Solid-State Drives (SSD)

[id898989]

After 3 days of aggravation I finally got my 64gb's flashed to 1819. Thanks again to those who helped me. That was a nightmare. But unfortunately the nightmare is not over. Please see my screenshot. Before I installed Vista on them I benchmarked these drives individually. They were both getting 200mb reads stable, they did not fall below 200mb. Now that I got them flashed and in RAID I decided to run another benchmark and Im getting really bad results. Any ideas what the problem might be? Is it the firmware? Are these drives no good in RAID? Is it because I have no RAID controller? Even without a raid controller shouldnt my numbers go up instead of down? So far I have done no tweaking been so busy trying to flash. Are there any settings I have to adjust to get these working properly?

*edited post to attach image to forum* - moderator

[Tekno]

Well, you need to give people a bit more information.

1) What OS are you running

2) What Processor

3) What Mobo

Also, please note hardly any raid controllers (if any at all, currently) support TRIM at this time. You would require a background garbage collection firmware to do TRIM for you in a raid setting. Also, only Windows 7 currently supports native TRIM commands. Windows Vista and XP do not natively support TRIM. You'll have to use an external program called wiper (which was just released for Crucial but it's the same program released by OCZ a while back). The 1819 Firmware does not have background garbage collection to my knowledge. It requires intervention from the OS to use TRIM properly via a native command or by using wiper.

Unfortunately, because you are in a raid situation, you won't be able to just run wiper. I am unsure what options you have since I don't run raid.

[id898989]

Vista Ultimate x64,  I7 920,  Asus Rampage Extreme 2

Couple questions.....

What is trim and garbage collection?

Am I suppose to align my partition?

What about disabling superfetch, defrag and drive indexing?

[Tekno]

Do some research. There's plenty of information out there answering those questions. OCZ forums has tons of information for you as does this site and many others.

[id898989]

If you know why not just be cool and tell me? I need someone with experience to give me straight answers. It makes this much easier.

[JasonKruys]

There is VAST amounts of information available, to much for one person to practically tell you. The best thing you can do, is read through it, and make your own decisions based on what you need, and what you feel is relevant to you. It's really not that hard. There is a sticky thread in this forum for a start that is probably about 1 cm above this post on your screen! And a search button. It really is the best way to understand everything, and make the best decisions.

[targetbsp]

Yeah, you've basically asked for all the information that exists about SSd's in the space of one post!  It's a bit inconvenient to do that for every poster that visits so their are stickys covering all the commonly requested info.  The sticky 

Tips, tweaks, and recommended settings

covers disabling things and alignment.

As for trim and garbage collection... basically these drives can only write to an empty cell but when you delete a file its only marked as deleted and not actually deleted.  So when you need to rewrite that cell because all empty areas of the drive have been rewritten at least once then it first has to erase it which slows the read performance down a bit.  To fix this, Windows 7 and these drives with the 1819 firmware support Trim which actually erases this file when you delete it.  However, most raid drivers do not yet support Trim.  Garbage collection does a similar job but rather than doing it when you delete, looks after the drive when it is idle.  This has the advantage of working irrespective of your operating system or drives but the disadvantage of putting wear on the drive.  Crucial drives do not support GC.

The above only affect write speeds so aren't going to be your problem anyway.  The disabling of services mostly improves Windows performance by disabling drive optimisations that are no longer needed to save ram or to protect the lfie of the drive.

So basically, alignment is the thing to check with regards to performance.

And certainly if you have specific questions about specific topics feel free to ask.

[id898989]

I know there is VAST amounts of information available. I have been reading through it. Its just so much easier if someone tells you. These are my first SSD's I dont know anything about them. To be honest I thought I would plug them in like a normal HD's and that would be it. I wasnt expecting all this. If I would have known all this I would not have bought them. From my end it doesnt seem like these are ready for prime time yet. But I have already spent good money on them so it would be nice to get them working properly.

Few questions.....  

I did see DAZ's guide for re-alignment, but I still do not understand what re-alignment is or why I should do it

I did see SSD Tweaks for vista on how to disable superfetch, defrag and drive indexing, but again I do not understand what these do and why I am disabling them

Should I run these in windows 7 because of trim and garbage collection?

It seems RAID support is lacking, any opinions regarding dumping these and getting a 256gb ?

[targetbsp]

You're kind of contradicting yourself.  On the one had your implying it's all a bit too complicated and on the other your asking for explanations of all the complex stuff which you really don't need  to know.  You shouldn't have to do anything special with the drives if you don't want to.  If you install Windows Vista or 7 on them they are automatically aligned.  If you install Windows 7 on them it SHOULD disable superfetch, defrag and drive indexing for you (though it didn't for me).  So I'm not asking you to take my word for it - Microsoft have determined these settings produce the optimal performance on SSD's.  So it's down to taking their word for it and if you want to understand the reasoning you need quite a bit of research into how these things work which may be beyond what I can get across in a forum post but I'll have a go!

Alignment.

At a physical level the drives store their data in 4k pages within 512k erase blocks on the disk.  NTFS also stores it's files in 1 or more 4k clusters. Now, imagine you need to read a 4k cluster. If your operating systems partition is correctly aligned with the drive you simply read a 4k page off the drive.  If however it is not then you have to read 2 x 4k pages for every 4k cluster you need to read.  If your partition was created by the Vista or Win7 setup then your alignment is fine.  If your partition was created by XP or older then the alignment is wrong.  If you restored a disk image backup to the partition then it could go either way depending on the backup software and settings used.

Superfetch and Drive Indexing and Prefetching are disk caching techniques.  They keep a track of files you regularly use and try to load them up in advance into memory on the grounds that memory is much faster than hard disks.  However, they provide no performance benefits for SSD's because SSD's are so fast anyway and they, as mentioned above use up memory doing what they do.  They also write frequent usage statistics to the disk so they can track commonly used programs to allow them to do their job.  So they don't speed SSD's up, use up memory and waste SSD erase cycles.

Defrag.

The point of defragmenting files is to ensure that all parts of a file are consecutive on a disk.  The reason for this is that mechanical drives have a seek time of say 10ms to physically move the read head to another part of the disk.  If it has to do this a lot because a file is in bits all over the disk then this will hurt performance.  However SSD's have a seek time of something like 0.1ms so can more or less instantly get all the bits of a file near instantly no matter where it is - especially when backed up with a 64mb cache.  So again, defrag provides no SSD benefits but has a downside to it.  Namely defragging a drive involves a LOT of rewriting on the drive which again wastes erase cycles.

Trim and Garbage Collection

When you delete a file the file is not actually deleted but instead just marked as deleted.  This is a technique to speed up deletes on mechanical drives and is why secure erase utilities exist to actually delete them.  However, whereas mechanical drives can simply overwrites existing files - SSD's cannot.  The file has to be erased first so overwriting a previously deleted file is slower than writing to an empty part of the disk.  To resolve this, Trim was born.  Trim is a command sent form the operating system to the SSD when you delete a file to actually erase the file rather than just mark it as deleted.

Garbage Collection does a similar job but the disk itself works out what's deleted whenever it is idle and cleans the drive up independent of the operating system.  The main advantage of this is it works on older operating systems that do not support Trim but it again causes wear on the drive.

For Trim to work requires operating system support (Windows 7), drive support (the latest firmware) and storage controller support (currently - pretty much only the ones built into Windows 7).  At the moment 3rd party drivers for raid controllers don't support it but they are likely to soon.