SSD solid state drive help / questions

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mobbmann

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I've been shopping online for a few days now for a ssd and I like what I see performance wise witht the drives. I seem to be discovering more questions than answers though at this point and I had a few questions that I'm hoping this community can answer. I'm simply looking to use this ssd with the windows 7 I purchased. I talked with some freinds and we all have the same questions regarding a simple setup for this drive which amazingly enough none of us can find on this forum...so without further delay THESE are the questions we have regarding the drive:



#1. Explain to me like I'm a complete idiot how to install this drive from start to finish witht the following setup...brand new installation of windows 7, and the only hard drive is the ssd drive.



#2. Explain to me like I'm a complete idiot how to install this drive from start to finish with the following setup... brand new windows 7 installation with one ssd, and one regular hard drive.



#3. In a windwos 7 clean install does the drive clean itself now with the "auto triming" or do I still need to do any manual cleanup of the ssd (once again explain it to me like I'm the village idiot)



#4. if I currently have an installation of windows 7 on my ssd and want to delete everything and reinstall windows do I have to do anything special to delete all the data? or does windows 7 take care of that? I've seen something about haveing to go into dos to actuall delete all the data... once again... thorough explanation...



#5. in regards to the pagefile issue... if I have 8 gigs of ram or more... with a windows 7 install...what is the safest bet in regards to the pagefile...and what size... not what is fastest but what will work consistantlly and at what size should I set it? I've seen some recommening 400mb to be sure there is enough for error reporting... a general answer along the lines of " go with this stupid... you cant go wrong" would be nice.



I know I'm not the only one who needs an answer to the above questions. personally waited almost a year for the kinks to be worked out and windows 7 to be released just #1 build a 64 bit system and #2 get a solid state drive...answers to the above questions are very much needed and should definitly be stickied in bold crayon!!! if it already exists I simply cant find it, thanks in advance for the answers
 
1-2 - An SSD is treated just like a normal mechanical hard drive. You do not need to do anything special. You just use it as such. If you're installing an operating system, you'll probably want to install it on the SSD (i.e., make it your C: drive). Important to set in your bios the SATA mode to AHCI, so that trim and Native Command Queuing (ncq) is enabled.

3. The self cleaning (aka TRIM) is supported in the new Gen 2 Intel drives and Idilinx barefoot controller drives (such as OCZ Vertex/Agility, Crucial, SuperTalent). The important thing here is that if you run an Intel motherboard, the Intel Matrix Storage Manager Driver DOES NOT support trim at the moment, only the Microsoft driver provided as part of Windows 7 does. So basically, once you install Windows 7, install all drivers except the Intel Matrix Storage Driver. I don't know what the situation is with AMD. Also note that the latest Intel firmware providing TRIM support was causing issues, and Intel has since pulled the updated firmware until a fix is in place at the end of this month. If you haven't bought the SSD yet, it's possible new SSD's from Intel already have the latest firmware with TRIM support, so in that case you're good to go.

4. If the drive supports TRIM, then issuing any reformat from Windows 7 (for example, during install) will also issue TRIM, which will wipe the drive clean and get your drive back close to optimal performance. If your drive does not have TRIM, then you need to manually erase the drive yourself using programs that can issue the ATA secure erase command to the drive. (For example, HDDErase 3.3 works - note that only version 3.3 works with Intel drives. Version 4 does not)

5. The recommended size for the pagefile is the same as the amount of RAM you have, but given the large amounts of RAM in modern systems, the pagefile is really for those programs out there that refuse to run unless there is a pagefile. Quite a lot of people I know run their systems with 6 or more GB of RAM with no page file. If you want a number, I'd say 1GB, and be sure to place on a different physical drive than your SSD.

To gain an understanding of SSD's, I highly recommend Anandtech's SSD article series. They'll tell you everything you need to know about SSD's and then some.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667

If you want the short summary, it's this:

An ssd is the single most upgrade you can do to your system at the moment as the difference it makes far outstrips anything else. And if you buy an SSD, stick with Intel or OCZ.
 
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nsx241 said:
5. The recommended size for the pagefile is the same as the amount of RAM you have, but given the large amounts of RAM in modern systems, the pagefile is really for those programs out there that refuse to run unless there is a pagefile. Quite a lot of people I know run their systems with 6 or more GB of RAM with no page file. If you want a number, I'd say 1GB, and be sure to place on a different physical drive than your SSD.
Click to expand...

