Solid State Drive question.
By
Gypsy_of_Paradox,
Posted on: 2010-06-04 07:31 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
Quote:
Problems: |
Originally Posted by Gypsy_of_Paradox
Need a new HD, current one is getting torn to shreds with what I run. New laptop not in budget, wife, kids, bills, etc. I have an Asus G50V-X1 and would like to install this SSD
We've got the best techies I know of, so I want to know if this is a good move. What problems I may encounter, etc. Any advice is good. I've already killed one HD, the dying one is one I ripped out of an external I had.  Edit: My "given" budget is standing at $250 |
Low space compared to a hard drive.
- HD: 500GB 7200 rpm $120
- HD: 150GB 10,000 rpm $185
- SSD: 80GB: $225
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
Drive space really isn't an issue, I've got a 1TB external drive on hand. What I want is something that wont get hammered from playing STO and CoX on a daily basis. Reason SSD caught my interest is I take my laptop w/ me everywhere, partly why I think my HDs are dying out.
Low performance and stability would be my main issue, I'm assuming I can't change this controller you mention. Whereas the normal HDs would work fine, I found more SSDs on other sites. Would there be a more compatible SSD out there or is my laptop itself not designed for this type of drive.
Gypsy , I use one when I used to multi box WoW, and it worked great.
I see right now, that new egg has one on sale, that might be up our ally.
http://www.newegg.com/Special/ShellS...0-_-20-227-461
OCZ Agility Series OCZSSD2-1AGT60G 2.5" 60GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
I hope posting a link like this to help answer a question, isn't a violation, such as promoting, as I have no relationship to New egg, outside, of, the taking a lot of my money over the years.
Anyways, I hope this ya man.
Stephen
No violation for listing stuff as far as I know so don't worry. Those were some of the drives I was looking at as well. My only concern is compatibility with my current laptop. Currently doing some research as best I can lol
Doh. Laptop, I missed that part. Never put one in a laptop, so I really don't know man.
Stephen
That laptop's running Vista or 7, correct? (XP, IIRC, has no TRIM support.)
Vista 64bit SP2
I read about the lack of TRIM support and read about utilities that I can use manually. I wonder now if my Systems Mechanic program would work with the drive. I guess I would ignore the defrag messages, I read somewhere that you don't defrag SSDs. I'm assuming TRIM for SSD is pretty much the same function as defrag for normal HDs. Cleaning out the clutter/trash so the drive is more efficient.
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Simple but fairly accurate way of looking at it, yes. And no, you don't need to defrag SSDs. Older ones it was even advised *against* doing so. (I seem to recall reading Win7 will actually prevent running Defrag on an SSD. If I can find confirmation from MS or another reliable source, I'll post it. Not sure if Vista will do so.)|
Originally Posted by Gypsy_of_Paradox
Cleaning out the clutter/trash so the drive is more efficient.
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Edit: Found.
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Originally Posted by Microsoft
Performance Degradation Over Time, Wear, and Trim
As mentioned above, flash blocks and cells need to be erased before new bytes can be written to them. As a result, newly purchased devices (with all flash blocks pre-erased) can perform notably better at purchase time than after considerable use. While we’ve observed this performance degradation ourselves, we do not consider this to be a show stopper. In fact, except via benchmarking measurements, we don’t expect users to notice the drop during normal use. Of course, device manufactures and Microsoft want to maintain superior performance characteristics as best we can. One can easily imagine the better SSD manufacturers attempting to overcome the aging issues by pre-erasing blocks so the performance penalty is largely unrealized during normal use, or by maintaining a large enough spare area to store short bursts of writes. SSD drives designed for the enterprise may have as high as 50% of their space reserved in order to provide lengthy periods of high sustained write performance. In addition to the above, Microsoft and SSD manufacturers are adopting the Trim operation. In Windows 7, if an SSD reports it supports the Trim attribute of the ATA protocol’s Data Set Management command, the NTFS file system will request the ATA driver to issue the new operation to the device when files are deleted and it is safe to erase the SSD pages backing the files. With this information, an SSD can plan to erase the relevant blocks opportunistically (and lazily) in the hope that subsequent writes will not require a blocking erase operation since erased pages are available for reuse. As an added benefit, the Trim operation can help SSDs reduce wear by eliminating the need for many merge operations to occur. As an example, consider a single 128 KB SSD block that contained a 128 KB file. If the file is deleted and a Trim operation is requested, then the SSD can avoid having to mix bytes from the SSD block with any other bytes that are subsequently written to that block. This reduces wear. Windows 7 requests the Trim operation for more than just file delete operations. The Trim operation is fully integrated with partition- and volume-level commands like Format and Delete, with file system commands relating to truncate and compression, and with the System Restore (aka Volume Snapshot) feature. Windows 7 Optimizations and Default Behavior Summary As noted above, all of today’s SSDs have considerable work to do when presented with disk writes and disk flushes. Windows 7 tends to perform well on today’s SSDs, in part, because we made many engineering changes to reduce the frequency of writes and flushes. This benefits traditional HDDs as well, but is particularly helpful on today’s SSDs. Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation on SSD system drives. Because SSDs perform extremely well on random read operations, defragmenting files isn’t helpful enough to warrant the added disk writing defragmentation produces. The FAQ section below has some additional details. Be default, Windows 7 will disable Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching on SSDs with good random read, random write and flush performance. These technologies were all designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could easily be a major bottleneck. See the FAQ section for more details. Since SSDs tend to perform at their best when the operating system’s partitions are created with the SSD’s alignment needs in mind, all of the partition-creating tools in Windows 7 place newly created partitions with the appropriate alignment. |
Edit2: This seems to indicate Vista does not. Plus:
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Defragging disks speeds up the reading of data from conventional hard drives by moving similar data together. But flash-based SSDs are already fast at reading data. Instead, SSDs are slow at writing data. Moreover, the process of erasing and moving data requires "flashing" the memory cells with high voltage. That gradually wears out the SSD. Defragmentation thus shortens an SSD's lifespan without improving performance, Shu said. |
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Vista 64 bit allows the SSD to be defragmented. I have been running an 80 GB SSD for about a year on my desktop rig with no problems. I have mine setup as a duel windows install. I have a stripped down version of Vista running from the SSD with all of the main games I play. I even placed the swap files and cache for the OS on the SSD. Is lightning fast compared to my old 20000 rpm drive. Screen load times scream in comparison. You will still get lag and such loading up but the delay wont be because the map isnt loaded up from the drive, it will be from the game mapping out NPC and other players.
