Acronis expert please help

[Randy Myers]

Thank you so much. I think I understand most of what you wrote, except not quit following what optiosn I select during restore :)

 

In the disk cleaning, inserting FF in the custom field is what I should do, correct. I have had little luck with other "tools", however it is easier to experiment knowing that Acronis can brign the disk back with little effort.

[Randy Myers]

Disk examing tool is very cool....

 

What it told me is that the from the first secot, 208,845 until somewhere about sector 30,000,000 has data on it. From there until sector 62,524,978 is full of FF and the last sector 62,524,979 has data on it.

 

The Diskpart seemed like it will work fine, however I have a couple questions. In the help format command it states that NCFS fs can't have allocation units above 4k; in the forums many times it is recommended to use 32kb allocation. How do you do this then? Also, the help states to use 4096 (I think it is) for 4kb, what number do you use for 32kb, if in fact it is the way to go.

[Cadencia]

Back home, but late at night,so will resume testing tomorrow. However, as far as the allocation unit is concerned, I see that it is often recommended to use a non-standard (32K) allocation unit. This MAY improve sequential write speed, but probably at the expense of small random write speed. Don't know about that. Certainly with a small disk - and I regard 64G as a small disk - you would lose a lot of available space. I have written a small analysis tool to check out the implications (will make available here later) - and in my case, just changing from the standard 4K allocation unit to a 32K allocation unit would take away over 5GB ov free space in wasted over-allocation. It may be less wasteful on a non system disk, but I suspect not really a good idea unless you are using a stripe RAID and have space to burn.

 

From a sheer useability point of view, I reckon random read/write of 4K and less is the real benefit of SSD devices - makes even Vista quite responsive. The ATTO benchmark doesn't really test that, as far as I know. And all the makers claims seem to be based on sequential read/write speed. So, for me personally, I want my SSD to be optimised for random access, small blocks, and will accept the extra sequential speed as a bonus. So, large allocation units would be counter-productive. Actually not sure if you even CAN change the block size on the system disk.

 

The other point about performance is this: the benchmarks measure the raw SSD performance, not using ANY cache. How likely is that in the real world? Run the ATTO bench with the "direct I/O" box unticked to see what real world small file performance is like. Astonishing!

[Randy Myers]

Ok, good.... i had read elsewhere that large allocations are really only useful if you are doing a lot of transferring and working with very large files. In OS and games the standard 4k is better for the reasons that you state. I thought that this might be your response so i feel a lot more confident leaving the disk in 4k allocation.

 

BTW- I ran the ATTO on both my x32 and my raptor, with and without direct I/O checked. The results are attached.

 

According to this test the raptor is out performing my x32. However the x32 "feels" faster. For example compared to my wife's computer, virtually identical other than she has only one raptor drive and none of the others that i have, mine boots windows several second faster than hers.

 

I am just wondering if the ATTO does not work correctly on my x32 in my system, or if my motherboard is preventing the Corsair from performing at it's best.... I wish I knew :(

[Randy Myers]

One further test I ran using Everest I found that in linear reads and random reads the x32 and the raptor were virtually identical, but in buffered reads the corsair shined.... see attached screenie....

 

So I guess at this point I have no idea what to make of all of this. Do you have any ideas, suggestions, etc.?

[Cadencia]

Well, I re-worked the Acronis experiment, as promised. It did NOT insist on doing a sector by sector restore. It took from 09:00 to 09:30 to do the whole thing - i.e.:

 

boot into Acronis stand-alone CD

run full backup to USB drive

confirm what data is present in the penultimate disk sector

run the disk cleaner to overwrite the whole partition

restore the whole disk

confirm that the data wiped by the cleaner is still gone

re-boot to windows.

 

The experiments were carried out using a Seagate Freeagent 120GB USB drive for backups, and a Maxtor 10GB ATA 100 5400rpm hard drive that I removed everything from, then installed a clean copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit.

