SSD Thread (Benchmarks, Brands, News, and Advice)

[madmattd]

All you need to do:

Install Windows 7. It will automatically format and align the drive for you.

Run the Windows Experience Test once you have all your drivers installed (graphics/audio/chipset being most important).

Verify that defrag was disabled on the SSD. Running the Windows test ought to do this, but check in the control panel. NEVER DEFRAG AN SSD!!!

You can turn off search indexing if you want and a whole host of other things, but really only turning off defrag (so it NEVER runs on the SSD, running on mechanicals is still fine) is necessary.

Also, make sure TRIM is enabled. I forget the exact command, but there is a command string you need to type into an elevated command prompt (run as admin) and it'll tell you.

You can delete the hibernate.sys file if you don't use hibernation so as to fee up the space (equal to the amount of system RAM), but you don't have to.

[dabooosh]

Thanks a ton Matt. +rep!

So there's no issue with sleep and SSD?

Best to just put the laptop to sleep when not using it?

[madmattd]

Well I sleep my laptop all the time (M4) with no issues, but others can have trouble. It is probably drive-dependent. Worst case, you find out it doesn't work (don't keep anything critical open when you try it). If there are problems, they will crop up immediately.

[arsad]

Corsair Nova 2 60GB (advertised at 270/240 read/write):
Did benchmarks with ATTO, AS SSD, CrystalDisk read speeds seemed good to me but writes were slower than what I expected. For CrystalDisk I originally ran with 5x but had lower results then disabled my antivirus and ran again at 1x that got me slight increases (those results posted). Other two benchmarks had the system in a normal state. This is all on a fresh windows 7 x64 install on my acer TimelineX 3830TG-6431 with 8GB of RAM (upgraded).







Sidenote: If anyone knows/ has ideas why the write speed seems low please let me know. I already made sure AHCI is enabled in the bios and TRIM appears to be working. Also checked partition offsets and they seemed to be correct as well. Thanks!

[eYe-I-aïe...]

Your writes are definitely off.

What's the chipset of your Acer ?

Did you buy the SSD new or second hand ?

I suggest you read this, this and this.

You might as well try the latest RST...

Best,

eYe

[tilleroftheearth]

arsad, SandForce based SSD right?

I'm guessing that it is lifetime write throttling (LTWT) imposed by the DuraClass 'tech' that SF forces on every manufacturer to guarantee a minimum duration (1-5 yrs) lifetime of the SSD.

From my experience, nothing you can do about it: I used my $400 Patriot Inferno as a USB (2.0!) external 'USB key' when I encountered that issue.

Even SE it won't bring back the performance.

Hope the situation is different for your drive, but as mentioned; it's the controller/firmware that is dropping the performance like this on you.

[Phil]

Corsair Nova 2 uses Indilinx Barefoot controller. Writes should be ~ 240MB/sec.

Perhaps changing the write caching helps.

[arsad]

I am already using the latest RST drivers and I asked Corsair about this sending them the benchmark information and they said based on the ATTO results it was working correctly... I feel better since they say nothing is wrong however still not exactly at ease.
@eYe Its a new drive just purchased from Newegg.

I noticed that those links are changing power management settings so I am going to retest without making any changes except setting power management to "High Preformance" instead of "Balanced" just to see if that changes anything. I'll look at the edits later in detail and possibly try them out.

Just ran the seq in crystaldiskmark no change in speed (just wanted to check).
Device Manager Reports the Chipset as Intel 6 Series /C200 Series Chipset.
I'll update with registry edits later.

EDIT: Followed the JJB thread instructions and umm... no change to read but write got slower...(seq down to less than 70)... wanted to test a theory so I changed to 1x50 instead (for less wear). Ran one test for a baseline then disabled the realtime shields on AVAST and ran again on 1x50 there is a slight increase in write maybe about +5mb/s at best, so I guess that was not an issue.
Used Restore Plan defaults (I am assuming the registry edit just makes the settings visible). Then ran another 1x50 and performance was better (again crystaldisk noted small improvements except in 512k write which jumped to 121mb/s from 64mb/s) than when the settings were adjusted as per the guide.
For now running a final 1x1000 to compare to my previous post (technically this would be with the same settings as my previous post if the registry edits just make the options visible, only difference is antivirus as noted below):

As you can see the preformance is roughly about the same for reads and the random writes actually went down... although around this time windows was notifying me about updates so that "might" have thrown that off.
Just remembered in my first post I had AVAST disabled for the crystaldisk... that DID slow down the writes on the 1x1000 previously as well so I think that is the reason behind that.

[eYe-I-aïe...]

Yes, the registry tweak only SHOWS options that were hidden for the processor's "fueling"...

Now, at that point, since you've got a laptop, and since laptops have batteries, you might just wanna try this:

→ Start Windows Explorer
→ Right-click your C drive in the LEFT pane
→ Choose Property
→ Click Hardware
→ Highlight your C drive
→ Click Property
→ Click Change Settings
→ Click the Strategy tab
→ Check both boxes...
→ Click OK...
→ Reboot...
→ Re-run the test (I suggest 2X500MB instead of 1X1000MB if you want to use CDM)

If after that your results still show crappy performance, no matter what Corsair says about Atto, see tiller's post above,
you might just want to revert back to MS AHCI controller instead of IRST, which tends to show the best results with RAIDed SSDs.

[James D]

Thinking to buy 60 GB OCZ Solid 3 for 117.63 backs ($) in Ukraine. Is it worse to buy now or better to wait until OCZ Vertex becomes cheaper? I noticed big difference in 4KB reads like 10000 versus 16000.