How much difference does tweaking make to your SSD performance? - lets find out

John24

John24

John24

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No doubt there are a few things you should "tweak" regarding your SSD, like disableing indexing and your defragger.

I have an Mtron ssd as you may know. :) It has performed to spec without any problems, since I first got it several tweaks have emerged form OCZ, that claim to improve the performance of your OCZ SSD, in many cases they do just that. I`m intruged to find out if these tweaks also apply to other SSD`s.

With your help I hope to find out, I`ll issue a baseline and you can tell me what to tweak, I`ll do it and post ATTO results along with my impressions. If there are any other tests you`d like me to run pre and post tweak I`d be happy to. :)

The baseline then, I run XP PRO SP3, indexing, pagefile, hibernation, system restore are disabled. Offset is 32 KB and the below bench is using ATTO 2.36 on an empty Mtron Mobi 3000 16 GB.

1238080957.jpg
 
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Well XP isn't the best of OS's to be testing SSD's on. I am running mine on Vista 64bit and these are the tweaks I ran:

These are the ones I ran:


1. Turn off drive indexing (go to drive properties, uncheck index this drive)

2. Enable write caching and advanced performance (device manager->Device properties for the SSD->policies tab)

3. Turn off system restore (Control Panel->System->Advanced System Settings->System Protection tab)

4. Turn off the pagefile or put it on a mechanical hard drive or RAMdisk (Control Panel->System->Advanced System Settings->Advanced tab->Performance Settings->Advanced->Change (Virtual Memory))

5. Turn off Hibernation (Right click Command Prompt and run as an Administrator. Type "powercfg.exe -h off" and hit enter.)


This has given my pair of 30Gb Vertex's in RAID 0 performance like this
attobench002.jpg


Ok so I did all the tweaks in one hit. Have since updated the Intel Storage Matrix drivers as my array is on the onboard ICH10R controller and am now getting read speeds of up to 400mb/s! That'll do for me.:D
 
The biggest speed boost I had was enabling the write back cache. (the method for turing this on is different in XP than vista) The other tweaks helped free up ram and stop doing unnecessary caching.

There was an interesting thread awhile back about disabling CPU power saving features. Some astonishing increases in speed when this was done.
 
lopkinfop said:
does the size of the drive (and therefor density) affect the speed, like platter hard drives
Click to expand...

Could do but for other reasons than mechanical drives, in the case of the OCZ Vertex series the 30Gb & 60Gb only have 32Mb cache whereas the 120Gb & 250Gb have 64Mb cache - not sure of performance gains in the real world tho, but others have suggested that the bigger drives have more channels to access the flash chips and therefore slightly higher speeds.
 
FaceplantSi said:
Depends wht you mean by real.

Maybe you didn't see the 5 tweaks that I listed in my earlier post (and had gleaned for myself by browsing and reading up on the subject in this and other forums). :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
If you bother to read the OP you`ll see I`ve already done all those. :rolleyes:
 
You guys are not understanding the point of this thread.

It`s to see whether the tweaks OCZ recomend have any effect on none OCZ SSD`s.

So please stop posting your OCZ SSD benchmarks in this thread, there are plenty of other threads to show off your peen in. :D

There are general tweaks that obviously will benefit all SSD`s, these have already been done. Then there are tweaks only recomended by OCZ such as the alignment, my aim, and the purpose of this thread is to determin whether such tweaks can benefit none OCZ SSD`s.
 
I don`t have cpu power saving so I just set the power scheme to laptop and the bench showed better results:

1238167531.jpg


Then I installed windows 7 build 7057 and the bench showed worse results, especially for the small file sizes:
1238167552.jpg


Would any of the OCZ tweaks improve the W7 results? Don`t know, tell me what to try and I`ll do it...
 
Power saving on/off

My two Samsung 64GB MLC SSD's in Vista 64 RAID0,128stripe & 128 offset,on an Intel ICH10R 'board (Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R).

Indexing,hibernation,system restore are disabled.Pagefile moved & write caching and advanced performance enabled (good gain if you have everything safely backed up).

I have just tried the Power Saving on & off and my results seem to contradict others...


EIST & C1E OFF -

off2.jpg



EIST & C1E ON -

on2w.jpg


So I think I'll be keeping mine on (saves the planet too!!).

.
 
FaceplantSi said:
Could do but for other reasons than mechanical drives, in the case of the OCZ Vertex series the 30Gb & 60Gb only have 32Mb cache whereas the 120Gb & 250Gb have 64Mb cache - not sure of performance gains in the real world tho, but others have suggested that the bigger drives have more channels to access the flash chips and therefore slightly higher speeds.
Click to expand...

32MB cache on 30 and 60GB models where only pre-production. They changed it on production models and all now have 64MB cache.

I had to do a fair bit of googling as I knew it said 64MB on OCZ website and also on the box so I wanted to be sure...this is not 100% I guess but confirmation came from Tony (OCZ's Old Jedi master) on the OCZ forums although even he got it wrong at first.

There is still confusion out there and I see some websites play it safe by saying "up to 64MB" LOL
 
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