 

I took photographs of each screen, and have put them up onto my website for you to look at - http://www.mdr.co.nz/hsb/SSD

 

Because I had previously wiped the disk to all ones (x'ff') I wiped it to x'fe' this time to prove the wipe is behaving as expected. But this is NOT what you would do to clean out the SSD - you would wipe it to all ones (x'ff') according to some folk, and all zeroes (x'00') according to others.

 

I have no idea what you should wipe it to. I had thought that writing all ones was the way to go - but using the acronis disk editor to examine the 3 SSDs I have available to look at (Corsair X256, Corsair P256, and cheapo unmentionable Indilinx based 64GB drive) none of which have ever been "wiped" - I find that the 'unused' sectors were all set to 'all zeroes' (x'00').

 

Perhaps RamGuy or someone else who REALLY knows what happens inside could give us a clue.

 

I have several queries of my own that I would like answers for, but will address those separately.

 

As for what you should do, Randy, in your particular case, I offer you my $0.02 here, fwiw:

 

It seems to me, not knowing how you use your computer, that 32GB is very, very small for the system disk. The win7 ultimate I installed as a test-bed took more than 6GB - no other software, no virus database, no weekly updates.

 

However, I would

 

Follow the Win7 tips and tweaks.

Keep the NTFS allocation unit at 4K (4096 bytes)

since you have 8GB RAM and your SSD is only 4 times as big, run your system without a page file. I don't think it would be a good thing to use up 25% of your SSD with the paging file. I, too, have 8GB RAM, and run with no page file with no problems. I stopped using the page-file when using Vista on Raptors - I couldn't stand the constant disk clicking, so did most of the Win7 tips and tweaks before getting the SSD, just for the peace and quiet!

Don't enable hibernation for the same reason.

Turn off system recovery

use firefox as your browser, and fix it to use RAM for the cache.

 

And remember - the SSD at it's worst level of performance is still MUCH better than the best spinning disk.

[Randy Myers]

This article tends to support that the initial, erased state is all bits in the sector set to "1"...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Erasing

 

And another article which tends to support the same...

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/08/08/0210246

 

Thanks for your help and suggestions... the first couple things I do when I a clean install is to turn off Hibernation and the page file. With Vista you had to first set the page file to 16MB and then turn it off, because that was the smallest allowed and it would leave the file behind. Win 7 seems to get rid of the page file all together if turned off. I also move Outlook PST and my documents, etc., to other drives and re-direct the applications to these locations. I have always done this actually.

 

32 GB works fine as an OS only drive. Then OS and everything on the drive takes up about 12GB so all is good. It also makes it much quicker to restore :)...

 

So please review and tell me if you concur with these procedures to reset the drive:

1) Either perform a full drive backup making sure to verify that the sector by sector box is unchecked or use a current backup that was created with said box unchecked.

2) use Acronis Disk Cleaner in custom algorithm with FF in the box to wipe the drive.

3) reboot the system from the Acronis Boot CD and verify that the drive in fact contains all FF using the disk examination tool.

4) Restore the whole drive/partition and don't worry about when in the summary it states sector by sector restore.

5) reboot into windows

[Cadencia]

well, I guess you can try it both ways and see what works.

 

Good luck.

[Randy Myers]

I think I will try it with all 00 first since your drives that have never been wiped having 00 in the empty spaces tells me more than the "theries" in these articles. I assume the best way to accomplish this is the pre-set algorithm, can't remember what it is called, but it performs a single pass all zeros.

 

Anyway, I will let you know and I do much appreciate the chat back and forth. It is a wonderful thing to discover and pick apart new technologies. I just wish there was more clear accurate information so we could develop procedures without so much trial and errors.

[Cadencia]

You need to do a full disk backup - not a partition backup, but the full disk, including both partitions created by win7.

 

And that's what you need to restore - full disk, not just selected partitions. Then it will not do 'sector by sector'. If it tells you it is doing sector by sector, it is not lying, there's something wrong.

 

Don't ignore it.

 

Good luck again.

 

PS - I guess I got more software than most - and my system disk - only system stuff, no personal data - is at 67.2GB used. That's why I think of 32GB as small. Delusions of grandeur.

