Samsung 64GB 2.5" SATA-II MLC Solid State Hard Drive

yeh you can put the pagefile anywhere, probably not a bad idea because i'm sure Vista still uses one even when you disable it .....at least this way you seemingly have some control over how much to use and where it is put.

atm ive put on on to a different hd and was reading that you shouldn't disablle it altogether.

so when my new ram arrives im going to play around with a ramdisk
 
TBH I can't be bothered with any more tweaking lol. But sure if you come up with any new findings let us know. It is possible the make the performance worse rather than better if you get the offset wrong however, so just bare that in mind and GL!

yeah, i wouldn't do it if I were you until there was some semi good evidence that a specific offset is best for these drives either, theres tweaking and theres taking it too far. If windows was as quick and easy to install as last time i was on Win XP it wouldn't be such a hassel, i think on a raid 0 with 4gigs, a q6600 it was getting under 10mins, vista/win 7 don't come near that yet.

I think the offset will have a bigger effect on raid setups mostly due to having to choose a stripe size on raid so an offset that goes with the stripe seems to work best, on a single drive the default vista would probably be less of an issue. I'm not to sure though, what seems nuts, and drives me mad is, that ssd manufacturers that pay people to test, design and produce them didn't find any of these kinks out before they sold loads. I mean you can understand OCZ, to a certain degree they make their own products but all from other peoples stuff. Intel and Samsung though are more manufacturer rather than "rebranded" that ocz are, they are higher up the chain and you'd think years of testing and research would have been done.

I doubt it will be before the windows after 7 that we'll get some real and true SSD compatibility, like you install on an ssd and "windows 8" will automatically choose an alternate install without pagefile, defrag, this that and the other, have a windows designed pagefile that kicks in and works in ram when programs insist on using one.
 
did you do a fresh windows install ?

are you on vista ?

Vista but not a fresh install.

Also when I set up the raid array I didn't seem to need any raid drivers, I pressed CTRL + I i think it was and it was just there, could I be using old Intel raid drivers?

Also I have 6Gb of ram, is that enough?
 
6gb should be fine, what Vista install did you use, ghosted a old copy onto new drives? doing that can screw up allignment though I'm not 100% sure how to check, I'd read into the ocz guides if you think performance isn't where it should be.

For raid array setting up you don't need drivers, the raid array itself simply reads each drive as normal single drives, windows needs drivers later to translate what the southbridge is telling it, basically masking the two drives as one. But vista/win 7 should have fairly appropriate drivers for it already though not the most up to date.

Its worth going with the latest motherboard bios(if yours is semi old) as newer bios's get occasional raid bios updates aswell, which the way things are going should be looking to fix problems with ssd's as they get more common. Likewise newest chipset drivers could help aswell.

Just smegging around with vlite at the moment, apparently can take a while to rebuild a iso, guess we'll see as its doing it now. Removed tonnes of stuff, no idea how big a difference to the install it will make, smaller iso, easily but install I'm not sure. But removed some stuff like defragger, loads of drivers and some other stuff, disabled a lot of the things that "track" what you do, error reporting, search indexing and a couple other things to help minimise writes.

Will burn that and hope it installs ok, though being a pain the "new" windows 7 build turned up with a few fixes I really wanted in the way the UI works aswell as shed loads of bug fixes and better app compatibility so I'm torn between which to use as Windows 7 seems to by default install a much more streamlined version of itself than Vista. bad timing :p

Waiting on the memory to turn up aswell, according to DHL its out for delivery still but its getting a touch late in the day.

Do'h, I just realised, maybe I should be whacking them in not as OS but as backup on current install and test them from there, that way changing the allignment/stripe and testing single vs raid shouldn't be too much of an issue. Not sure if I can be assed tbh, though without testing not really sure what offset to choose.
 
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Vista but not a fresh install.

Also when I set up the raid array I didn't seem to need any raid drivers, I pressed CTRL + I i think it was and it was just there, could I be using old Intel raid drivers?

