SSD Drive. Could use some help

[Boyo]

I am getting an OCZ Vertex 2 100GB ssd. I am totally new to ssd's and I have read that you should not run a defrag program on the drive, but why? I am also concerned after reading that there is a degradation of these drives over time. Why is that and how long after I buy it will I experience that?

Thanks for any help.

 

[Damar]

The memory chips in an SSD can only be written to so many times before they die off. Running a defrag program uses up "write cycles" needlessly, because even if that SSD is fragmented to hell, it won't really affect performance all that much since there are no moving parts. A good read (once again) for new SSD owners is here at MS.....

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

As for degredation over time, even at it's slowest speed, a good SSD is still going to be much quicker than your old HD was at it's best. TRIM allows the drive to "clean things up" a bit and restore what little speed you may lose, but I've never seen it be a night and day difference.

Read that article I linked above, it answers your questions in much greater detail along with tons of other useful information.

Also, do a clean install of Win7 unless you want to have to worry about drive alignment and other settings that you'd have to disable manually. Win7 sets up several things differently on a clean install to an SSD. WinXP and some other OS's won't.

 

[ww_Crimson]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think if you find an SSD with TRIM technology it doesnt' degrade over time.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think if you find an SSD with TRIM technology it doesnt' degrade over time.

You are wrong, and corrected.

it is a physical aspect flash ram that causes it to discharge over time as the rite-cycles accumulate. TRIM does nothing to improve this.

All SSD's have wear leveling to minimize he impact, but eventually they will all fail. it will likely happen after the end of their servicable life anyway.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Also, do a clean install of Win7 unless you want to have to worry about drive alignment and other settings that you'd have to disable manually. Win7 sets up several things differently on a clean install to an SSD. WinXP and some other OS's won't.

Interesting. I did not realize this. I read somewhere that Windows 7 was able to automatically detect and change settings for SSD's, I didn't realize it would require a fresh install. I just copied my Windows 7 and Linux partitions over to my SSD using gparted.

Is there a guide to which settings to manually disable in a case like this?

 

[Damar]

Interesting. I did not realize this. I read somewhere that Windows 7 was able to automatically detect and change settings for SSD's, I didn't realize it would require a fresh install. I just copied my Windows 7 and Linux partitions over to my SSD using gparted.

Is there a guide to which settings to manually disable in a case like this?

Take a read through the link I posted and you'll find this for starters.

Windows 7 Optimizations and Default Behavior Summary
As noted above, all of today’s SSDs have considerable work to do when presented with disk writes and disk flushes. Windows 7 tends to perform well on today’s SSDs, in part, because we made many engineering changes to reduce the frequency of writes and flushes. This benefits traditional HDDs as well, but is particularly helpful on today’s SSDs.

Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation on SSD system drives. Because SSDs perform extremely well on random read operations, defragmenting files isn’t helpful enough to warrant the added disk writing defragmentation produces. The FAQ section below has some additional details.

By default, Windows 7 will disable Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching on SSDs with good random read, random write and flush performance. These technologies were all designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could easily be a major bottleneck. See the FAQ section for more details.

Since SSDs tend to perform at their best when the operating system’s partitions are created with the SSD’s alignment needs in mind, all of the partition-creating tools in Windows 7 place newly created partitions with the appropriate alignment.

To verify your alignment, go here and fill in the values.

http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/other/157

 

[Boyo]

The memory chips in an SSD can only be written to so many times before they die off. Running a defrag program uses up "write cycles" needlessly, because even if that SSD is fragmented to hell, it won't really affect performance all that much since there are no moving parts. A good read (once again) for new SSD owners is here at MS.....

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

As for degredation over time, even at it's slowest speed, a good SSD is still going to be much quicker than your old HD was at it's best. TRIM allows the drive to "clean things up" a bit and restore what little speed you may lose, but I've never seen it be a night and day difference.

Read that article I linked above, it answers your questions in much greater detail along with tons of other useful information.

Also, do a clean install of Win7 unless you want to have to worry about drive alignment and other settings that you'd have to disable manually. Win7 sets up several things differently on a clean install to an SSD. WinXP and some other OS's won't.

Thanks for the link to the article. That helped out a lot. But one other question I have is, what is the average life span of an ssd?

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Thanks for the link to the article. That helped out a lot. But one other question I have is, what is the average life span of an ssd?

Thats a good question, since they haven't been around that long there isn't a huge amount of data on how quickly people use up their write cycles.

I've heard a few stories here or there about people's SSD's dying after a few months to a year, but those were likely bad units from the factory.

Estimates in typical use seem to range from 5 to 15 years. Either way, it's long enough that the drive is probably obsolete by the time its write cycles are worn out, unless abused.

 

[Boyo]

Thats a good question, since they haven't been around that long there isn't a huge amount of data on how quickly people use up their write cycles.

I've heard a few stories here or there about people's SSD's dying after a few months to a year, but those were likely bad units from the factory.

Estimates in typical use seem to range from 5 to 15 years. Either way, it's long enough that the drive is probably obsolete by the time its write cycles are worn out, unless abused.

Great. Thanks for the help.