*** Crucial M225 SSD's Available From £102.99 inc VAT ***

grumpybeard said:
Hey guys,

I will be building my new PC in a week when I get home. I've just bought a Crucial M225 128Gb SSD which I'll be using as my OS/apps drive. I also will have 2xWD RE3 1Tb drives that I want in RAID mode for games etc.

My motherboard is an Asus Rampage II. I dont know anything about the BIOS setup for the ICH10R controller, and the various options eg SATA/ACHI/RAID that you guys mention.

Would it make sense to:

* Clean install W7, letting W7 configure SSD with no tweaking (Timko's link to MSDN blog seems to infer that W7 will do everything for you, just leave alone). Bios ICH10R controller probably set to SATA?

* Install motherboard drivers and Intel Matrix Storage Manager Controller, which in turn installs the ACHI drivers.

Upon reboot do/should I change the ICH10R controller to anything other than default eg ACHI/Raid, for best performance of SSD bearing in mind the 2 RAIDed WD drives?

Many thanks in advance, good stuff doing the groundwork on getting the SSDs setup, cheers!
Click to expand...
If you want to RAID the 2x1TB drives you'll have to use the "RAID" option in the BIOS, you won't be able to use "IDE", "AHCI" or whatever else it gives you. The good news is that single drives that aren't part of an array are handled by AHCI anyway, so your SSD will work just fine.

I haven't bothered installing the Intel Matrix drivers because of the issues I've heard with people saying Wiper doesn't work with it. Then again I don't even know how relevant Wiper is, whether Win7 is actually handling it behind the scenes, etc.
 
Spyder said:
I think you may be thinking of prefetch. Pagefile is used to offload data from memory to disk when available memory becomes low. I agree that with our current crop of 6 and 12GB machines that may not be needed.



Without a pagefile you will hit problems as you approach the limits of available memory and - if memory serves - will not be able to analyse crash dumps.
Click to expand...

Where do you think the prefetch data goes ;) yup, right into pagefile. Infact prefetch will basically constantly load up pagefile to pagefiles maximum size with the most used things you do as it can dump them from memory in a clock or two but can save a lot of time loading things.

Yes you can run out of memory , though unlikely, because some apps are stupid, some will have memory leaks that will crash anyway eventually.

What I've done so far, on a vista install is most of the tweaks recommended on the OCZ site, ramdrive for pagefile, FF/IE cache onto ramdrive also an temp folder on ramdrive.

Now the issues that have been caused, when a game has caused a BSOD(Champs online beta is a pretty guilty party in that) the ramdrive will often not save properly and can have issues setting itself up on rebooting. I've hit that issue a few times and so many things won't work without a temp folder. WHen I finally get around to putting Win 7 on again(used the beta but went back to vista due to 1-2 games not working great) I'll still use a ramdrive for pagefile but live with temp folder's and IE/FF cache on the ssd. That way the ramdrive doesn't need to save any data to shutdown and will have less things to go wrong should an error occur.

You probably do save a lot of writes to the ssd with ie/ff/temp/pagefile all on a ramdrive and saved to a mechanical hd at shutdown, but its not as easy as it should be yet.

Frankly Windows should have the option already of setting memory for ramdrive at boot and if you do so it automatically puts temp folders/pagefile in the ramdrive.
 
DragonQ said:
Well I was kinda thinking that I should wait until SATA 6Gbps comes out and then get a 2 port 4x PCI-E card for a pair of SSDs and then use the on-board ports for the larger drives (a 4 port would require an 8x card, which is fine but it seems unnecessary for now). Seems like a good idea. :)
Click to expand...

Fair enough, but in that case, make sure you get one that's bootable - many of the cheaper ones aren't!
 
Is this why its taking so long to get stock.

I did see another place had some today .. was tempted but i got my order in with the better price so decided to wait.

Rich
 
I've posted an updated video now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMl11VcK0Uc

Took onboard the comments on removing the password. Also, this new one is a straight bootup - no comparison. On the last one I had a strange stuttering problem. Changed the controller from IDE to RAID, deleted and reformatted, and then installed RTM instead (thanks Technet!) and all that has gone away. MUCH faster, and really nice around the operating system.

The rest of the guys talking about imaging etc, I'm only doing this for fun - not taking it THAT seriously ;)

Worth a watch then if you're considering the Crucial M225 + Windows 7 for your desktop.

