fadsarmy Posted September 23, 2010 Share Posted September 23, 2010 Don't format an SSD. Do the secure erase and let WIN7 install normally. Won't Windows 7 want to partition and format during a clean install? What about restoring an image? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gunrunnerjohn Posted September 23, 2010 Share Posted September 23, 2010 When you restore an image, it just writes the image, which it would have to do anyway. A "quick format" won't attempt to write every sector, it'll just build the disk structure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steven l Posted September 25, 2010 Share Posted September 25, 2010 Used your instruction on my F120 XP Pro As i do not run Raid is 32 k alighment still ok to use ?? ATTO bench W265/R252 Format was done In W7 on my P128 Also could not get Parted Magic to work on DVD but USB option worked great Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Obscuru Posted October 9, 2010 Share Posted October 9, 2010 Hello everybody, I have a Corsair F60 SSD since few weeks and I run Win7 64 bits on it. Now I want to reinstall Windows for some reasons. Do I need to follow these steps (from the start of this topic) with Parted Magic and all of that ? Or would be enough to insert win7 DVD -> format SSD and install ? Or what it's the proper way to make a resinstall of the win 7 64 bit on this SSD ? Thanks in advance ;) Sorry for my english ... it's not my native language :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
allidea Posted October 31, 2010 Share Posted October 31, 2010 OK, here is my feedback about described procedure. I have F80 drive and noticed that due to some increased writting activity on it it has degraded in performance a lot. I have not performed any test to get some specific results at that time, but I noticed it on prolonged time of chrome loading pages and switching between tabs, which was not present before described read/write operations. I am using Win7 x86 and my SSD has about 200 hrs of activity and has 50% free space left on it. I have tried leaving my system (notebook) running over night in logged off state (I have found somewhere on this forum that this will activate TRIM) to see if TRIM will help me or not. Below is snapshot of my results after that http://i623.photobucket.com/albums/tt314/vistman/th_F80.png Since I have no previous results to compare those with I could only notice that chrome was loading pages and switching between tabs a bit faster than before. But generally speaking I found this results not to be very good according to maximum possible values. After that I tried HyperFast and also left it to work it overnight and here are the results I got after that http://i623.photobucket.com/albums/tt314/vistman/th_F80_after_HyperFast.png Since these results are still far away from what they should be I decided to try secure erase method. I chose Parted Magic, and bypassed the drive lock protection by letting PM to load up, the I have disconnected SSD for 30 secs, (no USB adapter was used) and then I have put it back and I could freely erase my SSD without any problem. I used Acronis Bootable Media (Home 2011 edition) to create backup image, but this is where I came across my problem. After I wanted to restore the images from external usb hdd. I discovered that Acronis was simply persistent to assign 100MB system partiton on Win7 which has no letter assigned with drive letter C: and actual C: partition was forced to become F: since attached usb hdd was assigned with D: letter. Generally this is not the problem if you have some other bootable utilty tool near your hand which can handle drive letters (in my case I had win7pe) so I changed the drive letters (C: was removed, and E: became C:), but this is simply not very convenient since win7pe takes some time to load up. I really do not understand why acronis had to do it this way, since I have not assigned any letter to 100MB partition before I made my backup. This last part might give an answer on the following problem. I have had some problems with this. I am sure that I followed every step as accurately as possible (except for Part D as I am only using a single drive, and not RAID), but after using Acronis to restore the image to the SSD, the system refused to boot. It got to a point where it had on the screen Controller Bus 0..... and some other parameters, but refuse to go any further unless I disconnected my SDD. I've had to reformat the SSD and restart from scratch :( If anybody has any ideas as to what might have gone wrong, I would love to hear them! Regarding the acronis issue, using Win7 built-in backup/restore solution might be a best way to do it in future, assuming this utility does not use sector-by-sector methodology of creating backups, which I think is not case since would produce larger images. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gunrunnerjohn Posted October 31, 2010 Share Posted October 31, 2010 I think the advice was to leave the system setting in the BIOS setup so there is no disk access of any kind to let the automatic garbage collection to work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
