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SSD Cloning Impact on Performance?

T

tonyb

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 30, 2010
Messages
130
I had a 60 GB SSD Windows 7 boot drive that was always filling up.

I used dd in Linux to clone the drive to a new 128 GB drive, and had Windows expand the volume.

I was curious, so I ran some benchmarks. Given that SSDs are way faster than HDDs, I'm not too picky if my benchmarks come a bit under what others see. But this seems severely limited compared to other published results.

AfxRHobCQAMyzXI.png


Here's what others have been getting:

http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=101387
 
The clone shouldn't have anything to do with it. Is the drive aligned properly? What controller is it on? Is AHCI turned on?
 
The 64 GB SSD was a fresh install of Windows 7, so alignment should be fine. AHCI is enabled.
 
What kind of drive was use before? Now?

I clone Win7 from SSD to SSD all the time and have never had a problem such as this when using Acronis (Intel supplies a version with their drives).

I think some more info may be needed...
 
Old drive was a Kingston 64 GB SSDNow 100. New drive is new Corsair Performance Pro 128 (just released).

I used dd in Linux to clone the drive.
 
The alignment should be fine, but check to make sure (AS-SSD can tell). Again, what controller is this on? How was the performance of the old drive? Try a different benchmark, like Crystal DiskMark and see how that compares.
 
tonyb said:
The 64 GB SSD was a fresh install of Windows 7, so alignment should be fine. AHCI is enabled.
Click to expand...

That doesn't necessarily matter. It depends on the software, but cloning an aligned image to another disk usually breaks the alignment.

The quickest way to check is run AS SSD, in the top left you'll 1024 - OK (or some multiple of 1024). I learned that lesson the hard way. I've not used dd, but only there are very few ”SSD aware" cloning programs. Usually, only if you were copying to a drive with an identical amount of space would the alignment be preserved.

Post an AS SSD screen shot. That's the quickest way to verify alignment.
 
Wow, the Performance Pro's are really fast. Are you using it on a SATA III port or SATA II?

A 120GB Performance Pro should top out at about 500+ reads and 300+ writes with something like ATTO. On a SATA II port it will obviously max out at 270ish. Run AS SSD to verify alignment first (you don't have to run the benchmark). If the drive is unaligned, you'll end up turning the 50GB of writes from CDM into some multiple of that. WA will explode by 10x, maybe higher. (My Agility 60 Indilinx was cloned from an aligned drive but the alignment wasn't preserved, and write amplification went up to 100x, meaning when I wanted to write 1MB, the drive had to write 100MB.)
 
OK, that's better. I was plugged into a SATA port that wasn't AHCI capable (AS SSD, great tool, thanks for the suggestion) reported that it was pciide - bad. Tweaked a little, got it running with AHCI, and the results are much better.

Alignment was always fine.
 
ckryan said:
That doesn't necessarily matter. It depends on the software, but cloning an aligned image to another disk usually breaks the alignment.
Click to expand...

Using imaging software which would 1) recreate the partition table 2) copy the filesystem.

dd copies all the data from one drive to another, including free space. Partition tables, etc are kept identical.
 
If the drive was just mis aligned, you'd still get around the same reads but writes would go in to the toilet.
 
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