SSD newbie question

chiefcrust · 26 Mar 2009 at 14:10

I was thinking of getting a

OCZ Vertex Series 30GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive

do I just install my operating system on it as normal or are there other things I have to do? If there is, how do I do it?

Many thanks in advance.

LeJimster · 26 Mar 2009 at 14:36

if using windows 7 or vista just install away and then run the tweaks. Optionally you can use VLite to cut out uneeded parts of vista which will help with installation size.

If you use XP the only other step is to align your partition properly before installing.

NickK · 26 Mar 2009 at 14:38

In theory you treat it like a normal drive.

In practice - with windows you'll need to align the drive page blocks and sectors - more information on the QCZ support forums.

If the drive comes with v1199 firmware then immediately flash it to 1257 as 1199 has a write corruption bug.

wibble1 · 26 Mar 2009 at 14:49

how can you tell which firmware is on the drive?

FaceplantSi · 26 Mar 2009 at 14:52

Have a good read through this thread link from these forums. There's some very good advice and links to external info there. Also some very good info at Anandtech here.

FaceplantSi · 26 Mar 2009 at 14:54

wibble1 said:
how can you tell which firmware is on the drive?

Hook it up as a 'spare' drive on a running system and it'll be detected as "OCZ Vertex 1199 SSD" or something along those lines... that's saying it's firmware v1199. There's a very good guide to Flashing on the OCZ Forums, a quick google should get you there, oh and you'll need a jumper to flash them (drive needs to be set to Factory mode first) - I had one from an old HDD but it was a little large and quite fiddly.

Here's the link to the OCZ Forum.

chiefcrust · 26 Mar 2009 at 15:30

Im using Vista, what are the tweaks I need to run?

Many thanks for everyones replies

FaceplantSi · 26 Mar 2009 at 15:43

chiefcrust said:
Im using Vista, what are the tweaks I need to run?

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.)

There is also a free app called "SSD Tweaker" which is supposed to be able to do it all auto for you, I tried it and found that manually doing them worked best for me. A quick google should find it for you.

I also got best performance using the latest Intel Matrix Storage Driver as I'm using the onboard ICH10R controller for my RAID setup.