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SSD drives research and advice.


Bikerdude

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Doing so, you are wasting your drive's potential. Anand from AnandTech wrote an article about SSD life and flash cell wear. He quotes numbers from Intel, saying that you'd have to actually write somewhere around 20 GB per day for 5 years to get your first worn flash cells. Afterwards, he's talking about his own drive use, stating that he writes around 7 GB per day:

 

"If I never install another application and just go about my business, my drive has 203.4GB of space to spread out those 7GB of writes per day. That means in roughly 29 days my SSD, if it wear levels perfectly, I will have written to every single available flash block on my drive. Tack on another 7 days if the drive is smart enough to move my static data around to wear level even more properly. So we’re at approximately 36 days before I exhaust one out of my ~10,000 write cycles. Multiply that out and it would take 360,000 days of using my machine the way I have been for the past two weeks for all of my NAND to wear out; once again, assuming perfect wear leveling. That’s 986 years. Your NAND flash cells will actually lose their charge well before that time comes, in about 10 years."

 

So you might do yourself a favor if you put all your temp directories back on the SSD. I'm pretty sure you'll notice an increase in responsiveness. At least I did.

Yes, i agree with you. :)

 

I would add that the only thing that should be done on a ssd is to free up space, because space is not a lot especially on the 120 gb. I turned off hibernation that never used it (saved about 4 gb). I set the virtual memory to 50 MB, and saved other 4 gb. I disabled system configuration restore and saved another 3-4 gb.

In all, on my 120 gb, I released a 12 gb or so. : D

Edited by ECHELON
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I don't use hibernation as well (hiberfil.sys wastes 6 GB on my SSD!), mainly because the computer boots up fast enough (and I can shut it down properly without wasting time), but also because I avoid standby modes since I first owned a Corsair Force SSD. Those drives had a particularly bad habit of breaking up if they went on standby, so it was highly recommended at that time to absolutely avoid that. I have never heard of such a thing for my OCZ drives, and I also don't know if Corsair eventually fixed the issue, but I still have all standby modes disabled - you never know. Also, a full shutdown wastes even less electric energy than even the lowest standby mode.

My Eigenvalue is bigger than your Eigenvalue.

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My system is using a 60GB Corsair SSD (F60GB2) for the Windows 7 64bit OS.

Plus a genuine 1TB HDD - on which ALL applications and games reside.

Runs like a charm and startup is incredibly fast for more then a year already.

It just takes some discipline to tell all the installers to NOT use the default install path, but drive D: instead.

But this is a good tradeoff if you don't want to spend a lot of money.

And there is still 50% free disk space left on the SSD.

 

However, the SSD is a replacement already.

My first SSD (also some Corsair with 60GB, but a slightly different model) lasted for about 3 month before it saw the BSOD out of a sudden.

Edited by gnartsch
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so far the kingston is fantastic. I had to do a few tricks to relocate some files but all in all its nice to boot from log in to ready in seriously like 0 seconds, I am now waiting the few seconds for the internet to connect. other than that as long as I am carful about changing the default downloads to HHD im cool. had to enable trim in win 7 though and a few other settings.. looking forward to advances in this tech... I am having problems with creating a back up restore points though ....

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However, the SSD is a replacement already.

Make sure you have the drive updated to the latest FW, and do a data backup before you do that.

 

so far the kingston is fantastic, I am having problems with creating a back up restore points though ....

Which drive model did you get..? and what problem exactly are you having with system restore..?

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  • 3 weeks later...

Ready to buy one... Which of these should I get?

 

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16820227791

or

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16820211602

 

If I understand correctly, the bottom one is (slightly) faster at writing? The top one however has a much longer warranty.

 

EDIT: I got the Vertex 4.

Edited by lost_soul

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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I might get the Vertex 4, too, sometime soon. One of my drives is actually an 8-year-old IDE HD that holds a bunch of non-program data (e.g. Music, videos, etc.). I'm certain it's going to be dying soon, so I'd best get cracking on protecting my information.

yay seuss crease touss dome in ouss nose tair

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Yeah I had an HDD for about 9 years before I retired it. It still worked perfectly, but S.M.A.R.T was showing about 90 reallocated sectors and it was best to replace it before spare sectors were gone. Amazing how they can make stuff last that long. Hopefully an SSD will last even longer.

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm pretty happy with mine. It tops out at 540 MB/s and averages at about 500. I did not upgrade the firmware when I set it up though. Linux and Win 7 x64 are both installed on it. I did the few tweaks in Linux like using discard and noatime in fstab to decrease rights and enable TRIM, but I think I still have to do some stuff in Windows to make it reach full potential. That's because I just moved my existing Windows install over rather than reinstalling W7 from scratch.

 

Make sure your mobo is set to AHCI, or else (I think) TRIM will not function. If you change your SATA controller from IDE to AHCI, Windows will stop booting. You need to do this first. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

 

I also symlinked /var/log to a partition on the HDD to decrease writes some more.

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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I think I still have to do some stuff in Windows to make it reach full potential. That's because I just moved my existing Windows install over rather than reinstalling W7 from scratch.

Yup, was AHCI enabled in the bios on the old drive that windows was installed on..? if it wasnt this will slow down the drive. Also dowload the latest driver for the SATA controller for your mobo.

 

lastly did you created align partitions when setting up the SSD drive..?

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I read about the partition aligning after I did set it up, so nope. I just used "Gparted" to make them as normal. On the original drive, it was set to IDE. That is why I had to fix it using the solution above.

