Preemptive HDD>SSD question.

[Corsair2004]

i'm going to (most likely) get the f160 ssd in the next day or so.

it will replace my current c: drive which is a raptor 150gb.

my current 150gb hdd is used thusly:

 

c:\10gb fat32

d:\other physical drive

e:\other physical drive

f:\other physical drive

g:\66gb ntfs

h:\68gb ntfs

 

will i still be able to do this with the ssd?

i will actually probably have it like so:

 

c:\10gb fat32

d:\other physical drive

e:\other physical drive

f:\other physical drive

g:\20gb ntfs

h:\130gb ntfs

 

i will then reinstall my o/s's thus: (i multiboot)

 

c:\10gb fat32 winxp 32 bit

...

...

...

g:\20gb ntfs winxp 32 bit

h:\130gb ntfs win7 64bit

 

can i use my win98 boot disk (like i can now for the raptor) to boot and use fdisk to partition via fdisk the ssd as described above? than use the format.com to format them as fat32 (all) and then install xp onto c:, then xp onto g: (but format to ntfs via xp install), and finally win7 onto h: and also format to ntfs via it's own install.

 

a question re: trim. once it works under win7, will it keep the entire drive (with my partitions) TRIMed? or only the partition that has win7?

[Synthohol]

WHY????

honestly my own perspective, i dont agree with EVER partitioning a drive ssd or hdd. hard drives are cheap, i mean real cheap so partitioning is always asking for trouble in my professional M$ system builder opinion. ive been working on/ building/ repairing computers since the 8086 days before HDDs were even available to the public and i have NEVER had a partitioned HDD that i was able to just recover/repair the damaged partition without affecting the other partition in one way or another. i can't be just THAT unlucky (or inept).

 

i mean a 2TB drive is like 105 bucks. partitioning makes NO sense to me at all. never did, never will.

/.02

[Wired]

Why XP on an SSD? Thought about using Virtual PCs instead?

[Synbios]

Wow, you should really re-think this.

 

IMO you should really be using Windows 7 with an SSD for TRIM support. Also like Synthohol has mentioned, partitioning is a huge pain in the butt, and I'll explain exactly why:

 

The MBR for a drive maintains all of the information regarding partitions. If you needed to image or backup a single partition from drive, you would not be able to restore it to another drive unless the drive you are restoring it to has the same partitions in the same format, then you can copy the MBR over.

 

Partitioning is a waste. Use Win7 with the SSD and use windows XP virtual environment (free with Ultimate and perhaps other editions).

 

If you want to use Win98 you should use a separate, older HDD.

 

Keep in mind that if you're going to use older windows installations on other drives (or if you ultimately decide to partition), you MUST install the older windows installations first, and install Vista/7 last. Vista and 7 both respect older boot.ini files. Vista/7 use a completely different booting mechanism, and older OSes such as XP will destroy your ability to boot into Vista/7.

 

Also: Why do you want to use FAT32??? So many problems...just stick with NTFS.

[Synthohol]

big fan of VirtualPC which is free for XP and V/7 if the virtual OS gets borked just delete the folder and try again. works great except lacking in the USB support so i just share the USB drive on the host and map the drive to the virtual client :):

[Corsair2004]

WHY????

 

Why XP on an SSD? Thought about using Virtual PCs instead?

 

because that's how i roll. :laughing:

 

i have been using this "setup" for a while now. (many years)

i have the 1st fat32 partition for a couple of reasons. first, i make it fat32 so that i can see the drive and it's contents if i boot using a disk. which, yes i do often enough to warrant it. unless you can show me how i can use a boot disk (1.44mb) to boot clean and then be able to see the contents of a ntfs drive in "dos" mode (not some gui crap) i may consider switching. i even made a post before, here on these forums, about if there was a way to do just that, and the closest i came was to use a nero boot cd that was able to see an ntfs drive, but because i use a wireless usb keyboard, that did not work too well since i could not type anything....

 

also, that small 10gb c drive is not used often, but it's an important partition that keeps me anchored somewhat in the past - and i like that. with each new windows we are having more and more power taken away and the o/s is dumbed down for the lowest common denominator. just press fancy buttons and don't worry about how things actually work. well, i want to know how things work, "under the hood" as it were, and most the time i want to execute commands and such, manually. i could go on but there's no point. if you grew up on dos, like me, using a gui is dumb. (using cygwin is neither here nor there as it's got no real use for me other than nostalgia. even dosbox serves me better for dos flashbacks.)