[JoeSchmuck]

Well you beat me to it, but I've had a few busy days at work and didn't feel like turning on the computer after I got home. I saw that Randy was only selecting the C: partition which was causing the errors. I have heard of people removing that partition but I'm willing to bet the C: partition was moved and made the primary boot partition as well. Yes, both partitions are needed for Windoze 7 recovery under your situtation.

 

Also, Randy, when you do wipe with all 0's, what please post your benchmarks and then do all 1's and post that benchmark. I'm curious if you will have the same type of results those folks using BCWipe did. If your results are the same, you may be able to run the bootable CD version of BCWipe and not destroy your data. I'm not certain if you can do a custom that way. Maybe I'll take a gander tomorrow to see.

 

Take care,

-Joe

[Randy Myers]

Ok, test are in... filling the drive with FF seemed to work better, although neither had good numbers. The writes after cleansing drive with FF was about twice as it was with cleansing with 0s.... restore worked better with doing the protected Win 7 area also, although it did have to delete the partition duirng restore. There was no option to clean that partition, so it makes me believe that I should delete the protected partition prior to cleansing....

[Cadencia]

yep, probably wouldn't hurt. But the little system restore partition is important, not because it contains anything, but because it forces the alignment of the main partition to a proper boundary. That is to say, the first sector of the real main partition should lie on the first sector of an 'erase block', to coin a phrase. It is better that way.

 

I don't think the system reserved partition will ever be written into after the initial install - but that's only a guess.

 

Like to see the benchmarks, out of curiosity.

[JoeSchmuck]

If you still had a partition left over after DriveCleanser then DeriveCleanser didn't fill the entire disk with FF, or 00 for that matter. Guess that means that DriveCleanser is a partition scrubber, not a whole disk scrubber since it didn't hit the partition tables in the first sector.

[Randy Myers]

The numbers with ATTO on both situation were not good. The all 00 were about the same as the numbers I posted before. After FF fill (which looking at the drive appear to have filled it with FF except a few sectors in beginning of drive and the last sector), the numbers were writes from about 15 - 20 mb/sec, and reads were up maybe 10 mb/sec higher from what I had previosuly posted. As I stated, my numbers do not approach what others have posted here. The drive seems fast but the numbers don't bare that out at all.

 

I simply wish I knew why my numbers are so much lower than everyone elses.... is it my motherboard? I ahve no idea... I dont see any settings to change in bios that may affect it.

 

Ok, adding a screenie of my best numbers so far (pitiful isn't it).... I have checked, there are no other settings in bios.... turnign off SATA support means none of my drives are found, tunring on raid menas that it expects these drives to be raided and it wants to setup the raid... the marvell SATA II setting is the only thing that can be changed that "may" effect it. This test was ran with the marvell on. There is no other setting....

[Randy Myers]

Here is my screen shot....

[Cadencia]

Randy, I can see why you're not a happy bunny!

 

The wipering business is supposed to address slow writes, but there should never be a slowdown of reads anyway. Folk mostly seem to get read speeds pushing 150MB/s. So - possibly you've a duff SSD, or possibly there's something else wrong in the system. I would investigate the latter, if I were you. Run ATTO on the other drives in your system. If they are bad too, you have a different problem, and I would seriously consider swapping the motherboard. As a comparison, here's a ATTO of the slower of my external backup drives, attached by eSata. That's a 1.5TB cheapo Seagate.

 

Now, forgive me for autobigraphing you, but fyi: I programmed my first computer in 1962. I retired from paid employment in 2001, when I sold my computer bureau to someone who made me an offer I could not refuse. Between those two dates I built up a really successful computer bureau. I hired the salesmen - my job was to make the system GO. Since retiring, I've continued to play with computers. It's what I do, apart from taking photographs.

 

That's the background against which I give advice. But others here have different knowledge and perspectives, and it's all valuable. Only you can weigh up what works best for your particular useage.

 

In another thread you suggest that money is no object - I don't think you actually said that, but you know what I mean. So, money no object, this is what I would do.