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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Hmm, your loosing a massive chunk of perf then and you didn't even know it, I strongly suggest you backup your data and secure erase the drive and then create aligned partition and then reinstall. You will thank me for the perf boost rather than all the time spent reinstalling etc.. :-D

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Thanks. I may end up doing that eventually, but before I do, I will check with Parted which allows you to see the raw sector positions of partitions on your drive. Hopefully it aligned automatically. :) This may be unlikely though because the distro I use is a couple years old.

 

Also, boot times are very fast. I know, there is only so fast a system can boot even with a super fast disk because of hardware initialization and stuff like that. For exampl, if you leave a CD in your drive it tends to spin up during the boot process which can make it take logner to boot.

 

EDIT: oops, I accidently clicked the report button instead of edit. Hopefully that didn't do anything bad. Sorry about that.

Edited by lost_soul

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'll be doing the SSD thing soon as well, I'm planning to spend about ~$1500 on a new build over the next few weeks. Half my storage solution is complete, just bought a Hitachi sata3 2TB 7200RPM 64MB cache mechanical drive for $99, now the last piece of the equation is the SSD for the system drive.

 

I want performance to be high, but with 0 tolerance on sacrificing reliability. I keep hearing about reliability problems with OCZ drives, and sandforce controllers. I guess Marvell is supposed to be the rock-solid one? I haven't even heard about samsung/indilinix controllers, i know nothing about them.

 

Is there like a comprehensive list of available SSD's sorted by generation and controller somewhere to look at?

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There are only two drive I can recommend at this present time, the Crucial M4 256GB and the Samsung 830 GB, the crucial has the edge on 4k QD1 read/write speeds over the Samsung and conversely the Samsung with sequential write speeds over the Crucial. But seeing as windows, apps and game spend most of thier time in the 4K QD1 range the choice would appear obvious.

 

I currently own a Samsung 830 256GB and its been solidly reliable, the only issue I have had with it is when I secure erased it 1 month after I bought the drive I found the 4k QD1 write speeds has dropped from 90MB/s when it was new to 74MB/s as it is now. Speaking to Samsung they said this is the normal write speed for this drive and a few of the reviews I have found would concur with this. But the fly in the ointment is that I was getting 90MB/s on the older intel RST driver, using said driver yields only 60MB/s and am only able to reach 74MB/s with the latest RST driver. So both I and Samsung think I "may" have a faulty drive.

 

Amazon have said they will give me a full refund as they don't have more of the drive in stock, so I could look at buying a Crucial M4 and see how I get on with that. And yes OCZ have thier Vertex 4 out, with its Indilinx 2 controller which is supposed to have none of the flaws of its Sandforce based drive and has the highest sequential and 4k QD1 speeds out there, but OCZ don't have a rep for being reliable... In america there are a more SSD manufactures out there than we have over here in Europe, so it may be worth doing some more research before you make your purchase. My personal view is to avoid Sandforce based drives, due to the shear amount of BSOD reports on the web.

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On the subject of SSD ownership, I should mention most strongly that you need to change how you setup and use your PC to minimize the amount of writes to the drive in order to extend its useful operation lifespan.

  • Before installing the drive make sure AHCI is enabled in the bios.
  • If you have a working PC prior to setting of an SSD then use "diskpart" in windows 7 to created an aligned partion, this is a must do as it enabled to drive to operate at full speed. If however you are installing windows dirtly to the driver, windows 7 will correctly created an aligned partition for you.
  • Windows 7 be default still has a number of services enabled that do a lot of unnecessary writing to the drive and these need to be disabled as they are only designed for mechanical drives: defrag, superfetch, indexing, readyboost, hibernation.
  • The following is optional but I strong recommend it, have all your data (movies, music, documents, download, Temp & windows temp folders) on a separate physical drive.

Here are some links with above information but with some more option things you can turn off

 

- http://www.overclock...tup-and-secrets

- http://www.overclock...tup-and-secrets

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samsung went and made life more difficult by adding 3 models at each capacity level, fortunately I got that one worked out, and its nothing major, just accessories:

 

The Samsung 830 is available in three variants, designated by B, D and N attached to the capacity size. In particular, for the 128GB (being reviewed here) there are

 

MZ-7PC128B/WW:

This version is for both (and hence, the B designation) a notebook or desktop computer without a 2.5-to-3.5 bracket or SATA-to-USB adpator.

 

MZ-7PC128D/AM:

This version comes with a desktop upgrade kit (D designation), with a 2.5-to-3.5 bracket.

 

MZ-7PC128N/AM:

This version comes with a notebook upgrade kit (N designation), with a SATA-to-USB adaptor.

 

edit: also after about an hour of pricing these out, it looks like every vendor is charging ~$15-20 for the D or N models. 15-20 for a mounting bracket or usb adapter? no thanks. if you do grab any capacity samsung 830, get the B model.

Edited by ungoliant
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On the subject of SSD ownership, I should mention most strongly that you need to change how you setup and use your PC to minimize the amount of writes to the drive in order to extend its useful operation lifespan.

 

...

 

Here are some links with above information but with some more option things you can turn off

 

- http://www.overclock...tup-and-secrets

Hot sausage! B) That's a great collection of advice! I've just got to wait to get the funds for a SSD. Poor poor university student, I am.

I got the 256GB model (MZ-7PC256N) for a £140, it was the cheapest around even though it came with the pointless USB-to-SATA cable

That can be a super useful device for rescuing data on dead computers/near-dead HDs. I used to use a USB-to-IDE some years ago, when three students at school simultaneously got the nasty 'Windows Antivirus' virus.

yay seuss crease touss dome in ouss nose tair

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