 

the xp on c: is not normally used but when it is i use it to make images from discs using alcohol. it's a "clean" system that doesn't even have sound drivers installed. i install xp, the intel chipset drivers, gpu/monitor drivers, perform some windows tweaks and customizations and that's it. of course i can always boot into it should i need to access one of my other boots for files that are locked and so on. and i do store some special files/folder on that partition as opposed to others for several reasons.

 

the g: drive partition is (was) my regular windows boot that i use to access the net and such. that is ntfs. but just recently i finally made the push to actually use my win7 boot as my primary "every day" boot. so the g: drive partition will still be xp, but i will only use that when i need a proper xp system, or to mess around with older games. and by older i simply mean most current games that do not take advantage of dx10+ or in some cases even have issues with 64bit win7. or many other valid reasons for the way i compute.

 

my win7 partition will become my everyday boot.

anyway, i simply hate writing as it's too slow and i can't keep up with the thoughts in my head to write them all as i think them. what i write is a lot less than what i'm thinking as i write the thoughts.

 

as for virtualization? been using it for a decade or so. when vmware can have direct access to my gpu and other hardware, or as close to it as possible, then come talk to me about virtualization. ie: wake me when a VT software doesn't emulate a generic (or trident) 2mb svga video card. that alone stops me from using xp via virtualization for anything other than testing or messing about with programs. when i can make a virtual xp o/s container using vmware version XX (XX is maybe a future version) that lets me install my gpu's own drivers and sound drivers and anything else just as when i do it for real on a partition, and i can play current games at full speed on that virtual system, than i will know VT has become of age.

 

and whilst you posted none of you, specifically wired, answered the actual question. (or one of them)

so i ask it again:

if i decide to go with my partition plan as above, will trim work on all 3 partitions when i am using the win7 boot, or will it only "take care of business" on the h: drive?

[Synthohol]

trim will only work on the windows 7 partition for just that NTFS partition, it may even need to be your main boot partition to work at all (citation needed)

 

due to the "pathetic censorship i won't bother listing what i have" entry in your system specs, i can no longer have means to assist you.

sorry.

[Corsair2004]

trim will only work on the windows 7 partition for just that NTFS partition, it may even need to be your main boot partition to work at all (citation needed)

 

due to the "pathetic censorship i won't bother listing what i have" entry in your system specs, i can no longer have means to assist you.

sorry.

 

good, don't... you haven't assisted me in any way shape or form so far anyway.

 

yeah, i've had enough...

i just noticed with my last post that the ram specs i listed, went from 12GB (kit model number) to: 2 kits of (kit model number). just silly nonsense. who asked them to change it, be it an automatic script or not. it's pathetic. they want you to fill in all those specs but then change them and censor them because some items are competitor brands. whatever....

 

ninja edit: hah, and look who's calling the pot black. look at the crap you wrote in there.... grow up.

[Synthohol]

if you click the system specs link in my sig as per the dropdown, my full specs are listed in the pic and quite uncensored as well.

and for the record, the pot calls the kettle black, not the other way around.

[Wired]

Synthohol: Please report it the next time you see a non-standard profile field like that, ok?

 

2004: It's called standardization. If you don't like it, you're free to remove your specs, but adding a message in there instead of the requested information helps no one. As such, the field has been removed. Your previous comments regarding the filters and specs have already been noted.

 

TRIM won't work on XP period.

 

HOWEVER, you MAY be able to get the best of both worlds by Understanding Virtual Hard Disks with Native Boot. You'd need Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise.

 

This article series should help:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cmayo/archive/2010/03/05/adding-a-native-boot-vhd-to-windows-7-part-1.aspx

[Synbios]

because that's how i roll. :laughing:

 

i have been using this "setup" for a while now. (many years)

i have the 1st fat32 partition for a couple of reasons. first, i make it fat32 so that i can see the drive and it's contents if i boot using a disk. which, yes i do often enough to warrant it. unless you can show me how i can use a boot disk (1.44mb) to boot clean and then be able to see the contents of a ntfs drive in "dos" mode (not some gui crap) i may consider switching.