allidea Posted October 31, 2010 Share Posted October 31, 2010 I think the advice was to leave the system setting in the BIOS setup so there is no disk access of any kind to let the automatic garbage collection to work. I think very few people have this option in their BIOS. On most new BIOSes there is nothing you can do to prevent this, except the procedure I have described. But this was not my problem anyway, it is the way how acronis managed my partitions. Anyway I was wondering if anyone has tried using Active@ KillDisk for secure erasing SSDs? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gunrunnerjohn Posted November 1, 2010 Share Posted November 1, 2010 Well, you can simply Enter the BIOS and walk away, so I think almost everyone has that option. Whatever floats your boat, but that looks complicated. ;): Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tamvegas Posted November 3, 2010 Share Posted November 3, 2010 Thanks for this great sticky, I've been using my x256 for over a year and have noticed performance decreasing. Just did the PartIt scrubbing with great results. Here's before and after of the Atto measurements: Before http://i167.photobucket.com/albums/u125/tamvegas/Attobenchmarkbeforescrubbing1yrofuse.png After http://i167.photobucket.com/albums/u125/tamvegas/AttobenchmarkAfterscrubbing1yrofuse.png :D: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
allidea Posted November 3, 2010 Share Posted November 3, 2010 I have solved acronis drive swap mistery. It simply seems that any disk imaging sw when booted from cd/dvd/usb simply assings a drive letter to win 7 hidden 100mb partition. So after restore you simply need to use some partitioning tool to reset drive letters as they were before image restore. I found Active Boot Disk very good solution for this problem. On the other hand I would like to know if your speed increase after secure deleting ssd, refers to clean windows installation or just image restore? I simply cannot get any better results than cca. 140MB/s R/W after secure erase and 50% free disk space. Does ssd occupancy influence ssd speed? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Synbios Posted November 3, 2010 Share Posted November 3, 2010 Does ssd occupancy influence ssd speed? Yes marginally. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
allidea Posted November 3, 2010 Share Posted November 3, 2010 Yes marginally. It that case I really do not know what is causing so low performance on my F80 ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Synbios Posted November 3, 2010 Share Posted November 3, 2010 It that case I really do not know what is causing so low performance on my F80 ... Please fill out your system specs in your profile, are you running an AMD chipset or do you have SATA I or II? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
allidea Posted November 3, 2010 Share Posted November 3, 2010 Please fill out your system specs in your profile, are you running an AMD chipset or do you have SATA I or II? I have filled in all relevant info. I run Intel based NB with SATA-II controller. At least SIW says it is Transfer Mode (Current / Max) SATA-300 / SATA-300 MB/s. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Synbios Posted November 3, 2010 Share Posted November 3, 2010 I have filled in all relevant info. I run Intel based NB with SATA-II controller. At least SIW says it is Transfer Mode (Current / Max) SATA-300 / SATA-300 MB/s. Thanks for filling out the info. The 945PM does have an ICH7 so it should be SATA II in theory. You're using a Lenovo laptop though so most likely there are energy saving feature enabled that are reducing your hard drive transfer rates. I just looked back at your ATTO post, and those speeds are EXACTLY on par with SATA I. The laptop may be limited to SATA I speeds by another factor such as the SATA controller itself that is attached to the ICH7 southbridge or it is limited somehow by Lenovo's implementation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tamvegas Posted November 4, 2010 Share Posted November 4, 2010 On the other hand I would like to know if your speed increase after secure deleting ssd, refers to clean windows installation or just image restore? I simply cannot get any better results than cca. 140MB/s R/W after secure erase and 50% free disk space. Does ssd occupancy influence ssd speed? No fresh Win7 install. Used Acronis Home 2010 for a full image restore after of the fresh system backup. SSD about 60% full (105 gig free). Many games, programs etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
allidea Posted November 4, 2010 Share Posted November 4, 2010 Thanks for filling out the info. The 945PM does have an ICH7 so it should be SATA II in theory. You're using a Lenovo laptop though so most likely there are energy saving feature enabled that are reducing your hard drive transfer rates. I just looked back at your ATTO post, and those speeds are EXACTLY on par with SATA I. The laptop may be limited to SATA I speeds by another factor such as the SATA controller itself that is attached to the ICH7 southbridge or it is limited somehow by Lenovo's implementation. This could be the case since Lenovo managed to make a faulty implementation of this chipset in T60p models by limiting max RAM size to 3GB no matter even if you put 4GB and even if you use x64 OS. I will take out ssd today and test it on my desktop PC to see how it performs. I am only sorry I have not made any tests when I just installed Win 7 fresh, but I was still naive and impressed with performance then and to be honest was not aware of real world problems with ssds. On top of that it is not quite easy to take out and return ssd in my nb to perform secure erase due to connector position. Weird but true, I never had any such issues with mechanical hdds. And just one additional info, not directly related to ssd speed. I just made an upgrade to FW 2.0 