks, but under constant pressure within a day. By the end of the day I guarantee your performance will drop.
IMO RAID on an SSD should only be used if you absolutely must. For day to day usage it is useless unless you want to -
1. Break your RAID array, seperating the drives.
2. Boot into Gpart and run Diskpart from a Linux disc.
3. Hot plug your SSD to unlock it (power out power back in, meaning taking apart your PC).
4. Run a secure erase.
5. Format it.
6. Either reinstall or run a cloneback of Windows.
Even in the best possible situation the quickest I could perform the above (I had a drive pre TRIM) was around 40 minutes. And, it relied on me continually running clones on the SSD to make sure I got back to where I was pre cleanup.
You can add the Revodrive to that too. Basically a Revodrive is two SSDs sitting behind a RAID controller in RAID 0. Because the TRIM command can not make it past the controller neither can firmware updates for the drives themselves . Meaning even if OCZ came up with a way to make their drives TRIM in RAID you wouldn't phsyically be able to implement it.
The choice of course is yours, but just know the hassles involved.
Now let's move onto the tips and tricks of running and maintaining an SSD.
Firstly as soon as you hit Windows after the initial install you will want to disable system restore .
Now Windows should, by default, detect your SSD on the way in and disable it for you. Windows System Restore is basically a weak crappy image of your install. But that's good,right? No it isn't. Sadly security and WSR don't exist. If you get a bad virus or malware on your computer it will simply infect all of your restore points. This means that you have a whacking great chunk of data eating up your SSD.
In my "tool kit" which is like the swiss army knives of SSDs I have Acronis True Image. This software is installed onto my SSD and I take images of my OS with it every week or so. With it you can make a bootable restore image of your Windows installation. Then, you simply boot from a CD you made and browse for the image on another backup drive and simply clone it back. The nice part of it of course is that you can store these images on slower and cheaper moving parts drives instead of it being about as useful as a chocolate teapot and munching your SSD space.
So now we have Windows System Restore banished to drive hell let's move onto the other important things shall we?
Hiberfil.sys is a file stored on your installation. Hiberfil is to do with the Windows Hibernate function. When your system goes into hibernation it stores what you are up to on a great fat file. At initial install this file is around 3GB. As you start to load on the apps though it will grow, and grow, slowly eating your SSD space. Feel free to look into what it does, but chances are if you are running an SSD you will fit into the "I don't need it" category. To perform the disabling of it and removal of the bloat from your system open up the command prompt, like so.
Go to your Windows 7 run box at the bottom left.
Type "CMD". You will then see a small black squared application. Right click it and run as administrator.
Then with the old fashioned black window with text in it in white type -
powercfg -h off
Then press enter. At first nothing will seem any different. Reboot your computer, hello more SSD space.
Checking that Windows has detected your SSD and is sending the TRIM command.
Open up the CMD window again following the steps above.
Type - fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify
If the answer returns as 0 TRIM is enabled and being sent. HOWEVER it does not necessarily mean it is getting there or that your drive supports it. You could run the command on a RAID 0 array and the answer would come back as 0. All it deciphers is that Windows is actually using and sending the command, not that it is physically working.
To make sure it is working and continuing to work then I would suggest downloading the ATTO hard disk benchmark and running it every couple of months.
Don't overdo it ! TRIM does not come along and spit and polish your drive the second you delete something it will do it as and when it sees fit.
Further maintainance.
This one is probably pretty obvious. But, if you're like me and don't have much of a clue of the cool things tucked into your Windows then hey, might come in handy !
Again go to your run box thinger bottom left. Type "Cleanup". You will see disk cleanup appear. Run it, get rid of any temp files or error logs. A friend of mine once installed Win7 pro onto his 40gb Intel SSD.. He had driver issues (tri sli) and by the time he was done he had amassed 9gb of error logs
But yes, I run this about every week and gain back a good 5-600mb. It sounds small, but Windows will continue to pile on the pounds until you are at 50mb free.
And that, mon amigos, should about cover it !
Other more complicated things...
Before buying your SSD check to see if your drive's firmware updates are destructive or non destructive.
Basically let me explain it. On my old Corsair SSD the firmware updates were non destructive this meant that I could flash my firmware and business continued as normal.
However, on a Patriot drive I had the firmware flash was destructive and once performed you would need to run a secure erase, format and complete reinstall (well, unless you follow the advice above about Acronis). This is a major PITA, especially if you opt for a brand spanking new model that may need fixes to the firmware.