 

All you need is NTFS4DOS or NTFSDOS which was released almost a decade ago. If you even googled it you would have found it. Obviously Microsoft does not support DOS anymore so they wouldn't have any projects. But there are plenty of 3rd party projects that took off where Microsoft left it. I believe the original DOS code is open source now, since Microsoft's patent expired for it.

 

I highly recommend you make an Ultimate Boot CD for Windows ( http://www.ubcd4win.com/ ). It makes a bootable CD using an Windows XP image which uses that for a bootable live CD of win XP which you may not necessarily need, but it also includes some useful CLI (command line interface) tools such as "NTFS4DOS" that are available as soon as the CD boots before you get into the live WinXP. Just pop the CD in and you can have DOS up in seconds. If you really want a floppy with it that bad, you can find a copy of NTFS4DOS for that too. I believe DOS took up 6 floppies, so I'm not sure what you're doing though. There is also a version of Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) that doesn't have the windows live option, it may have DOS4NTFS but I haven't used it in a long time. It does have purely CLI tools however so you might want to check it out. http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

 

edit: FreeDOS which is included in the standard UBCD does have NTFS support through NTFS4DOS and is purely command line. http://www.freedos.org/

 

There are many options to get a rustic feel on a modern day computer without sacrificing and having to use FAT32 or Win98 as a primary OS.

 

You post here on a forums where most of us are into cutting edge and high performance computer parts, and make it look like you're doing some type of project that we would have done 10-15 years ago so you're going to get shredded to pieces. I apologize for that but I hope this post has convinced you enough to ditch FAT32 and change your system to purely NTFS. What you do is your business but the main reason why I'm against FAT32 is because data loss is so prone with power loss, speed and security options are limited, and corruption is more abundant.

[E46Johnny]

i'm going to (most likely) get the f160 ssd in the next day or so.

it will replace my current c: drive which is a raptor 150gb.

my current 150gb hdd is used thusly:

 

c:\10gb fat32

d:\other physical drive

e:\other physical drive

f:\other physical drive

g:\66gb ntfs

h:\68gb ntfs

 

will i still be able to do this with the ssd?

i will actually probably have it like so:

 

c:\10gb fat32

d:\other physical drive

e:\other physical drive

f:\other physical drive

g:\20gb ntfs

h:\130gb ntfs

 

i will then reinstall my o/s's thus: (i multiboot)

 

c:\10gb fat32 winxp 32 bit

...

...

...

g:\20gb ntfs winxp 32 bit

h:\130gb ntfs win7 64bit

 

can i use my win98 boot disk (like i can now for the raptor) to boot and use fdisk to partition via fdisk the ssd as described above? than use the format.com to format them as fat32 (all) and then install xp onto c:, then xp onto g: (but format to ntfs via xp install), and finally win7 onto h: and also format to ntfs via it's own install.

 

a question re: trim. once it works under win7, will it keep the entire drive (with my partitions) TRIMed? or only the partition that has win7?

 

All sandforce based drives has a built in garbage collection function at the controller level of the drive.

 

So TRIM might not be as important as you should think.

 

Read the guides on how to tweak your OS to reduce the writes to your SSD drive.

 

There is allot of info on this on the nett, you should also have a look at how a SSD is working, to better understand why tweaking the OS helps the SSD not becoming slow.

 

There are some post in this forum that have explained this in some more detail.

 

So in short, if you are able to reduce the writing to the drive TRIM becomes less important.

[Corsair2004]

thanks for your reply synbios, i will have a longer reply later. i'm about to go to the shops now and pick up my f120 (no stock of f160 at all in australia atm, boooo!!)

 

wired, i shall read those articles in detail soon too. :P

 

and just to make it clear. i use one fat32 partition once in a while. so basically c:\ drive doesn't really gets used. all my "systems" (boots) i use ARE ntfs. so 99.9% of the time i'm using ntfs. please don't get hooked on that fat32 partition, think of it as not being there.

 

i shall post some results and such later today (maybe) or most likely in several days.

 

thanks,

[RAM GUY]

Corsair2004

You are of course welcome to try anything you like, but I am sorry we would advise against it and just use one SSD drive for one O.S. Maybe consider purchasing a few smaller SSD drives to do what you want.

