SuperTalent 64GB + Seagate 1.5TB for $242 Shipped

Pretty interesting results regarding the GC routines bing, looks like if you give it enough time to do it's thing it's as good as having TRIM (which is definitely not on if you're using RAID, no one has TRIM-aware RAID drivers yet, not even Intel, ironically).


I've been doing some posts on Symantec's boards lately and I'm impressed w/how well Ghost 14/15 handle Vista/Win7 partition offsets, they basically keep the current offset of the existing partition (even if it was generated or created on a regular HDD) as you move it around or restore it, or even if you re-size it... So as far as using it w/SSD, you don't really have to do anything special to insure partition alignment unless you happen to be migrating a WinXP install or something.

Just mentioning it as another option for those that are comfortable with Ghost or already have it, I can't comment on older versions (tho I believe 12.0 would behave in the same way as well).


As for some of the tweaks you have implemented... Many are rather unnecessary and were meant for earlier-gen SSD or Vista/XP. If you disable the defrag service for instance, it won't automatically run on your regular HDD... But Win7 itself won't defrag your SSD (when the service is enabled) if it has properly recognized it's a SSD.

The Superfetch/Prefetch thing was born out of a comment a MS dev made on a SSD Q&A (he stated it would be disabled by default for Win7 installs on SSD) but frankly I dunno why it would make any difference at all since those services just read off the SSD and cache stuff to RAM. If anything I think what the MS dev actually meant was that said services would actually behave like defrag (meaning, they would instead cache stuff off your HDD where the speed difference vs RAM would be more noticeable).

Same MS dev so no reason whatsoever to disable indexing, it still helps to improve the speed of searches and you can configure what drives/directories are indexed by Windows' Search anyway. Disabling Hibernation is just a matter of space saving, for a desktop user it's obviously irrelevant but for laptops the quick hibernate/resume times w/SSD are one of the best reasons to upgrade to a SSD to begin with.
 
Just got it yesterday, it's great! There are so much info about how to set up windows 7 for an ssd though, I know a lot of it is outdated.... it's hard to tell what is legit. I wish MS would have their own info on how to set it up (pagefile, indexing, turning things off, etc.)
 
There's a semi-official Q&A w/a MS dev and the only things he stated explicitly were that Windows would, on it's own, prevent the defrag service from running on the SSD and that it would (supposedly) not run Superfetch off it (or at all). You really shouldn't have to be messing w/the page file, indexing, hibernation, etc. The only reason to do any of that imo is if you're crunched for space, not performance... In fact, half the reason people did it w/older SSD was to either avoid odd stutters (not an issue w/current-gen SSD) or because they were paranoid about the number of write cycles their SSD could sustain.
 
Mine is running latest firmware. Fresh Win7 64bit install on EVGA X58 with the Jmicron controller running my WD500s in RAID0. Takes 56 seconds from the time I push the power button till I have a usable desktop. 29 seconds for EVGA Bios and Jmicron RAID screen, 27 seconds for Windows splash.

Havent done any optimizations yet though.
 
56 seconds? Really? Mine is usable after a little more than 20 seconds. I'm running win7 x64 on a gigbyte ud3p, q6600 @ 3.5 ghz and 4 gb ram. It also came with the latest firemware
 
with my rocketraid 2300 card popped out, I can get to my desktop in about 20 seconds also on boot.. maybe a hair less.

As for the defrag thing, I noticed my ssd was not added to the group of disks which were lined up to be defragged with the win7 defrag scheduler.. but when I looked at the disks after the schedule ran, it listed my SSD as being defragged on 1/31 with the other disks.. bah! can't tell if it really happened or not, but I have since deactivated the scheduled defrag tool and service.
 
The EVGA has a long bios boot period, and the Jmicron RAID bios takes a bit too.

Did some of the Win7 and SSD edits, going to time it again in a minute.
 
Impulse said:
Pretty interesting results regarding the GC routines bing, looks like if you give it enough time to do it's thing it's as good as having TRIM (which is definitely not on if you're using RAID, no one has TRIM-aware RAID drivers yet, not even Intel, ironically).
...
As for some of the tweaks you have implemented... Many are rather unnecessary and were meant for earlier-gen SSD or Vista/XP....
Click to expand...

Yeah, I guess it's all a balance. I think the key is to turn off stuff that accesses the SSD (particularly writes) but doesn't provide any performance boost. Indexing is in this category. There is negligible increase in search speed on the SSD with indexing on. As mentioned indexing can be configured to run per drive, and down to specific file types. And you can define where the index gets written to as well.