Also I have 6Gb of ram, is that enough?

6gb is fine but personally i would do a fresh install of windows as afaik, that is how it will align the drive properly
 
well, I have no idea what the allignment is as was going to boot in and use windows default at first, getting not at all bad writes, 8mb at 0.5kb , 44mb/s at 4kb, 60 at 8kb, and 80mb's from 32kb and up in Atto, will try some other things, but only 100mb's reads tops which is dissappointing. Seen a lot of people, and some reviews show these drives hitting 160mb/s reads, I wonder why there is such a difference, allignment, afaik, doesn't alter reads "that" much though maybe it does.

lol, as I was typing the door went, at 7pm for my memory to get delivered, about 5 mins after I finally gave up on it arriving and took my system apart to put the drives in , gits :p

not really a fan of DHL unless you have the pre 12pm option which is like £1 more places that offer it. I asked the guy and he said DHL deliver anywhere to 9.30, awful days up to 10pm, free but still a bit crap time wise.

back to the drive, I can cope with the lower reads, hopefully it will hit a decent speed in raid anyway and if it works well with random reads and i/o's then I can't(or shouldn't :p ) complain.

Is there any way to check allignment in windows or is it only from programs in dos you can really see allignment numbers?
 
windows 7 build 7048 x64, my suggestion would be to check again ;)

32bit is a different build number but seems to have the same stuff in, not sure if they are different in any way but 64/32bit, or if the 64bit is newer aswell.

Ah thanks, no idea why it didn't come up before when I searched windows 7
 
Just installed my two Sammys and its flying, really really brilliant difference!

Ive ran the SSD Tweaker.
However, when I tick both the boxes in the HD section (enable write cache....) the boxes dont stay ticked.

Anyone know why it might be?
 
hmm, hd tune shows me higher reads though i think thats a hd tune bug people think there is with ssd's with the large jump after the first bit. but the random access test on that compared to my normal hdd's was awesome. normal hdd gives i/o's from 45-85 and really slow average speed, the single sammy gives 9.3k iops at 512kb's rather than 80 , the lowest was 152 at 1mb, which i've seen most ssd's get that low, thats the 45 on the normal hdd so still massively faster. the average access time is ridiculously lower, even the test completed in about 1/100th of the time as on the slower hdd's.

Iometer was fairly impressive for full test, less impressive on the 4krandomwrite, only getting 800i/o's ish random and 3mb's throughput with low access though, still significantly better than my raided drives which was 315i/o's and 1.3mb's throughput.
 
well, I have no idea what the allignment is as was going to boot in and use windows default at first, getting not at all bad writes, 8mb at 0.5kb , 44mb/s at 4kb, 60 at 8kb, and 80mb's from 32kb and up in Atto, will try some other things, but only 100mb's reads tops which is dissappointing.

Is that a chipset limitation perhaps? I have ordered one of these drives and my board is ICH7 - I am wondering if I will also face a 100MB/sec ceiling for SSD even though my existing 7200rpm HDD exceeds that.
 
yeh you can put the pagefile anywhere, probably not a bad idea because i'm sure Vista still uses one even when you disable it .....at least this way you seemingly have some control over how much to use and where it is put.


I decided to go for maximum performance and have 2 paging files. :)
 
Is two better than one?

According to microsoft, it is possible to use 2 paging file and you will see an increase in performance. Done some research on it and decided to try it for myself. I can see a difference. Requires 2 seperate HDD's though. Since i have 2 raptors, i decided to place 1 paging file on each, and leave my SSD's free from stress :P
 
According to microsoft, it is possible to use 2 paging file and you will see an increase in performance. Done some research on it and decided to try it for myself. I can see a difference. Requires 2 seperate HDD's though. Since i have 2 raptors, i decided to place 1 paging file on each, and leave my SSD's free from stress :P

/looks at your sig

You have too much money pal :p
 
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