Xp to new SSD with alignment?

elshiftos2

elshiftos2

elshiftos2

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27 Jan 2007
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So I just got a C300 installed, restored my Acronis image of XP to it and all appears to be working. Benchmarks are showing 250MBs+ continuous read speeds, and the system feels/loads a bit faster but it hardly feels like a worthwhile upgrade.

Question 1. Will alignment give things a worthwhile boost running XP?
Question 2. Despite a fair bit of reading, I haven't found a cast iron way of transferring my existing system over to an aligned partition on the SSD, either using my acronis image or by other means. Anyone know if this is possible?
Question 3. As a single, fixed drive, non-raid system, should I bother with enabling AHCI, RST drivers, etc?

Many thanks
 
Correct partition alignment is absolutely essential to get the intended performance and experience from your SSD (mainly because mis-aligned partitions will cause 4k reads and writes to suffer drastically).

You can correctly align an existing partition using a few different tools. Paragon Alignment Tool is the one I've used before (for a 4k sector HDD but the principle is the same) and it worked great.

AHCI combined with optimised drivers from Intel or AMD is always worth it. In fact, AHCI should really be used by everyone, even if they have no SSDs.
 
Download AS SSD benchmark which will tell you in the the top left corner if the SSD is aligned correctly or not even without running the benchmark.
 
Someone said:
Download AS SSD benchmark which will tell you in the the top left corner if the SSD is aligned correctly or not even without running the benchmark.
Click to expand...

Very handy that feature!

Restoring an Acronis image onto another drive (SSD) results in a non-aligned partition, so I need to find a pre or post restore fix for this problem.

I'll look at Paragon - thanks for the suggestion
 
Ok, managed to blag Paragon 2. It aligned a partition containing ~20GB data on my C300 in a matter of minutes, and the drive booted just fine afterwards!

Got the AHCI thing working on my XP install with the latest Intel drivers.

System definitely feels 'snappier' on C300 now I have done the above and the boot times are half what they were on Spinpoint.

Spinpoint - 60 secs boot time
samsungc.jpg


C300 aligned - 30 secs boot time
c300.jpg
 
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Why would you buy an SSD if you're still running XP? Without TRIM the performance of that drive is going to drop fairly quickly and never recover.
 
Do i need to worry about alignment with win7?

Also i didn't see an option for AHCI in the bios so i didn't bother with it, is it really that much better?
 
If you read the few posts in the thread someone said download AS SSD Benchmark to check the alignment of your SSD.
 
Radiation said:
Do i need to worry about alignment with win7?

Also i didn't see an option for AHCI in the bios so i didn't bother with it, is it really that much better?
Click to expand...

Let the win 7 installer create the partitions on your blank hard drive and they will be aligned correctly.

ACHI improved throughput for me but it wasn't like 'night and day'. However, I think if you have these features available to you then use them, if not....don't!

I now have AHCI and alignment running and, I've been forced to learn something about drive partitioning in the process......thanks all! ;)
 
Broken Hope said:
Why would you buy an SSD if you're still running XP? Without TRIM the performance of that drive is going to drop fairly quickly and never recover.
Click to expand...

I have no need or desire to run Win 7 just yet. The thought of another reinstall and sorting out all the tweaks and quirks of a new OS makes me :eek:

From what I've read, garbage collection can help in the absence of trim. Besides, I've hade a Vertex SSD in my Macbook for over 18 months now without any obvious degradation in performance.

I'm not using a swapfile and my temp/tmp folders will be on another drive, thus keeping writes to a minimum.....time will tell!
 
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