markgrant Posted November 4, 2009 Share Posted November 4, 2009 i read all the stickies etc, but still have some very basic questions. When installing an ssd, it seems the best method on an intel chip set board is to set the disk drives to raid for flexibility (that way it also uses AHCI); is this correct? will the ssd work properly in this format? i think so based on the stickies, but... also, i read somewhere about installing windows on some ssd boundaries, and also about formatting cluster size etc. could someone summarize what exactly i should set everything up as on a new install? thanks. mark Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NfiniteZERO Posted November 5, 2009 Share Posted November 5, 2009 Hey Mark. Your Intel motherboard should have a dedicated AHCI mode. I'd use that unless you have issues with the install, then I'd swith to IDE mode (might also be called Compatibility Mode). Having the RAID mode on could cause some issues if you're not using it. If you're using Windows Vista or Windows 7 for the initial install, everything will be taken care of for the partition offset of the drive. If you use Windows XP to partition the drive, that's where you'll have problems. When you go for the format, make sure it's a quick format. I've found that 4k clusters (default for NTFS) works pretty well. You really only have to mess with that if you're going for max performance in a RAID 0 setup. Right now, I'm under the rated for the P256 at 220MB/s Read and 200MB/s write but not by much. And that's after hammering the drive with my laptop's recovery disk, a clean Win7 install, loading quite a few games, and doing all the tweaks in Davyc's sticky. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Corsair Employee RAM GUY Posted November 6, 2009 Corsair Employee Share Posted November 6, 2009 I would suggest 32K Allocation for the format with 32, 64 or 128 GIG SSD Drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markgrant Posted November 6, 2009 Author Share Posted November 6, 2009 I would suggest 32K Allocation for the format with 32, 64 or 128 GIG SSD Drives. how about the 256gb drive? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Corsair Employee RAM GUY Posted November 6, 2009 Corsair Employee Share Posted November 6, 2009 From the testing we did a while back 32K or 64K would be best but with our performance series it did not seem to make a difference. We have not had the parts to do that testing on X256 or P256 in detail like we did with 32, 64, and 128 GIG SSD drives. And if you are using Windows 7 just let Windows do the default it will setup SSD's correctly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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