128GB Crucial C300 SSD maintainence

I just wanted to ask how i could maintain my SSD. I've heard you can't defrag it so how can I keep the the files from being fragmented. I know this SSD has TRIM but it doesn't seem to work as my booting times are getting longer and longer.

 

fragmentation does not affect SSD. Can your SSD use garbage collection? Check if trim is enable. Disable prefetch, superfetch.

 

Crucial C300 has garbage collection.


TomJG90, could you please download and open the AS SSD application and take a screenshot of the first screen? You do not need to run the benchmark.

 

namaiki, Thinking a partition alignment problem?

TomJG90 - In case you get a run, here's a post for comparison




You may want to also look at what services / apps are running at start-up. As you add more and more utilities, anti-virus, tools and other programs to an operating system, more and more services seem to be loading at boot. Perhaps overtime, all the auto-updating, IM, music services, etc. are slowing your computer's boot up time.

 

Due to the way SSDs work, fragmented files can actually be faster than defragmented files, unlike for a platter drive. More to the point, though, for boot times, TRIM should have little effect; boot times should be almost completely reads, not writes, and TRIM is meant to solve write degradation, since SSDs don't usually suffer from read degradation. If your boot time is taking longer and longer, it's most likely additional utilities and services as jclausius says.

 

Partitions on SSD are Virtual.
Agree. Looks like it is software problem and looks like you just installed too many applications. You need to clean registry and check startup programs.

 

what is your reasoning for that ?

 

Not what I'm talking about. To clarify, I should have said partition alignment offset. Having the incorrect offset can affect SSD performance.

Search around for "ssd partition alignment offset" on how the offset needs to be divisible by 4K (4096) in order to ensure peak SSD performance.

 

I gave myself 3 minutes to check it in google. What I understood is if you do not partitioning SSD and have Windows 7 then it should not affect anything isn't it?

 

For a platter drive, a fragmented file slows things down because the platter has to spin to each (fragmented) location to read the data, rather than doing it all in one read. For a SSD, a "fragmented" file could be read more quickly in the same way that RAID 0 works; if the bits of the file are spread out on different NAND chips, multiple channels can be used to read the data concurrently. In fact, as I recall, this is the way SSDs usually work by default; files they write are broken down into chunks and concurrently written to multiple flash blocks at the same time.

Not that the file would appear fragmented to the OS, but I don't think a fragmented HDD file appears fragmented to the OS either.

 

file fragmentation is an OS file system thing, it has nothing to do how the block is actually arranged inside the SSD. IOW, a one single 10M file at the OS file system level could already be splitted among 10 channels in say the X25M. In fact, over time this is more likely to be the case as the SSD would only write to free blocks(that interally overtime would be all over the place), it doesn't care whether you ask it to write 1K block x 1000 times or 1M x 1 time.

 

TomJG90,

A couple of things I didn't think about asking...

a) What (FW) is on the drive? If you do use AS SSD, it is the 2nd line. I don't have any numbers to back this up, but the "feel" of my lappy was a lot better once I flashed it to 0006.

b) What OS are you using? As mentioned before, while TRIM won't affect your READ times (like at boot), it will affect WRITEs like saving documents, application temp files, etc. Also, a SSD drive supporting TRIM is worthless unless the OS knows to send the TRIM command. Unless someone knows different, I think Win 7 was the first MS operating system to offer TRIM. I also think newer versions of certain distros of Linux support TRIM. Mac OSX does not yet support TRIM.

In any case because TRIM may not be available, some drives offer a way to take care of write degradation issue with garbage collection routines on deleted NAND cell blocks within the drive's (FW), but TBH I don't know how fine tuned this is with the C300.


One other note, you mention defrag in your original post. You can defrag the drive, but you wouldn't really want to as it will unnecessarily cause more writes to the NAND cells, and as mentioned by others, it won't really help speed things up.

 

Win 7 seems to use the correct offset, yes. We didn't ask the original poster about the OS. (See my latest post above)

 

Right, except that it's just a file system thing, which has nothing to do with the OS. As well, there's also the difference between HDDs and SSDs in that physical fragmentation on a HDD will result in fragmentation in the file system, while not so in a SSD (or maybe that should be the other way around; fragmentation in the file system will result in physical fragmentation of the data on the HDD, while... it doesn't matter for the SSD). My point is still that for a SSD, it's designed to be "fragmented", while for a HDD, it's better that it's not. Either way, we're drifting a bit OT here.