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Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
Simple but fairly accurate way of looking at it, yes. And no, you don't need to defrag SSDs. Older ones it was even advised *against* doing so. (I seem to recall reading Win7 will actually prevent running Defrag on an SSD. If I can find confirmation from MS or another reliable source, I'll post it. Not sure if Vista will do so.)
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Ok so OS isn't a problem as long as I avoid defragging the drive. Seems my Iolo Systems Mechanic will become obsolete with this drive installed. As TRIM looks like it does everything it did for my HD. My remaining concern atm is what Hyperstrike mentioned about my laptop not having the right controller to run a SSD. I'm putting a call into Asus Tech Support when I have time later.
Might consider an OS upgrade if I can fit both the drive and it into my set budget. Another option is to save up, get a desktop and us my laptop as backup. I just expect my HD to die out soon as it was meant to be an external storage, not run an OS.
Edit: Tech Support was entertaining, it was a question of is it possible. All I got was "We don't know and we don't advise you do it". I'm ok with "at risk" I explained, TS of course more concerned with liability. My laptops already out of warranty so it doesn't matter if I break the damn thing. IF it doesn't work, I'll simply store the drive till I'm able to get a system that can support it properly. Think I will go with this SSD as the price looks nice and I can swing an OS upgrade as well. Thanks for all your replies and help
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If the system is new enough to have come with Vista, I wouldn't worry too horrendously about it.|
Originally Posted by Gypsy_of_Paradox
My remaining concern atm is what Hyperstrike mentioned about my laptop not having the right controller to run a SSD.
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Worst thing that could happen? It doesn't work. RMA it.
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
I googled for the ASUS G50V-X1 and it seems it only supports Serial ATA 1.5 Gbit/s (SATA I) which means your data transfer rate is limited to 150 MByte/s in either direction. It is possible to connect a SATA II SSD on SATA I, though.
TRIM is only supported under specific conditions. Auto-TRIM needs Win7. Manual TRIM is possible with WinXP/Vista on SSDs with the Indilinx Barefoot and Barefoot ECO controllers. Some SSDs support Garbage Collection (GC) instead.
Before you buy a new SSD you should always identify the SSD controller used.
You do NOT want a SSD with the old JMicron(602)B controller, no matter how cheap they are.
SSDs with the established Intel X-25-M G2 / Postville, Samsung RBB or the Indilinx Barefooot and Barefoot ECO controllers are good.
Then there are the new controllers. I would be careful with the JMicron 612 / 618 and the Marvell controllers. The SandForce controller seems to be solid, though.
If you had SATA II I probably would suggest the new SandForce controller (SF-LE seems to be very interesting atm as it's a mix between the SF-1200 and SF-1500 but being sold for less than the SF-1200) but your SSD will be slowed down to SATA I speed. I think you should check out the Barefoot ECO controller. It's a bit slower than the other controllers but it is cheaper, too. It is said that OCZ and Super Talent work closely with Indilinx and offer new firmware versions regularly, so I would take one of their SSDs, if possible.
Check out these SSDs:
Super Talent UltraDrive GX2 (Barefoot ECO controller)
OCZ Agility (Barefoot controller but uses cheaper and slower flash memory)
Need a new HD, current one is getting torn to shreds with what I run. New laptop not in budget, wife, kids, bills, etc. I have an Asus G50V-X1 and would like to install this SSD
We've got the best techies I know of, so I want to know if this is a good move. What problems I may encounter, etc. Any advice is good. I've already killed one HD, the dying one is one I ripped out of an external I had.
Edit: My "given" budget is standing at $250