New to SSD, fresh install low performance ?

[monographix]

I just got my first SSD, G.Skill Falcon (1) 64gb. Came with FW 1370 ("1.10" ?)

Just initiated and formated as any disc, basic disc, "default alocation", NTFS, before i put anything in it i am checking if everything is optimaly set with it.

first benches :

Thats an MSI P35 board with ICH9R and the only free available sata port is a Marvel Sata that is bound to the PATA/IDE channels. After switching to an ICH9R port i got slightly better results but still not where i expect them to be. Also tried with IDE and AHCI mode in the ICH9 port, no difference. (is it maybe an Intel Storage Manager issue ? .......) (When bios in ahci, iastor takes control, when bios in IDE, ms drivers take control)

Then i upgraded the FW to 1571, still no change ...

I aligned / reformated the drive with 4096 allocation this time, still no change. ( http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=52912&highlight=ich10r+raid+guide )

I thought to try wiper, although i havent filled the drive with any data yet, but to use that, i need to have OS installed in the SSD and all the other HDDs unplugged ??

--- BTW, what is this alignment business ? why AS SSD benchmark states the "alignment/offset" are as "BAD" ? and to what exactly the k number displayed there refers to ? (is it of any importance to mechanical single HDDs?)

--- bit irrelevant, Should there be some second "advanced write caching" option in the device manager HDD properties under the "policies" in XP or this is something found only in vista/7 ?

Thank you

 

[Zarf]

You should be seeing results around 220MB/s reads, 130MB/s writes on that drive.

I believe you want AHCI mode, on the ICH controller, with latest Intel drivers, but the big issue is your alignment, the 31k partition offset is what's killing you (ssd's and your file system like to work in 4k pages, a 31k (which doesn't easily divide by 4) partition offset basically forces the drive to do all it's operations over two pages instead of one)

Open up cmd,run 'diskpart' type 'list disk', then 'select disk #', where # is the ssd. Then type 'list partition' and post a screenshot.

you'll then probably want to delete the partition that's on there, ('select partition #', 'delete partition') and then creating a new one with correct offset ('create partition primary offset=128'). Then you format the partition with the 4096 allocation.

 

[monographix]

Here are the results after temporarily connecting it to an ICH9 port (have to remove the program files HDD and plug in the ssd in its place) (and after flashing to fw 1571, and aligning acording to http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=52912&highlight=ich10r+raid+guide). Matrix is 7.8.0.1013)

Tried write cache also after this, no difference though

"list disk" on cmd doesnt come up with any existing/executable command is it for XP32? maybe refers to diskpar.exe?

What are the conditions need to be met for this drive to deliver 230 reads max and 135 writes max as advertised on its own info sticker?

Whats exactly this 31k partition offset? AS SSD Bench seems to present this "31k - BAD" to some other drives of mine as well, like my 36.7 OS files Rraptor, a card reader (??) an external USB/IDE HDD, some small 30-40gb partitions in other HDDs, and most other partitions appear as "4104607k - BAD" . All mechanical HDDs, do these offsets need fixing ? something to gain from "alignment"?

Is there a way to clone an OS without ruining "alignment" ? (either on the target or source drive)

 

[Zarf]

Hmm, still a bit low, even with a proper offset.
Run Wiper (or whatever g.skills equivilent is), and see how it does then.

You don't need to worry about the offset on your mechanical drives, it makes no difference to them.
Think of reading or writing to an SSD it a bit like scanning in pages from a book, and your file system allocation as wanting to store pictures that will exactly fit on one page. it takes a fixed amount of time to scan each page but once it's scanned you have a whole picture.
The offset is like having some white space above the very first picture in the book, If this isn't a whole number of pages in length then the first picture will be partly pushed off the page and it now has to be spread over two pages. This then means the next picture is pushed off and so on, so now every picture is spread over two pages.
Now whenever you want to look at a picture on the computer, you have to scan two pages and stitch the two parts of the image together.
When you want to change one page you now need to scan the images in from three pages to get the bits of the images either side of the one you want to change and print out two new pages - much more work than simply printing the image you want out and swapping it in.

In contrast, a mechanical hard drive works more like a giant scroll, going through a continuous scanner, the images are never physically split and so pages are just logical barriers rather than physical ones - meaning your page sized image will take the same amount of time to read (determined by how fast the scroll moves through the scanner) no matter how much space it is offset by.


I hope this metaphor makes some sense to you. To sum it up, file system allocations are like pictures, SSD's work like books, and Mechanical drives work like scrolls.

 

[monographix]

Great description, deserves a sticky i think Thanks for taking the time to put it together here Since, using Wiper (dont know if its the same with OCZ / indilinx, but g.skills called wiper too) requires , if i understood right, that wiper runs from OS installed on the SSD, and no other drive is pluged in the system, maybe i should try first updating the Intel matrix storage manager ?

And what about alignment in Raid situations? does it affect performance there ? (eg 4xHDD Raid-0)

 

[ChileanLlama]

Hi Monographix,

The Wiper.exe was created by Indilinx and OCZ seemed to have it first. You should be safe to run it on your drive as it uses the same Indilinx controller - most of the SSD makers now provide it through their own sites - if you'd feel safer getting it from G.Skill then I'm sure they'll have a link - maybe check their forums.

With Wiper.exe you need to run it as an administrator and have it in IDE or AHCI. If you're drive is on a RAID controller it may not work at all, or if it does it can be very, very slow (we're talking hours - if not days - instead of seconds/minutes). It won't work at all if your drives are part of a RAID array.

Alignment applies to RAID as well. It's just printing two books side by side at the same time instead of one (to use Zarf's analogy). Also be wary of going 4xSSDs in RAID0 without a dedicated RAID card if you are doing it to maximise performance. The popular Intel controllers (ICHxR) will cap out at 660MB/s, which for sequentials will equate to only 3 of your drives - of course you'd still benefit for the smaller reads/writes, which in reality is more important.

 

[monographix]

This turns out to be a nice forum

- To run wiper do i have to run it from an OS installed on the SSD itself and have all other drives unplugged?

- Is there a way to detect if the HDDs (not SSDs) of a Raid-0 array are aligned properly ? ....

 

[ChileanLlama]

No you can run Wiper from another disk running Windows, I have an old drive I use via e-sata to boot Windows and run any tools I need on my SSDs as I run mine in RAID0 - you don't even need to unplug other drives, just make sure you set your BIOS correctly to set the controller mode you need, and the boot order so you boot from the correct disk.

If you need to change, say from RAID to IDE or AHCI, it's wise to have a backup though - just in case something gets overwritten or you select the wrong drive and wipe an array!

AFAIK there's no need to worry about alignment on HDDs in RAID0, just leave it as default. You do need to think about the stripe size however, this is the limit before it starts splitting files between the drives on the array and files smaller than the stripe size reside on a single disk. A lot of people have good results with 32KB stripe sizes, I prefer 128KB - especially on my SSDs.

 

[monographix]

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this drive now runs on my new P55 PCH system (win7 64) ... I just did some AS benches and numbers still remain the same ...