[Corsair2004]

ok, well i got the drive and just got around to installing it. i connected it to a sata port that i had one of my dvd drives plugged into, just until i decide what to use it as. it is running as udma5 instead of 6 which i think it may be the port. maybe. i will switch it to one that has a hdd attached to atm and then know for sure. this is on win7 using ahci. all my other connected drives (four of them) are running at udma6/7 (their max)

 

in the meantime, i am worried about the reallocated sector count error. worried in the sense that even if it doesn't "matter" or is within specs, since this drive is brand new i shouldn't have it. i read that some tools don't report smart codes correctly but is this one of those codes? in other words is that error real or a "wrong" message? ..and at any rate, which program does show the correct smart info, if any? would other people return a brand new drive for this? for $AU369 i can't accept this.

 

 

http://i54.tinypic.com/2m458c5.jpg

 

 

 

edit:

well i changed the port to another one and it still shows as udma 5 instead of 6.

what gives?

 

http://i55.tinypic.com/2m3pfmd.jpg

[Synbios]

Use CrystalDisk and report back the firmware version that you have. You can try the 1.1 firmware or wait until the big release at the end of the month/beginning of oct (roughly, but no exact time has been announced obviously)

[Corsair2004]

Use CrystalDisk and report back the firmware version that you have. You can try the 1.1 firmware or wait until the big release at the end of the month/beginning of oct (roughly, but no exact time has been announced obviously)

 

it's already 1.1. don't you trust hdtune? anyway crystal is listed below too. it's 1.1

 

http://i56.tinypic.com/118djpl.jpg

 

 

i devided the pso by 4096 and i get 256 so the number is even and correct, yes?

 

here are the benchmarks, pretty crap:

 

http://i55.tinypic.com/2u3zi2b.jpg

 

http://i56.tinypic.com/25gc49e.jpg

 

 

94%, not happy at all. and i saw other people's pics of this screen an many are 98% and some 100%. this drive has been on for 2 hours. :mad:

 

http://i55.tinypic.com/241v12e.jpg

 

as for atto it's the only one that requires me to create an account to download. i'm not doing that (free or not) on principal alone. if anyone has a direct link i will bench using that, otherwise stuff 'em. it also looks the crappiest and i find it strange that's the one corsair likes/recommends. maybe it's because it's the only one that doesn't have a direct/single number for the result? you have to look at individual numbers. almost as if they don't want people to be able to easily compare a consistent result. understand what i mean?

 

at any rate, as of now i'm confused and unhappy.

1. is the hdtune error false?
   
2. why isn't the drive at udma6 ? (or is that not relevant to ssd's? and why wouldn't it? in fact i'm going to search for other people's pics to see if others have it at full speed.)
   
3. why are the benchmarks not that good? ..at least the write speed, when looking at the crystal benchy.
   

[Corsair2004]

ok, since i couldn't believe the crap performance of the drive from the above benchies, i called a friend who has a sandforce ssd with same specs and after some back and forth, and him giving me a direct link to atto, i'm more at ease, with the results.

 

so does that mean that crystal & hdtune are "useless" for ssd related anything until they (maybe in the future) support ssds? sounds like it, but if so, why in hell are some of you "pros" even bothering to use crystal? why? to confuse matters?

 

at any rate, my friend also has the "errors" when using hdtune/crystaldiskinfo which also proves that it's those software reporting things wrongly. total b/s, especially from hdtune who has an august 2010 update, which makes it very recent. and from their release notes:

 

28th August 2010: HD Tune Pro 4.60 released.

 

Changes:

 

* Added temperature statistics

* Improved support for SSD

* Improved access time resolution

* Health

o added support for more SSDs

* Random access

o maximum access time is shown

o added 4 KB align option

* Extra tests

o added random seek 4 KB test

o added 4 KB align option

 

so much for "Improved support for SSD",eh ??? i guess not improved enough. :mad:

 

 

anyway, the atto marks:

http://i53.tinypic.com/2rc1zdy.jpg

 

now, i'm gonna decide how exactly to use this drive, do that and close my system back up.

 

in parting i have 2 questions. one is based on my friend's suggestion (and what he decided to do for his ssd) he turned off the write caching for that drive. he wants to prolong the drive's life. i know what he means but i expect to sell this ssd i have now in around 2 years or less. so is it really worth it? personally i think not.

