Bought an Intel 320 120GB SSD yesterday, anything I need to do?

M

MrFace

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Is there anything I need to do with the drive other than upgrade to the newest firmware? I noticed Intel has an "optimizer" in the SSD toolbox. Does this really need to be ran?

I ran some benchmarks and I'm getting advertised speeds, so I'm happy!

Sorry...first SSD.
 
No you don't need to do anything. I wouldn't worry about running an optimizer unless you have performance issues. Just let it do it's thing. Congrats on the new drive. :jealous :)
 
Thanks! The blue SATA ports on my motherboard died(I didn't exchange my mobo during the recall) and took out my system drive. Figured it was a good excuse to finally go SSD.
 
Do make sure you check for the firmware upgrade though - Intel just released the new one that fixes the 8 MB bug. The optimizer basically forces a TRIM on the drive, so it makes sense to run it every once in a while - not required, but doesn't hurt and might help.

You might consider turning off hibernation on your system to save driver space - and you can also consider setting a smaller manual page file, again to save space.
 
Run that optimizer. It's simple and makes great config suggestions.
 
gmohr said:
Run that optimizer. It's simple and makes great config suggestions.
Click to expand...


Even though my OS supports TRIM, I have mine set to run once a week or so. It seems like a fairly benign program so I figure it can't hurt. I look at it like a kind of periodic chkdsk or fsck, in case the TRIM function misses a few blocks occasionally for whatever reason.
 
for intel, there is no need to update firmware as it is stable anyways. props for buying an intel. just plug it in and install. ur gonna love ur new ssd
 
To be fair to Intel, a data failure that occurs only sometimes on a hard powerloss a bit of tough issue to detect. I'm more inclined to stay with Intel since their response was what I expected. They stated that they would look into the issue, acknowledged the issue when they reproduced it, and released a firmware patch that corrected the issue.

Sure, it would have been best if the bug was caught before the drive was released, but IMO their response was good.

I own a mix of Crucial/Intel/OCZ drives (though I'm moving away from the OCZ stuff)
 
Just to be clear, I'm not faulting Intel, just pointing out that in this case you definitely should update the firmware. I do think it's a serious bug, but the way they handled it seemed reasonable to me.
 
I was just commenting on the "...Intel perfect stability idea has been shattered..." comment. It's that same line of thinking that people use with hard drives and causes people to say "one single brand X hard drive died on me, so I'm never using brand X hard drives from now on, because they're unreliable"
 
SSD's are bleeding edge in the most germaine way. Intel SSD'S appear to be the best bet for stability, but not perfect.
 
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