Crucial C300 128GB $200 Good Deal?

Only in sequential write speeds, not in 4K speeds.

 

OK, I have read a number of these alignment threads and have backed off my plan to use Acronis (Home 2010 is what I have) to clone my new HDD and move it to my Crucial C300. Apparently even Home 2011 will not properly take into account this "alignment" issue.

So back to the clean install (and from Lenovo self made "recovery disks")

Perry

 

I've seen a lot of people on the forums of Storage review confirm that Acronis 2010 and later does handle alignment fine as long as you use the "clone disk" option.

I've also done it myself a few times without problems.

 

@pkincy - Hope the links helped.

 

What if it is from a 500GB HDD -> 120GB SSD ? Is Acronis smart enough to just copy the first 120GB sector by sector then adjust the last partition(and the associate partition table entry) ?

It is always this case that is troublesome and 99% of people buying a new SSD would face.

 

Worked fine, this is what I just did.

It shrinks the partition as needed. It even knew to keep the hidden backup partition and use only as much space as needed and give the rest to the main os partition.

 

thanks for the information. Just to confirm, it is Home 2010 or Home 2011 ? As this almost becomes an FAQ and google would only return conflicting information about each version.

 

I used home 2011 but you should be able to update to home 2011 for free if you own 2010

 

As long as you don't have more than 120GB data on it, it will work as far as I know.

 

Again remember that I am not a techie but just willing to read a lot of google pages, but I did find an Acronis forum site that had Acronis employee input.

They stated that neither 2010 nor 2011 will intelligently correct alignment. What they will do is maintain alignment correctly. But if you are bad to start with you will be bad after the clone. If you happen to be initially good than you will still be good.

I did use the Lenovo Recovery disk to copy over my as sold Lenovo HDD to the new Crucial C300. It seemed to work fine.

So I can check for you, how would I check "alignment."

Perry

 

One easy way is to download / install "AS SSD". Once installed, merely start up the tool, and change to your SSD drive (if not already selected). Look at the top left hand corner, if it lists the SSD as "OK" in green, your alignment is good.

Here is s a screenshot from my system.




There is also a manual method to calculate alignment as well.

HTH

 

Thank you very much. I had used Diskpart to get a report yesterday but wasn't smart enough to understand the data (my image is a Lenovo with a recovery partition as well as data).

But the AS SSD tells me I am green. Simple solution.

Thanks again.

BTW, I have done all the internet tweaks to my registry as well as the services and disabled defrag. One question remains. I have seen a recommendation to not have write cache checked and I have seen a recommendation to have both of those boxes (enable Write Caching and Turn off Write Caching Buffer) checked.

If anyone could help explain that and which is correct, I would be grateful.

BTW, my C300 120 GB for $200 rocks. I suppose I could have paid more and gotten something "faster" but I have run these same benchmarks on my old T61 with a WD Scorpio HDD and there is no comparison between it and this drive on my new Lenovo W520.

Perry

 

I was so excited to get a 128GB C300 and started to save up my money, but after reading conflicting reports on SSDs in general from tilleroftheearth and phil, I'm not sure if it really is for me. I mean...it's a rather expensive investment, for such little space.

I think I'm going to hold off a little longer (though I don't know why, now is the perfect time to buy last-gen SSDs at ridiculous prices), but you guys go ahead and make your decisions.

Mr. Mysterious

 

What kind of system is this in? (A. Laptop or B. Desktop) Also note, the answers I am providing here are for an INTERNAL disk drive, not an external drive (or flash drive) that can be unplugged at a moments notice.

If you are using A. (Laptop) and you have a good battery and run on AC power, then you would want to check "Enable write caching on the device" and uncheck "Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device."

What happens here is the operating system will periodically ask your drive to write stuff to disk. When this option is checked, those requests are eliminated allowing the disk to go do disk at a longer interval, thus increasing system performance. However, if you immediately lost power, you might also lose the data that has yet to be written to disk.

Also, if your battery can turn off in a blink of an eye and you seldom run on AC adapter, then I would not check the top box.


If you are using B. (Desktop), and have a trust-worthy UPS, then again, I would check the top box. If however, you are using a desktop that may lose power at a moment's notice, then leave the top box unchecked.



In regards to the 2nd option for "Windows write-cache buffer flushing", I found this article from a Windows programmer. Try to get through some of the programming language, and Raymond Chen (one of the developers of Windows) explains these features:

HTH

 

This is exactly what I do and precisely why I think a used SSD is a good idea. Or alternatively, why speed trumps (long term) reliability.

 

Yeah, I only got one for my laptop because i already know i won't be keeping much on it as my desktop is my main computer w/3TBs. If I didn't have my desktop and my laptop was all I had I wouldn't bother.

 

Phil,

In commenting on Vicious' SSD benchmarks you commented that his 4ks were low. (~20Mb/s)

Have you ever seen them down to 4 Mb/s?

I am getting that both on CrystalDiskMark and on AS SSD and my alignment shows OK and I have done all the standard recommended tweaks.

My reads are all pretty good but the sequential writes are somewhat low and in the 4k and 4k-64thrds they are abysmal. 4-5 Mb/s

The Crucial C300 is actually performing pretty well except for those very low small file writes.

Perry

 

Perry, I've never seen them that low.

Looks to me like there's something wrong.

Would be nice if you could compare you're real performance to others that have the same SSD. One way to do that is the filecopy benchmark in AS-SSD.

 

With the help of the Crucial forum I found my problem. I had not enabled write caching in the new drives properties.

To demonstrate how important that is here is the before "enable write caching".



And here is the after "Enabling Write Caching."



Huge difference.

Perry

 

Hmm most guides say to turn that off for SSD. I'll have to check and see if its on for mine. I guess I should leave it off for my Intel G2

 

It should not make much difference on G2 as G2 doesn't use cache for data). Same is also true for SF.

However, I am interested to see the reason why it should be off for SSD. Cache is just cache and the reason to turn it on or off depends on whether the power source is stable, not whether it is SSD or HDD.

For notebook(which has a builtin UPS circuitary), turning cache on(both OS and device) sounds like a reasonable choice. Now that is under the assumption that your current OS is stable as BSOD can leave unflushed device level cache in danger resulting in data corruption.

 

I certainly couldn't tell you the technical reasons why, but clearly one benchmark was run, than I changed the Write Cache to enable and another was run.

Huge difference.

I did see conflicting advice on whether or not to set it to enable in my Google searchs. I had it first set to enable and saw advice to disable it and did that than started running benchmarks.

So I know where I need to keep it for my computer (W520).

Perry

 

Perry, looks like you're using the same configuration I mentioned in my earlier post.

FWIW, it was on by default on my system when I installed the Intel RST drivers.

[strike that]Unless you lose the circuitry for power distribution within a laptop, it should be somewhat safe. Perhaps SSD is susceptible to problems when its cache is not periodically flushed.[/strike that]

EditAs Abula just mentioned, apparently this is drive dependent.

 

It seems it depends on the drive though, from The SSD Optimization Guide (8)

 

'reported' ? I don't see any difference on my G2 and have it enabled anyway.

 

The top checkbox correct? Did you reboot after making a change one way or another?

 

All combinations have been tried. Close to no effect(statistical noise) on my G2, noticeable on my Scorpio Black.

 

The flush and the cache are 2 different settings.