This is a contested issue. The pagefile is supposed to act as virtual memory when you don't have enough physical RAM. You should set its size to (how much memory your apps need) - (physical RAM installed). However, the pagefile also holds crash dumps (i.e. at least matching the RAM size), so you need to make sure it's big enough for that if you want to take advantage of it.

Here's how Windows calculates the size by default:
You’ll notice that the default configuration is for Windows to automatically manage the page file size. When that option is set on Windows XP and Server 2003, Windows creates a single paging file that’s minimum size is 1.5 times RAM if RAM is less than 1GB, and RAM if it's greater than 1GB, and that has a maximum size that's three times RAM. On Windows Vista and Server 2008, the minimum is intended to be large enough to hold a kernel-memory crash dump and is RAM plus 300MB or 1GB, whichever is larger. The maximum is either three times the size of RAM or 4GB, whichever is larger.
Click to expand...

Also, putting the pagefile on another drive will save writes on the SSD, but it will also slow down your pagefile access.

Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory has a lot of good info.
 
mini or kernel dumps don't need the full size of ram.. and they can still be useful for debugging crashes
 
InvisiBill said:
Also, putting the pagefile on another drive will save writes on the SSD, but it will also slow down your pagefile access.

Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory has a lot of good info.
Click to expand...

That's true, but I'm actually suggesting this as a space saving measure given the size of current SSD's. I wouldn't be too concerned with the savings in terms of write cycles if we are to believe the specifications given by the manufacturers in terms of wear leveling.
 
As long as you have 4GB or more of RAM, a static 512MB pagefile on your SSD is perfect. You're not using a lot of space, and you get the significantly faster paging access. As far as the limited write cycles goes, it's been said(by anandtech I beleive) that you could write GB's worth of data everyday to the drive and it'll still last more than 5 years. 99.6% of users can't move that much data on their personal computers.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=4 Anandtech article I mentioned earlier.
 
thank you for that last post... from other articles I've read it seems if you have more than 8 gigs of ram then 400 to 512mb of pagefile seems to be right... thank you all for your help...

I still a bit of confusion though in regards to how trim works with the most current drives in windows 7. Does it clean itself of garbage (autotrimming of sorts) or do I still have to run a manual garbage collector... I'm looking at the latest crucial ssd with trim support to purchase... thanks in advance for any help :)
 
mobbmann said:
thank you for that last post... from other articles I've read it seems if you have more than 8 gigs of ram then 400 to 512mb of pagefile seems to be right... thank you all for your help...

I still a bit of confusion though in regards to how trim works with the most current drives in windows 7. Does it clean itself of garbage (autotrimming of sorts) or do I still have to run a manual garbage collector... I'm looking at the latest crucial ssd with trim support to purchase... thanks in advance for any help :)
Click to expand...

TRIM is a function of both the drive controller and the operating system driver. You need both in order for TRIM to function automatically. Otherwise, you'll have to issue the TRIM/self clean manually.

As I said in my first post, in Windows 7 the driver provided by Microsoft supports trim, but the drivers provided by Intel (and I think AMD too) do not at the moment. The current drives that support trim are Intel (once the firmware issue is resolved) and Indilinx Barefoot controller drives. In terms of the Indilinx drives, it is recommended to go with OCZ or Crucial as they work directly with the Idilinx and get updated firmware much faster than other companies.
 
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nsx241 said:
...In terms of the Indilinx drives, it is recommended to go with OCZ or Crucial as they work directly with the Idilinx and get updated firmware much faster than other companies.
Click to expand...

Or Patriot for the ten year warranty.
 
ok cool, so I dont have to manually clean the drive if I have windows 7... but what was just said raises another question... I have a 780i mother board, are there any issues with nforce chipsets or will the trim work fine with it?
 
The driver supplied by Microsoft in the OS should correctly initiate the TRIM command. For certain though, the nforce sata controller driver provided by nvidia does not, and I doubt they will anytime soon considering nvidia is out of the desktop chipset business right now and sata performance itself historically has been lackluster on nvidia chipsets compared to intel counterparts.

Just doing a simple google search, I found this comparing the performance, so you're better off using the microsoft drivers in terms of support and performance anyway.

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=109061
 
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