 

Get a new SSD with at least 128GB size, and start again. I know from years of experience that if you ever let your scarce resource get more than 50% utilised on average, then you're in trouble. Your scarce resource is SSD space, from what I can see.

[Cadencia]

whoops - here's the screenshot.

[RAM GUY]

Randy

Have you tried to image the drive to another HDD and Erase it with Parted magic then format with 32K Allocation and test it as a second HDD with ATTO?

[Randy Myers]

No Ram Guy, I have not because I purchased the SSD as my boot drive... Setting up one of my other drives as a boot drive would be a pain... Also, from what I read the 32k allocation seems more in line with benchmarks than real world so I would prefer real world use, with that said I do believe the drive "feels" faster, just shows really bad numbers in the tests. I tried GParted and it did not work. I have not tried parted magic, and certainly can. Is it all that different than wipping the drive with Acronis wiping it with all 1s? If it is would you please explain? I am really trying to understand all of this.

 

Yes, Cadencia, I ran the test on my Raptor (the results are shown in one of the screenies on page two, i think entitled x32?)... basically the results ran about 20-30 MB/Sec ahead of the results you were showing in your screen shot. So I would say that the results were fine on the standard spinning HDD. BTW- money certainly is a concideration with this economy and trying to start a new company, etc.... but I like good equipment and try to do the best I can with what I have... :)

 

As a bit of background, I too have been into computers for a long time. I develop database programs (mainly in VBA, VB and SQL).... but I love to play with software. I also have tons of programs installed, but I install the applications on one of my HDD because speed in opening Corel painter, for example, is not the most important thing to me. I also am very into photography (have been for a very long time) and didgital painting. Here is a link if you want to check out any of my paintings.

http://www.myerscomputerdesigns.com/Paintings.html

 

I really really am trying to understand this technology. I never have used most of these tools before because I am extreme in manually backing up files and I usually rebuild my system from scratch every 6-9 months. Acronis seems like about the best I have seen for backing up and restoring (although the documentation and forums are weak at best). The difficulties I was encountering was 100% lack of documentation driven. If it can be used to perform all of these tasks then why utilize additional tools, such as parted magic to clean the drive if Acronis can do it?

[Dusan123456]

Gentlemen,

 

I understand that this is a somewhat trivial point,but I'm running five installations of Win 7 in my household (two Pro x64,three Home premium x86) and in all cases I've made an ATI 2010 image of my C partition,then wiped the disk completely and re-installed the images,so that C is the only partition on the drive. All of the computers are behaving extremely well and so far there has not been one misfire on reloading any backups. No issues with sector by sector recovery and I get to use the entire drive.Until one of my P128's died I ran the two of them in RAID 0 with ATTO benchmarks in the vicinity of 400K MB/s for reads and around 350K MB/s writes. So,I'm still not certain if that small partition set up by Win 7 is necessary at all. Certainly not being missed here.

[Cadencia]

The little partition is of no relevance, except that it forces the alignment of the system or working partition. It may well not show up in a benchmark taken on a new(ish) disk.

 

Here's why it's important As we all know, the write-block size in the SSD is 4K. Which is why the sequential read/write performance of little records is not so hot - each successive 512byte write must cause a read/update/re-write sequence of the 4K block the data lives in. Each write of the 4K block should actually land up on a new 4K block somewhere in the device, the old 4K block should be flagged as 'dirty' and the tables maintained by the drive to link logical block addresses with physical SSD cells should be updated. That's the wear levelling in action.

 

Now, we've got our NTFS set up to use 4K blocks, which is a nice match. Ram Guy is urging 32K allocations, also a multiple of 4K. But what if your partition doesn't start on a 4K boundary? - and the pre-win7 default was to start on sector 63. If you leave it at that, our nice 4K NTFS block straddles two SSD 4k minimum-write-size blocks. So, each write must hit two 4K blocks. At the best this will use up the clean blocks at twice the rate, and, when there are no clean blocks left, may very well cause the system to need to clear 2 128K minimum-erase-size chunks before the write can happen.