 

and second, he also recommended installing the intel RST (rapid storage software) is that really gonna improve my drive's speeds? now that i ran atto i see that i'm getting the specs of 280/275 in most cases, or very close to them.

[Synbios]

ATTO gives a much more accurate reading than the other benchmarks tools, especially for SSD.

 

You may not be happy with your Force drive, but from your ATTO results they look right on par with all the other Force drives that I've seen on this forum and your transfer rates are within spec (between 250-300 MB/sec, with slightly higher read times).

 

For the yellow in HDTune see-> http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=89316

 

With regards to write caching, I personally always turn it off because if you get a BSOD or any other power failure you will lose any changes you've made to the drive. I simply cannot take this chance and the small change in performance is not worth it for me. If you're doing a huge file transfer, write caching only works for the first couple dozen MB's or whatever the size of the cache is anyway. IMO it's not worth it to run write caching, but that's just my two cents.

 

I'm not sure about the intel RST, somebody else will have to answer that.

 

I think the UDMA5/6 reading is wrong, UltraDMA is a Parallel ATA standard so I don't know why you would need it. As long as you're running AHCI and you have SATAII aka SATA 3.0Gbps ports you should be fine and not using compatibility/IDE mode. UDMA6 is synonymous with ATA 100 so there's no way you could get those results unless you were running on SATAII ports.

[Corsair2004]

You may not be happy with your Force drive, but from your ATTO results they look right on par with all the other Force drives that I've seen on this forum and your transfer rates are within spec (between 250-300 MB/sec, with slightly higher read times).

 

no, i changed my mind after running atto. said as much in my last post, clearly. :o: so far, i'm happy, and i'm gonna get rid of the raptor and do what i suggested in the initial post with some minor alterations. i will have the f120 thus:

c:\fat32 10gb, will have a clean xp install (rarely used)

d:\ntfs 10gb, another xp install (used more often, as my crutch, to ease the pain of trying to switch to win7 permanently. it will take time. so many thing i hate about win7...)

e:\ntfs 100gb, win7 (every day boot)

 

For the yellow in HDTune see-> http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=89316

 

i read that before, and yes, i have now, accepted that the hdtune warning is erroneous.

 

With regards to write caching, I personally always turn it off because if you get a BSOD or any other power failure you will lose any changes you've made to the drive. I simply cannot take this chance and the small change in performance is not worth it for me. If you're doing a huge file transfer, write caching only works for the first couple dozen MB's or whatever the size of the cache is anyway. IMO it's not worth it to run write caching, but that's just my two cents.

 

i assume you also have one or more mechanical drive/s in your system. do you turn it off only for the ssd or all drives?

 

and just to clarify, as far as i know, write caching "catches up" after a few seconds of system inactivity, no? it finishes dumping the data so if there is a crash after it finishes any writing, you won't lose data. you make it sound as if a bsod (for example) even 20 minutes after your last write would cause data loss. is it more fair to say that disk caching can be dangerous if the system reboots or bsod's before the cache has time to finish it's job, but that - that, normally takes only a few seconds, less than 10-15 in 99% of cases. so unless the system just happens to crash after some writting, a crash at any other time is the same as having the cache off anyway. yes/no?

 

I'm not sure about the intel RST, somebody else will have to answer that.

 

so that means that you don't install it? do you at least install the latest intel chipset inf drivers on win7? i do. (that's assuming you have an intel chipset mb)

 

I think the UDMA5/6 reading is wrong, UltraDMA is a Parallel ATA standard so I don't know why you would need it. As long as you're running AHCI and you have SATAII aka SATA 3.0Gbps ports you should be fine and not using compatibility/IDE mode. UDMA6 is synonymous with ATA 100 so there's no way you could get those results unless you were running on SATAII ports.

 

this last part i'm investigating further. my friend's ssd is showing udma6 available and udma 6 active. so right or wrong, he gets 6/6 whilst i get 6/5. i'm doing some data shifting atm, but after my next boot i may have some more results. earlier, before i connected another drive i too got udma6/6 for the f120. now it's back to 6/5 and the only thing i did was connect another drive. once i'm finished copying 600gb from it and removing it i will see. so rather interesting. maybe using more than 4 sata ports for hard drives causes this?? we shall see.....

[Synbios]

Just look up UDMA6, I don't even know if newer drives even need to use UltraDMA. UDMA6 is only ATA100 and UDMA7 is ATA133. There's no way your drive is really running in any sort of UDMA mode as it would be far too slow and is for IDE mode especially PATA.

 

Are you running in IDE or AHCI mode? You may have mentioned it before but I don't recall your situation.

 

I never installed the Intel RST or the latest intel chipset drivers. I do have an intel mobo and processor and I used to install the chipset drivers back when I had XP. As of windows 7 I don't know if it's completely necessary. I think the intel chipset driver is installed using windows update because if I recall correctly on a build I did last year when I went to install the intel chipset driver it said that it was already installed. My system is running fine so why fix something if it's not broken?

 

 

I agree 100% with your statements about write caching.

The Force drive in particular has a problem where once it stops writing data to the drive, it BSODs. Some users such as myself have had this problem. Now, I did notice with write caching enabled that I lost all of my data just prior to the BSOD. When I disabled caching, the data was there after a reboot from the BSOD. Clearly in this situation it is Corsair's fault for having a faulty drive, but I think in general it made me realize that write caching really is not worth it to me. I'd rather play it a little safer than possibly lose some important data. I have it disabled on all my drives even the mechanical ones. Even before the Corsair problem, I had disabled it in the slim chance there is a power outage right after an important disk write.

[Corsair2004]

well now, after i shuffled some drives around, and i'm still to remove one more, before i close my case back again, it's at udma6. again, let's not discuss how the drive may not even be using udma, i understand what you said above, the thing is this: if hdtune shows the drive use udma5 but is capable of udma6, and now i showed pics of both, wouldn't it be "better" to have it at max, as per the pic below. i think so. i rest my case.

 

http://i56.tinypic.com/2mhcv3m.jpg

[Synbios]

well now, after i shuffled some drives around, and i'm still to remove one more, before i close my case back again, it's at udma6. again, let's not discuss how the drive may not even be using udma, i understand what you said above, the thing is this: if hdtune shows the drive use udma5 but is capable of udma6, and now i showed pics of both, wouldn't it be "better" to have it at max, as per the pic below. i think so. i rest my case.

 

 

If it makes you feel better than yes, but I'm pretty sure it's an errorneous reading as SATA and AHCI do not need Ultra DMA. Even UDMA6 is excruciating slow by SSD standards. If your drive was running at UDMA6, you would not be getting over 100 MB/sec reads or writes.

 

I just looked at it again and it's strange that it says UDMA mode 6 is active, it should actually be the SATA II standard that it says two lines above that..are you running in IDE/Compatible mode or AHCI? I forgot what you said before.

[Corsair2004]

If it makes you feel better than yes, but I'm pretty sure it's an errorneous reading as SATA and AHCI do not need Ultra DMA. Even UDMA6 is excruciating slow by SSD standards. If your drive was running at UDMA6, you would not be getting over 100 MB/sec reads or writes.

 

I just looked at it again and it's strange that it says UDMA mode 6 is active, it should actually be the SATA II standard that it says two lines above that..are you running in IDE/Compatible mode or AHCI? I forgot what you said before.

 

since around a month ago now, i am only running in ahci mode on any windows. which is basically xp pro sp3 and win7. there is no need to ever go back.

 

and, anyway, like i said. i just wanted hd tune to say udma6 since all my other drives are running (or at least reported) as that, at their max speeds via hd tune - even if it's erroneous and it doesn't use it or such. if it can do udma6 i want it to show it as using that not a lower one. :P

so now i'm happy.

[Synbios]

since around a month ago now, i am only running in ahci mode on any windows. which is basically xp pro sp3 and win7. there is no need to ever go back.

 

and, anyway, like i said. i just wanted hd tune to say udma6 since all my other drives are running (or at least reported) as that, at their max speeds via hd tune - even if it's erroneous and it doesn't use it or such. if it can do udma6 i want it to show it as using that not a lower one. :P

so now i'm happy.

 

Makes sense, but it does bug me and probably bugs you too that we don't really know why it was "running" in UDMA5 as upposed to 6, and how it switched. Very strange nonetheless.