 

Under Windows the file system can be safely assumed to be part of the OS given that its micro kernel architecture makes it impossible to function without a file system(it needs to load supporting drivers from some where).

While we may be drifting a bit OT, it is still relavent in the absolute sense that it takes more time for the file system to read a fragmented file though that time is in general neglagible.

I just want to say fragmented file(at the file system level) cannot be faster on SSD vs none fragmented one.

 

Except that Windows supports multiple file systems (well, mostly just NTFS and largely legacy FAT), and different file systems will fragment in different ways. I also freely admit I was sloppy with my use of the phrase "fragmentation" earlier; I really should have put it in quotes as I usually do when I refer to physical fragmentation as opposed to "just" file system fragmentation, and my comments were intended to refer to physical fragmentation as opposed to file system fragmentation.

 

I understand what you're getting at, but it is a bit of a generalization. For instance, Linux distros can mount NTFS based partitions.

You can scratch this post... I misunderstood the statement.

 

I put 2 backs that he uses Windows 7 x64

 

Firstly i do use Windows 7 64 bit. Secondly, i do have latest 0.00006 firmware on SSD. From what i'm reading it looks like a fresh install would be what i'd need.

Just one other question. How and when does TRIM work? Than maybe i can leave the computer in a state for it to run.

 

Here's one link, but my recommendation would be to read the entire SSD Anthology article.

Addressing the re-installation of Win 7... you should be just fine as the C300 and Win 7 support TRIM... but for others who read this and perhaps have not used a TRIM supported drive/OS, the write degradation on SSDs is not solved by a fresh install. SSD drives need a special wiping utilty so each cell appears as UNUSED. There are probably tools out there that do this, but TBH, I've never investigated.

 

There's the Tony Trim, which is supposed to effectively do that (and was used in the days before TRIM), but there have been mixed results with it. As for how and when TRIM works, well... TRIM works by sending a command when a file is deleted so that the SSD "knows" that the file is deleted, and thus can be removed. "When" depends on the drive itself; I believe that for Intel it's pretty much immediately, and a new block/page is written, but for a Sandforce drive, it happens as late as possible (possibly until the next time that block needs to be written to), to save write cycles.

 

so should i just leave my computer on the windows login screen for a while so its idle and this GC etc can work since i've read something like that makes TRIM work?

 

As stated above, TRIM usually occurs when deleting blocks within the SSD. Note, the Win 7 support is called "DisableDeleteNotify". This option allows Windows to send a commands to the disk subsystems when something is deleted. At that point, the SSD can decide what to do with the delete.

Since files are not deleted while sitting at a login screen, TRIM will not work at that point. In fact, you don't really have any control when TRIM runs. See link in my previous post regarding how TRIM works.

To know if TRIM is enabled, open a command prompt within Win 7 (in administrative mode), and type the following:

Code:

fsutil.exe behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

If it responds DisableDeleteNotify = 0 TRIM is enabled.

Also check to make sure the scheduling of the HDD to verify defragmentation is turned OFF against the SSD.


Also note, I found a "wiping" utility - it is called "Freespace Cleaner". Some have also mentioned it as "AS Cleaner" In any case, there is a link to Tony Trim Note, I don't think Tony Trim is a utility, but rather a set of instructions. It appears the OCZ employee who posted these instructions was named Tony, and the steps called "Tony Trim." In any case, I don't know if any of those instructions apply to the C300 (look at the link where someone said it totally messed up his Intel SSD), but you can look at the instructions yourself. Perhaps others who've used it can add more info if it will work with only OCZ or with other drives.

 

Its running so that good. I shall come back in a month's or so time when my SSD has been used more

 

Garbage collection, while somewhat related to TRIM, is actually completely different. You can think of TRIM as letting the drive know that something can be safely deleted, while garbage collection is the utility that actually does the cleaning. As well, garbage collection should naturally run at times and clear up old blocks as files get moved around via wear leveling.

Garbage collection is designed to run while the drive is idle, so a lot depends on how many processes you have may have running that might require disk access and keep the drive from idling. Leaving your computer at the login screen is just a way to guarantee that your drive will be idle, and thus give garbage collection a chance to run.

 

i shall do that. Thanks for all the help!