yesterday and in my case I got BSOD with 0x00000007 error. I then rebooted in safe mode, ran fw upgrade tool, and it showed I already have FW 2.0 I ran it again and system restarted without any BSOD. So maybe it would be wise to use safe mode when flashing BIOS, no matter upgrade tool will obviously flash the FW even if BSOD occurs. Here is how my drive performs with FW 2.0 (since I have not found what are actual improvements in FW 2.0): http://i623.photobucket.com/albums/tt314/vistman/th_F80_FW20.png Obviously, no performance improvement for me. OK, last update. Confirmed that T60p has faulty implementation of SATA controller as well. Below are the results from my desktop PC: http://i623.photobucket.com/albums/tt314/vistman/th_F80_Desktop.png This makes my case closed. Thank you Synbios for giving me a hint about SATA controller. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yellowbeard Posted November 4, 2010 Share Posted November 4, 2010 On some notebooks, this is not a "faulty implementation" per se. The controller speeds are intentionally capped as a power saving measure. I have not investigated to see if this is changeable in the BIOS or not. You may want to check with the notebook manufacturer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
allidea Posted November 4, 2010 Share Posted November 4, 2010 On some notebooks, this is not a "faulty implementation" per se. The controller speeds are intentionally capped as a power saving measure. I have not investigated to see if this is changeable in the BIOS or not. You may want to check with the notebook manufacturer. It is a faulty implementation as some users (I have a link to another forum, but have not posted it because I was not sure it is according to rules, but I can post it if you find it useful for other members to read) discussed this lenovo problem in detail and even decided to start a lawsuit them as they (lenovo) advertised to have SATA-II support, but in reality it is stuck at SATA-I. A lot of users experienced this problem with lenovo. Nothing against them, but other manufacturers have no such problems with the same chipset. This is a BIOS functionality which lenovo openly refused to fix. From my experience it really does not feel good when you buy a product and find out you can only use 50% of it's capatibilities. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yellowbeard Posted November 4, 2010 Share Posted November 4, 2010 It is a faulty implementation as some users (I have a link to another forum, but have not posted it because I was not sure it is according to rules, but I can post it if you find it useful for other members to read) discussed this lenovo problem in detail and even decided to start a lawsuit them as they (lenovo) advertised to have SATA-II support, but in reality it is stuck at SATA-I. A lot of users experienced this problem with lenovo. Nothing against them, but other manufacturers have no such problems with the same chipset. This is a BIOS functionality which lenovo openly refused to fix. From my experience it really does not feel good when you buy a product and find out you can only use 50% of it's capatibilities. Yeah, I think I read about that. Sorry to hear you got one of the units that will not or cannot be fixed. I was just throwing that out there just in case as I am not up to speed on which units are intentionally capped vs those with issues. Good luck in finding a solution that you can live with. ::pirate:: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dusha Posted November 7, 2010 Share Posted November 7, 2010 ewarwoowar thanks for the great Guide. Despite the fact that I'm running Win7+AHCI+P256 with TRIM enabled, after only 6 months performance was noticably degraded (see before and after) One comment to the guide, I was using latest PartedMagic 5.7 When I have selected Secure Erase - I was suggested to run Enchanced Secure Erase instead (as it was detected as supported). According to the desciption - it is the same as Standard one, but instead of writing zeros writes a pattern set by the vendor and that overwrites all bad blocks as well. I was not sure and have selected Standard one :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
babbar Posted December 3, 2010 Share Posted December 3, 2010 hey so after i back up my ssd to another driveusing arconis, do i burn the backup to a dvd? haven't tried it yet just wanted to know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gunrunnerjohn Posted December 3, 2010 Share Posted December 3, 2010 I use removable or network drives for my image backups, optical media is slower, and more labor intensive, especially if it's larger than a single disk. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ewarwoowar Posted December 7, 2010 Author Share Posted December 7, 2010 Sorry I don't come on here that often but its great to see that everyone is liking the guide and i'm amazed at how many views it's got! @Dusha you could always try the enhanced one and see what speed differences you get! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blackops Posted December 9, 2010 Share Posted December 9, 2010 I made an image of my ssd with Acronis. Then I secure erased with parted magic. Now the ssd needs formatting. My question will Acronis format this automatically for you during restore or do you have to format it before hand using say DOS DISKPART or Windows assuming you can add as a secondary disk? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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