Help With My SSD Please......

Kingy1968 · 12 Nov 2011 at 19:38

01. I have a single Crucial M4 128gb ssd as my boot drive and also some 2tb Samsungs sata II drives as storage..
For some reason I have Intel Rapid Storage Drivers running..
Do I need these with only one ssd boot drive???

02. If i click on the physical sector and the logical sector on Intel RST on the ssd its showing as 512 bytes...
Is that correct??

03. Ive just run the new ssd boot timer which is linked in a thread in this forum and its showing logon time as 11 secs and time to destop 32 secs..
Is that ok as well??? as I see there are loads on there with a lot faster times.
It seem to hang on the Window 7 Welcome screen for quite some time before its actually usable...
I am loading some things like superantispyware, malwarebytes, epson monitor and a few others.. Would this be the cause of the above problem???

Thanks guys and hope you can shed some light on these things...

Kingy

Kingy1968 · 13 Nov 2011 at 18:36

Anyone???

Thanks

skyripper · 14 Nov 2011 at 17:54

Kingy1968 said:
01. I have a single Crucial M4 128gb ssd as my boot drive and also some 2tb Samsungs sata II drives as storage..
For some reason I have Intel Rapid Storage Drivers running..
Do I need these with only one ssd boot drive???

If you are using the Intel SATA3 ports (and you should be) - yes. I believe these are the white ones.

If you are using the grey Marvell ports, change to the Intel ones. (If you dont manage to boot after that, swap back and repost - theres a potentially easy fix).

Kingy1968 said:
02. If i click on the physical sector and the logical sector on Intel RST on the ssd its showing as 512 bytes...
Is that correct??

If you used Windows 7 to install your SSD, then partition sectors size and alignment will be fine - it takes care of it for you.

Kingy1968 said:
03. Ive just run the new ssd boot timer which is linked in a thread in this forum and its showing logon time as 11 secs and time to destop 32 secs..
Is that ok as well??? as I see there are loads on there with a lot faster times.
It seem to hang on the Window 7 Welcome screen for quite some time before its actually usable...
I am loading some things like superantispyware, malwarebytes, epson monitor and a few others.. Would this be the cause of the above problem???

Run a HDTune benchmark with a few different benchmark sizes, or an ATTO benchmark. Then other M4 owners might chip in with their speeds. I dont have one.

Kingy1968 said:
Thanks guys and hope you can shed some light on these things...

Kingy

No worries.

Kingy1968 · 15 Nov 2011 at 11:18

skyripper said:
If you are using the Intel SATA3 ports (and you should be) - yes. I believe these are the white ones.

If you are using the grey Marvell ports, change to the Intel ones. (If you dont manage to boot after that, swap back and repost - theres a potentially easy fix).

If you used Windows 7 to install your SSD, then partition sectors size and alignment will be fine - it takes care of it for you.

Run a HDTune benchmark with a few different benchmark sizes, or an ATTO benchmark. Then other M4 owners might chip in with their speeds. I dont have one.

No worries.

I removed the Intel RSD drivers the other day and all seems to be still working at the same speed as before and they are plugged into the white ports. Do I need to reinstall them again then???

skyripper · 15 Nov 2011 at 11:48

With your motherboard set to IDE or AHCI, Windows7 will still work ok with SSDs on the intel ports using the default Microsoft drivers, but the Intel drivers are recommended for performance and the extra monitoring stuff. If you had your motherboard set to RAID, you would need the Intel ones as I dont believe the Microsoft ones would work.

Unless you are using actually using RAID (or plan to use the HD acceleration stuff), leave your motherboard on AHCI anyhow.

Do I need to reinstall them again then???

No, but your post was about speed of your system. I believe its recommended. I'd download the latest ones from Intel anyhow rather than any that came with the motherboard.

skyripper · 15 Nov 2011 at 11:51

32 seconds to desktop with a recent SSD, a Z68 motherboard and an i2500K sounds like something is slowing you down to me anyhow. Do a benchmark and see if its the drive, or something during the load of windows thats holding you back.

Kingy1968 · 22 Nov 2011 at 16:18

skyripper said:
32 seconds to desktop with a recent SSD, a Z68 motherboard and an i2500K sounds like something is slowing you down to me anyhow. Do a benchmark and see if its the drive, or something during the load of windows thats holding you back.

Heres the speed of the drive

Orcvader · 22 Nov 2011 at 16:28

It looks like you're on the 0001/0002 firmwire, if you upgrade to the 0009 firmwire you'll see a 20% speed boost. Even then for some reason the boot time looks pretty slow. But looking at the amount of things you have on startup... that's probably the reason of the slow down. It takes me roughly 3-4 seconds to get to desktop from login with only Avast, MSI AfterBurner, Intel RST and Rainmeter on startup. I disabled Windows Gadget as I found that shaved a few seconds off boot time.

Surveyor · 22 Nov 2011 at 18:06

Orcvader said:
if you upgrade to the 0009 firmwire you'll see a 20% speed boost.

I doubt it:

- Sequential Read (up to): 415MB/sec (SATA 6Gb/s) - 550MB/sec with firmware 0009
- Sequential Write (up to): 175MB/sec (SATA 6Gb/s) - 200MB/sec with firmware 0009

Kingy1968 · 22 Nov 2011 at 21:14

Orcvader said:
It looks like you're on the 0001/0002 firmwire, if you upgrade to the 0009 firmwire you'll see a 20% speed boost. Even then for some reason the boot time looks pretty slow. But looking at the amount of things you have on startup... that's probably the reason of the slow down. It takes me roughly 3-4 seconds to get to desktop from login with only Avast, MSI AfterBurner, Intel RST and Rainmeter on startup. I disabled Windows Gadget as I found that shaved a few seconds off boot time.

Im already on 009 firmware

pyropetepete · 22 Nov 2011 at 23:43

Latest BIOS
Latest IRST 10.8.0.1003? (Go to google, type Intel driver, go to auto driver update on Intels website!!)
Correct SATA port ie: Z68 not marvel?
MS Config - boot timeout chnage to 3 as to 30
When installing 7 you did delet delete or just install no partition of the drive

Kingy1968 · 23 Nov 2011 at 08:09

pyropetepete said:
Latest BIOS
Latest IRST 10.8.0.1003? (Go to google, type Intel driver, go to auto driver update on Intels website!!)
Correct SATA port ie: Z68 not marvel?
MS Config - boot timeout chnage to 3 as to 30
When installing 7 you did delet delete or just install no partition of the drive

Already have got latest bios on M/B installed
Already have got lastest RST drivers installed
Already have goto sata connector on the White Intel and not Marvel.
Timeout was on 30 but now changed to 3
When installing Windows 7 it asked where I wanted to install to and at the time I had only inserted the Crucial M4 so thats where I installed it to.
ACHI was also selected before installation of Windows 7..

Just did a reboot and exactly the same time as before...

Heres the AS SSD Benchmark

pyropetepete · 23 Nov 2011 at 08:42

Have you enabled the writeback catch in IRST

You could try http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?49779-SSD-Tweak-Utility

Kingy1968 · 23 Nov 2011 at 10:33

pyropetepete said:
Have you enabled the writeback catch in IRST

You could try http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?49779-SSD-Tweak-Utility

If you meant he Disc Data Cache in RST then yes thats enabled

skyripper · 23 Nov 2011 at 11:56

Speed of your drive is reading at nearly 500MB/s, writing at over 180MB/s. Not seeing a problem with your drive, or the speed which your motherboard can use it.

I'd start looking at what processes and services are starting up on your machine when you boot and kicking anything you don't need to the curb.