the_dutchable Posted November 15, 2011 Share Posted November 15, 2011 Hi, I am new to this and I will appologize in forhand for the questions. I believe it is best to ask too many questions than none at all. I have just purchased a Corsair Force GT 120GB SSD. Once I received it I cloned it from my original HDD and replaced it for the cloned one in my laptop. The laptop is a Dell Vostro 3350 has 8 GB of RAM and an Intel i5 2nd gen. After this I tweaked windows as in previous posts mentioned, resized the paging file to min 1000 and max 2000, created a RAMDrive of 1048 MB using Dataram Ramdisk and moved the TEMP and TMP folders to it for the user variables as well as the system variables, moved the IE Cache as well as the Firefox cache to this drive too. My first few questions are in regards to tweaks: - Would these still be needed for SSD drives? Taking into account the develpment of the SSD's over the years and potential windows adaptabillity (probably none :biggrin:). - Is using a Ramdrive for this a good option?Is the size big enough? - What other tweaks would be advisable? Please note this is a work laptop and is tuned on and used for about 12 hours a day, mainly using remote desktop connection to the work server and a lot of excel work. Second lot of questions are in regards to the fact that Windows takes a fair bit of time to load after I pressed Ctrl + Alt + Delete and entered my user and password. I do not see a difference between the SSD and the HDD. - Are there any tweaks that can resolve this? Thanks, the_dutchable Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madnisman Posted November 15, 2011 Share Posted November 15, 2011 Hi, first of all I would not recommend to clone a HDD to SSD. This could result in slow Windows load performance or other issues. When you do a clean installation of Windows 7 it recognizes the SSD and makes the appropriate settings (e.g. cluster alignment). I would recommend you to do the following: - SecureErase your SSD with PartedMagic - Do a clean Win 7 installation Beside the tweaks you have mentioned (resizing the page file; moving TEMP folder to RAM disk) you should disable auto-defragmentation and set the parameter "Turn off HDD after:" to "Never" in Windows energy options. All other tweaks are not necessarily needed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FoLmEr Posted November 15, 2011 Share Posted November 15, 2011 Have you tested the drive with ATTO? Are you running AHCI mode? Have you checked if the drive is properly aligned after the HDD image restoration? As for the RAMdrive... Well, there's no clear disadvantages to having RAMdrives excluding of course the amount of RAM it takes to run it is unavailable for the rest of your system. However, I'm not sure there are any clear advantages either when you're using an SSD. On paper the RAM are many times faster than SSD, but my bet is you'll be hard pressed to tell the difference regardless of where your temp files are stored. If you're thinking about protecting your SSD from wear from the temp files by using a RAMdrive - don't. It won't matter the slightest to the NAND as they can take upwards of 500TB data written before you should even start to worry. So yeah, RAMdrives make a lot of sense with HDDs, but not so much with SSDs. My take on it :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the_dutchable Posted November 16, 2011 Author Share Posted November 16, 2011 Thanks for the repplies, I will repply to both at the same time. The only reason I cloned the drive is because it is a company laptop and I have no access to a clean windows installation, however, I could get my hands on an image they use to load on all laptops they issue. I gather that is not going to help at all. I have changed the power settings to Never Hybernate and Never to turn HDD off. Thanks for the tip. I am running BIOS as well as Windows on AHCI mode and TRIM is enabled. How do I know if the drive is properly aligned? Is there a way to check this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FoLmEr Posted November 16, 2011 Share Posted November 16, 2011 AS SSD can do that; it is an SSD testing utility. All you have to do is open it and it will display some information in the upper left corner. You don't have to run the test itself. If it's red text and it reports something like: xxxx K - BAD, it's misaligned and needs to be sorted. Else it'll report xxxx K - OK; then it's fine and you don't need to do anything. Normally this alignment business isn't an issue if you've strictly been using Win7, but it CAN be misaligned if you've restored an image with a less than stellar backup solution or formatted the disk with an older OS and not explicitly specified a proper partition offset. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the_dutchable Posted November 16, 2011 Author Share Posted November 16, 2011 I dwnloaded AS SSD and out of curiosity ran the test, see image attached. Not sure what the result mean, however, it seems that the SSD is properly aligned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FoLmEr Posted November 16, 2011 Share Posted November 16, 2011 Your drive is indeed aligned, but your 4K performance is low. About half of mine. Not sure why. How much data is on the drive? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the_dutchable Posted November 16, 2011 Author Share Posted November 16, 2011 There is about 51.39 GB of data on the drive, part of it will be the dell recovery partition which contains 8.75 GB of data. I would have not thought that the recovery partition would slow it down, would it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FoLmEr Posted November 16, 2011 Share Posted November 16, 2011 Not to my knowledge, no. Have you tried turning off all power saving features (like c3-c6, C1E, EIST, other "green" stuff) in BIOS? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toasted Posted November 17, 2011 Share Posted November 17, 2011 Test the SSD with ATTO. Link on the Left. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.