 

Weird stuff.

[Dusan123456]

Well,you raise good points,can't say that I noticed any problems with things slowing down at all though. Here's a link I found,I'm presenting it not to argue incessantly,just as a bit of information:http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/01/09/how-to-avoid-200mb-hidden-system-partition-from-been-created-during-windows-7-installation/

[JoeSchmuck]

Well,you raise good points,can't say that I noticed any problems with things slowing down at all though. Here's a link I found,I'm presenting it not to argue incessantly,just as a bit of information:http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/01/09/how-to-avoid-200mb-hidden-system-partition-from-been-created-during-windows-7-installation/

 

That is exactly correct. The first partiton has nothing to do with 4K boundries. I don't know where that idiot idea came from but I've seen it bouncing around on these forums. Of course all partitions are on a boundry but the partitioning software places it where it belongs, it doesn't need to create a special spacer partition. It's simply a recovery partition and many companies have been doing this for a long time. Now MS is doing as part of a normal install. It has nothing to do with forcing alignment at all. That's like saying any windows prior to 7 were all mis-aligned. If you want to delete that partition, you can, from within windoze 7 even and then expand your primary partition to use up the space you just freed up.

We all know, or should know that's untrue.

 

As for where the block of data will be written on a SSD, guess what, the controller figures it out. Due to wear leveling there is no such thing as a defragmented SSD, all the files are fragmented but with the speed and latency of a SSD, it is not a significant penalty.

 

As for the 32K allocation, yes, you format a hard drive to 2K, 4K, 8K, 16K, 32K clusters. I'm not sure why anyone would want to format for 32K unless you had a huge drive. I hear some folks are doing it to boost throughput but you take a hit in capacity for that little speed increase. One thing to note is, if you format to 32K clusters and you have something that need 6 extra bytes, guess what happens, you use up an entire 32K cluster on those 6 bytes of data. Leaving it native 4K on NTFS is probably the most efficient use of your SSD. Look up Slack Space on the internet. That is the unused space of a cluster. There are some programs out there that can produce a report on how much slack space a hard drive has. I'm sure there are people that would argue otherwise about what cluster size you should have and then you would make your own decision. Here is the link to the NTFS cluster sizes. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314878

 

Sorry to vent but some people put out false information as factual and it irritates me.

 

Randy,

You are going through a lot of pain for this one SSD. I think you need to ask yourself two questions:

1) Should I contact Corsair and obtain a replacement drive.

2) Is this really a major problem and can I just live with it until a better method comes out.

 

I know you paid damn good money for your SSD and expect it to live up to the specs without having to wipe everything out every month or so, but there is not a lot some of us can do about it. For instance, I have a P128. I thought getting the new firmware would fix everything, well I was wrong. I'm still getting poor write speeds. It was good for about a week but now it's crap. This is why I'm trying to find a non-destructive method to restore the write speed. I'm not there yet but then again, I can honestly live with my performance since the read speeds are at 220. Write is around 105. It not what I want but it's what I got. My next SSD will be something with ~500GB and I'm sure a few years down the road (maybe next year if I'm lucky), but I think the bugs will have been worked out by then.

 

Sorry to ramble on...

 

-Joe

[Randy Myers]

Hey Joe,

 

Another side of the coin for me is to learn and to understand this new technology. I have gone through great pains and trying everything out there (within reason) and feel I have finally actieved an optimal solution. Being that my drive is only 32 GB it can not achieve the speeds that your's does, but it in now a lot faster than it was and I now have a reasonably good handle on how this works.

 

In conversations with Ram Guy he made alot of sence as to why set the allocation size to 32k (I would not be able to repeat his reasoning but it doid make sense when he was saying it), however I have also discovered that this can only happen by rebuilding from scratch. Acronis deletes the partition if it differes from that of the image. However, I am also under the belief that the benchmark increases that 32k may give would probably be loose in translation in real world use.

 

Randy

 

Although my drive does not perform as well as most that I have seen posted in these forums, I do believe it will hold its own against other similarly sized drives.