Prefetch is another I've disabled, I don't know what the performance hit is if any, but it definitely writes .pf files to the system disk each time a new program is started so I've turned it off.

As for defrag I think if you kill the Scheduler but enable the service you will be able to manually run it on mechanical HDs, but it won't run automatically. I think. I will be checking the status to see if it runs on the SSD and disabling the service as well if so. Then I would just need to turn on the service before manually running it on the drives that need it. There's an Analyze function for defrag that shows fragmentation status too, so you know whether a drive needs it or not.

Point taken re: Hibernation, I've disabled it as this system tuns 24/7.

I have seen a bit of a drop in performance around 4K writes and some inconsistent benchmarks with AS SSD and ATTO, not sure what is goin on. I haven't noticed any slowdown in actual system use. I will probably test more next week. I enabled NCQ with AMD RAIDXpert and saw a nice solid increase in the middle range of the ATTO tests.

As for my boot/shutdown times they are much longer than referenced above as I'm using a RAMDisk and it reads from and saves to a mechanical HD.
 
Hmm, I didn't know SF had to write to the drive to do it's thing... Question, could you actually tell that it was cache'ing stuff off your SSD when it was enabled? I've never bothered to mess with it tbh, despite the comment that MS dev made on the Q&A. I figured that if they intended it to not run on SSD it'd either behave like the defrag service (in that it'd just cache off other drives)or they'd just disable it entirely (which clearly wasn't the case, I guess there's always the possibility they changed their mind before RTM as well).
 
Impulse said:
Hmm, I didn't know SF had to write to the drive to do it's thing... Question, could you actually tell that it was cache'ing stuff off your SSD when it was enabled? I've never bothered to mess with it tbh, despite the comment that MS dev made on the Q&A. I figured that if they intended it to not run on SSD it'd either behave like the defrag service (in that it'd just cache off other drives)or they'd just disable it entirely (which clearly wasn't the case, I guess there's always the possibility they changed their mind before RTM as well).
Click to expand...

Not sure about SF, I've had it disabled per Tony@OCZ's current SSD/Win7 advice at the link below. He doesn't mention PF, but I've disabled it because the system is plenty fast to start programs, and I got sick of seeing all the writes to the SSD in Resource Monitor.

Here's my current config:

SSD alignment verified (AS SSD tool shows this)
Power config set so the SSD never powers down (... so GC can do it's thing during idle times)
Write Caching enabled (Write-Cache Buffer flushing disabled for now as I have no UPS)
NCQ enabled
Pagefile moved to mechanical HD
Indexing disabled on the SSD only, and configured to write index files to mechanical HD
Defragmentation Schedule disabled
Defragmentation Service enabled
Superfetch disabled
PreFetch disabled
Hibernate disabled
Browser cache moved to RAM
Firefox Profiles (History/Sessions/Bookmarks) moved to RAMDisk

Here are the OCZ links I used to base my config on.
OCZ Support: Just what tweaks are needed in win7 with SSD
OCZ Support: Windows 7 Ultimate Tweaks Utilities
 
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Write cache is enabled by default for any OS drive AFAIK, and again, I still think some of that is largely unnecessary... MS quote on the subject of the page file:

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

* Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
* Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
* Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.
Click to expand...
I imagine some of what you're doing revolves around trying to mitigate idle-time writes to the drive tho, as you alluded to earlier, so GC can work freely since you're lacking TRIM... And I'm coming from the pov of single-drive usage so I could care less what happens when it's idle. :p In that context I can see how the page file, SF/PF, and having stuff like the index file on the SSD would interfere w/GC. Can't see the point in some of it otherwise tho... /shrug Reading the search index file off the SSD to find data on the HDD would be faster than reading it off the HDD for instance.

The RAMdisk stuff is more of an enthusiast practice, not necessarily tied to SSD usage, people were doing that pre-SSD as well... FF seems fine for me on my SSD tho (then again I'm probably just satisfied with seeing it run decent , after seeing it chug a lot on my netbook's old HDD for months, heh).
 
Impulse said:
Write cache is enabled by default for any OS drive AFAIK, and again, I still think some of that is largely unnecessary... MS quote on the subject of the page file:
Click to expand...

I see write cache come up a lot on the OCZ forum so just thought I'd mention it. And if someone has an UPS the secondary option (that isn't selected by default) might add a nice boost. I tested it briefly and didn't see any difference, but that was before enabling NCQ, and with a single drive, on an SB710,,, so YMMV.

As for the pagefile, yeah, I've tried it both on the SSD and HDD. I moved it to the HDD for good after seeing it being written to for five minutes straight by the System process after a fresh reboot. No programs were running other than system stuff, so it annoyed me. I don't think there's a reason for this PC to have a pagefile really, but just in case, it's there.