Grumpybeard, I'd say

I have an update for you on the firmware situation. :smileyhappy:

We expect to publish the first firmware update by the end of next week. A firmware update tool will be made available at www.crucial.com/support at that time. As of right now, those are all the details I am able to give out.
Katana, Crucial Moderator, US
Click to expand...

is a little more than a loose indication :D
 
DanB said:
I've posted an updated video now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMl11VcK0Uc

Took onboard the comments on removing the password. Also, this new one is a straight bootup - no comparison. On the last one I had a strange stuttering problem. Changed the controller from IDE to RAID, deleted and reformatted, and then installed RTM instead (thanks Technet!) and all that has gone away. MUCH faster, and really nice around the operating system.

The rest of the guys talking about imaging etc, I'm only doing this for fun - not taking it THAT seriously ;)

Worth a watch then if you're considering the Crucial M225 + Windows 7 for your desktop.

Grumpybeard, I'd say



is a little more than a loose indication :D
Click to expand...

Wow, i cant even get to the log-on screen in 33 seconds.
 
I don't think I can either, even with my external drives not attached, but that's primarily because of the BIOS POST taking so long. That is the one good thing about Dell machines - my 3 year old Dell Inspiron 6400 POSTs in under 2 seconds whereas an i7 950 machine at work takes over 30s. :o
 
DanB, cool vid, cant wait to get my new system with SSD up and running now!

Let's hope that firmware update is out next week :)

This is going to be a dumb question, you are forewarned! Just wondering on organising of the 128Gb version I bought - leave as single partition with OS and apps installed, create partition 1 for W7 OS, say 30gb, with the remainder for apps ansd poss a few games on parition 2. Majority of games I intend to install on other RAID HDD. There's no performance hit with partitioning of these drives is there? Told you it was dumb!
 
Last edited:
There's not really any point in splitting up Windows and programs/games on separate partitions - if you need to reinstall Windows at any point, you'll need to reinstall those programs/games too anyway.

Splitting other data on the other hand makes sense because it means you can always reformat your system partition without losing any of your photos, music, videos, etc. These types of files also do not benefit from being on a fast SSD so keeping them on a separate HDD means more space for your OS. :)
 
Cheers DragonQ, yep I was planning on keeping my tunes and pics on the other non-os HDD drives, just wondering whether there was any good reason, perhaps performance related, in keeping the SSD as one partition or several - had a PC for many years now and still have NEVER partitioned a single drive myself as yet!
 
Last edited:
DragonQ said:
There's not really any point in splitting up Windows and programs/games on separate partitions - if you need to reinstall Windows at any point, you'll need to reinstall those programs/games too anyway.
Click to expand...

I would normally disagree with that, with my mechanical hdd's I've always partitioned windows and kept games separate because it makes defragging hugely easier and easier to keep pagefile clean, unfragmented and keep everything in tip top shape, most games and a lot of apps work without being reinstalled, those that need it i'll reinstall over the top.

But with ssd's you really don't want to be partitioning as drive wear leveling could become an issue, because afaik partitioning on ssd's would work like normal and mean it will limit the drive wear leveling basically from the full size down to, whatever you size your windows partition to. Unless partitioning is handleded in a hugely different way on ssd's I'd avoid it at all costs.

Keep backups of everything you can on alternate drives.


I decided to go crazy, got 2x64gb's rather than 1x128gb and will bench them tomorrow with windows 7 installed on it(might try and bench them empty while on this install first, not sure i'll bother).

Expensive week, splurged on a 1.5tb drive as I try to cut down from so many small old drives to a one or two and quieter ones.
 
drunkenmaster said:
I would normally disagree with that, with my mechanical hdd's I've always partitioned windows and kept games separate because it makes defragging hugely easier and easier to keep pagefile clean, unfragmented and keep everything in tip top shape, most games and a lot of apps work without being reinstalled, those that need it i'll reinstall over the top.
Click to expand...

I usually keep my page file a fixed size so that it doesn't fragment but even if you don't do this, fragmentation is not a problem on SSDs. ;)

Also, all programs that have an installer should need reinstalling when Windows is reinstalled. I dunno about games cos the most recent PC game I play is from 2003 but for other programs, the only ones that should work are the ones that do not require installing in the first place (i.e. they just come in a ZIP file).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom