Solid-State Drives (SSD)

[Allattar]

I have had my new drive for about a week now.  Installed Win7 on it, moved a few things over, and pretty much filled it to 80GB already. 

I guess thats what comes of moving the steam folder in .

Seems like its running well. 

The question is, should I upgrade the firmware, its currently 1517, and I am on Win 7 64 bit.

I know 1819 will give me TRIM, and as I understand it the firware upgrade does not lose data, although downgrading will.

I have also read that the Cleaner program is for Vista and XP, and doesnt really work on Win 7 64bit version.

[targetbsp · Accepted solution]

The cleaning program works fine on my Windows 7 x64.  I've only seen 2 people that can't get it to run so assuming most people will complain when something doesn't work and no-one will make a post randomly saying 'hey, guess what works' I think it's safe to say it works in the vast majority of cases

As for the firmware I don't know what to recommend here tbh.  The new one is working fine for me but slower for some.  And as you say it's easy to upgrade and a pain to downgrade so it may be worth holding off on the upgrade until we get the final word from Crucial over the performance.

[Allattar]

Thanks .

I will hold off updating and try the cleaner program. 

The other bit I need to do to get my pc working as I want it to is to consolidate all my other drives, a 320GB WD a 200GB something and a 32GB raptor into one drive.

I need a good 1TB companion drive to the 128GB SSD.

Another question that comes to mind is that occasionally my PC (despite loading to windows in about 20 seconds)

Can take a while thinking.  I am not sure where that is coming from.   I move the virtual memory from the SSD to the Raptor, but as I have 4GB of Ballistix ram in there I doubt it should be trying to use the VM.

On the offchance though, and this is probably a win 7 question. 

If it is using the other Hard disks rarely its going to need to wake them up, am I potentially seeing this effect, and should I switch the Virtual memory back to the SSD.  My thoughts where move it off the SSD that way I can stop it writing to the drive when I dont need it to, and then leaving stuff behind.

[targetbsp]

Yes, I noticed this when I moved my operating system to the SSD, I was using the other disk so infrequently it was spinning down and the machine was freezing whenever it did need to access it - mostly when Windows open/save dialogue browse boxes come up. In control panae go to power options, click change plan settings next to the one you are using and click change advanced power settings.  Change the hard disk to turn off after 0 minutes.

Also I keep a small (256mb) swap file on the ssd on the grounds that anything Windows does I want it to do as fast as possible. I don't want it touching a mechanical disk at any point during boot or general operation.

As for a 1tb drive, I've not seen any reviews of it yet but the Samsung F3 would be worth a look as it's the replacement for the F1 which had stunning reviews.  Don't look at the F2, that's a slower eco friendly power saving thing.

[Allattar]

Ill play around with those power settings, and see which drives need to be set not to go to sleep too often. Ill also try that small swap file space on the SSD as well. 

Thanks for the recommendation on the F3, Ill have a look and see what prices I can find on it.  It would help to tidy the PC insides up if I could take 3 of those drives out and  replace it with one.

[plagio]

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targetbsp wrote:

The cleaning program works fine on my Windows 7 x64.  I've only seen 2 people that can't get it to run so assuming most people will complain when something doesn't work and no-one will make a post randomly saying 'hey, guess what works' I think it's safe to say it works in the vast majority of cases

As for the firmware I don't know what to recommend here tbh.  The new one is working fine for me but slower for some.  And as you say it's easy to upgrade and a pain to downgrade so it may be worth holding off on the upgrade until we get the final word from Crucial over the performance.

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Hey, a question. If you are using the latest firmware, why are you using the cleaning program ? I thought the latest firmware enabled TRIM which is a cleaning program integrated in win7.

I also have a  SpinPoint F3 1TB as a data disk and it is way faster than my old 73 Gb raptor was.

[targetbsp]

Intels drivers don't support trim.