Impulse said:
I imagine some of what you're doing revolves around trying to mitigate idle-time writes to the drive tho, as you alluded to earlier, so GC can work freely since you're lacking TRIM... And I'm coming from the pov of single-drive usage so I could care less what happens when it's idle. :p In that context I can see how the page file, SF/PF, and having stuff like the index file on the SSD would interfere w/GC. Can't see the point in some of it otherwise tho... /shrug
Click to expand...

Yeah, that, and trying to save unnecessary "wear" on the SSD. I'm still using a single drive, the install under RAID was by accident. That said, for AMD there is an advantage running NCQ so RAID is advisable I think, even with just a single SSD. Assuming GC works long-term, or AMD/M$ come up with drivers to support TRIM w/ RAID.

Impulse said:
Reading the search index file off the SSD to find data on the HDD would be faster than reading it off the HDD for instance.
Click to expand...

Someone posted up the delta between the two configs (again, on OCZ forum,) and the difference was negligible even for a significant amount of data/files.

re: RAMDisk, I'm using it because the SessionManager add-on for F/F pretty much updates it's history/state files constantly despite my best efforts to tune it. The speed is fine using the SSD instead of RAM, but again, just trying to avoid tons of writes to the SSD.
 
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I dunno how OCZ rates their drives but Intel guarantees you could basically write 100GB to it on a daily basis and it'd still last 5 years, I'm not all that concerned by it. :p Is SessionManager running stable for ya btw? I remember using it forever ago but I think eventually it started giving me trouble and I dumped it, way before Mozilla implemented similar (but simpler) functionality into FF...

I kinda missed being able to manage multiple sessions and whatnot but I forgot about it after a while, 'specially after FF's built-in session restore function started letting you select what to restore (other than that I just use the save all tabs to single-bookmark-folder function to save w/e research I wanna put away).

I'm using another add-on that does some polling/updating in the background tho, Tab Catalog... I've tried a few other visual tab browsers like it but none of 'em were as nice to use. Tab Catalog could at times get sluggish before the SSD tho (or during marathon sessions, my 1GB of RAM was probably as much to blame for that as anything tho).
 
Yeah, probably over-thinking it. Especially considering I'm still only using 12GB of the space.

SessionManager crashes maybe twice a week, but it saves the state up to that point every time so I'm not complaining. I use two F/F profiles. One loads two instances of F/F with 160 tabs between them. The other loads two instances of F/F with 230 tabs between them.

It takes about 1:30-2 minutes to fully load all ~400 tabs, though some are usable sooner than that. It's network-bound at this point. Shutdown of F/F is instant, though it does tend to stick around and write for up to 30 seconds after closing. Sounds like a PITA I'm sure, but the setup works for me and the SSD makes a big difference.
 
I found my favorit part of having an SSD. Having it means you can shut off certain windowd features that use a lot of ram, and have it be just as fast or faster. With that spare ram I made a 2gb ramdisk. Set IE8 to use it instead of the HDD, and pages open 10x faster. Vid quality sucks from my phone but here is an example.
http://s864.photobucket.com/albums/...uild/?action=view&current=2gbRamDiskVideo.flv

HDTune bench
 
Cecil said:
I found my favorit part of having an SSD. Having it means you can shut off certain windowd features that use a lot of ram, and have it be just as fast or faster. With that spare ram I made a 2gb ramdisk. Set IE8 to use it instead of the HDD, and pages open 10x faster. Vid quality sucks from my phone but here is an example.
http://s864.photobucket.com/albums/...uild/?action=view&current=2gbRamDiskVideo.flv

HDTune bench
Click to expand...

Could you explain how to do this in detail please?
 
Cecil said:
I found my favorit part of having an SSD. Having it means you can shut off certain windowd features that use a lot of ram, and have it be just as fast or faster. With that spare ram I made a 2gb ramdisk. Set IE8 to use it instead of the HDD, and pages open 10x faster. Vid quality sucks from my phone but here is an example.
http://s864.photobucket.com/albums/...uild/?action=view&current=2gbRamDiskVideo.flv

HDTune bench
Click to expand...

do you live in a wind tunnel? :D i hope that's not your pc...
 
Did you guys read the post? Its a ramdisk. I took 2gb of my spare ram and made a HDD for temporary files. Its in the Ultimate Windows 7 Tweaks guide.
 
I just told Firefox to use RAM as a cache instead of the hard disk. That way I don't waste 2GB of ram. Is that an option in IE?
 
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