Dell Mini 9, painfully slow.

Marsman

Marsman

Marsman

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2009
Posts
11,174
I still have the stock 8GB SSD and 1GB RAM in mine running XP, but after so long it just grinds to a crawl. It was fine the other day, then I watched a video and it stuttered like mad, and after it seemed to be running slower. Starting up a defrag prog reveals it is fragmented to high heaven. I defragged the drive, but it takes so long to boot up now, I could go make a cup of tea in the time it takes. About three times since I have had it has it done this, a re-installation of XP will sort it out. If the SSD was crammed to the brim, I could understand it, but there is still 4GB free space.

I did see quite a while ago, that someone said defragmenting wasn't needed with an SSD, whether that is true or not I do not know.

I know the stock SSD's have terrible write speeds, which makes them rather slow at times, but is this a sign the SSD is ******?

Edit: Lol, just noticed I put this in the wrong section. Can a mod move it to the laptop section please. :)
 
Last edited:
Defragging an SSD will only help reduce its life, it wont help to speed it up like what it would on a normal rotating magnetic drive.

Have you noticed any tasks that might be slowing it down, like a virus scan?

could it be throttling from getting too hot?
 
Since the last time I reinstalled XP, I haven't defragmented the drive, not because I realised it wasn't any good for the SSD, more that I forgot about it. It was fine up until the point where videos started stuttering. I did check processes in task manager, to see if CPU was at full load, but it was about 50%, which prompted me to see if the SSD was fragmented, which it was. Not realising it did more harm than good, I defragmented, and since then it takes an age to boot up.

I can appreciate now that defragmenting is not a good thing to do, but it was showing signs of running slow even before I did so. Throttling because of heat is not something I had thought about, but I try to be aware if it gets too warm, and I try to let air circulate underneath by placing it on a flat surface, rather than directly on my lap.

I'll reinstall XP, and take note of if/when it starts to run slowly. What I should not have done was to defragment, which has made it much worse. I'll try to note if it gets to the point where it is unbearably slow, without defragmenting at all.

I wonder if running deframentation has degraded the SSD to the point where it's only efficient to a point, and gets slower from there on.
 
Have you tested the SSD in terms of sustained reads? I'm sure there'll be plenty of apps out there to do this. But for me I'd just get program something to randomly sample a range of differently sized files and get it to output the rate per second and see if you can notice some sort of negative performance.
 
I would suggest getting another gb of ram...This is something i will be doing soon to my Acer 531h as it is now my main pc and so when running winamp,football manager and chrome i notice a slight lag and the fellas in General Hardware have given me the recommendation to get some more ram which i will be taking from my dads laptop if its compatiable.
And im not sure if its possible but maybe get a new hdd? to replace the SSD?
You could get a new ssd or something like the WD blue hdds which are very good (have one in ps3)
 
I might get a faster SSD at some point and 2GB of RAM. The Dell Mini SSD is tiny, so there is no room at all for a HDD. I'll try what Dangerstat mentioned in the meantime.
 
run AS-SSD Benchmark and post the results. It's quite likely that the 8GB SSD has a crappy controller which doesn't support trim or garbagecollection and thus has resulted in degraded performance as the drive was used.
AS-Cleaner might be able to help.
 
I went and re-installed XP. I don't use a lot of programs with it, so it doesn't take too long to set it up again. However if it's going to keep getting to a certain point where it starts slowing down, might be worth trying to get SSD performance back first, rather than just re-installing. I'll download the suggested apps, so that I can test the SSD should it start to show signs of slowing down again. I did try to find some info on it, but I was looking for specific Dell Mini info, when I should have been looking for SSD's in general.

Thanks a lot for the help. :)
 
Yes it is slow. The write speed is the SSD's failing, but the normal running doesn't bother me too much. I hope to get a faster one at some point. I'm not expecting miracles mind, :p just half credible write speed. :)
 
The SSD is why I sold mine on Ebay. Loved the build, size, etc but it was too limiting. Moved to a much bigger and better HP Ion, but to be honest I miss the size of the Mini 9.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom