First SSD arriving soon - need hand holding please.

I'm getting my first SSD this week (maybe today if I'm home to accept the package). What do I need to know? It is an Intel 80GB G2. I plan on doing a fresh install of Windows 7 Pro. Once everything is installed, what do I need to look for. Is it a good idea to upgrade the firmware, before or after OS install? What software should I run after install, is TRIM automatic, or do I need to run specific software. What else?

Sorry if these are basic questions, but I just would rather get it done right the first time instead of having to redo it with an "oh crap" moment.

Thanks.

 

More than likely the SSD you receive will not need an update for its firmware, but I would certainly check it before installing Win 7 Pro.

The Intel site will let you download a bootable CD so that nothing needs to be installed on the SSD to be able to check/flash the firmware on it.

Once Win 7 is installed, all I would suggest is to disable System Restore (it has never worked for me and people are reporting it slows down the Intel SSD Toolbox - which you should also install and set to run once a week).

To make sure that Windows 7 passes TRIM commands to the SSD, make sure you use the default MS AHCI driver that Win 7 will install - don't use IMSM or the newer IRST drivers.

Make sure you are not filling your drive past 70% or so and just enjoy (for maximum speed, I would recommend not filling up past 50% capacity)!

 

50% capacity? Yikes. I got an 80GB SSD, but realistically, will only have Win 7 and basic apps and a couple games that I want the speed advantage of the SSD. Shouldn't be an issue (I hope).

Thanks for all the other suggestions though.

 

Ok, anyone else have anything to add? I was planning on checking/flashing with my eSATA hard dock. I'm assuming I shouldn't have to worry about the other drives in my system when I go to check/flash it? I just don't want to blow away anything on my other hard drives. Yikes!

 

You are fine...don't worry about the 50% capacity scenario. I believe if restore is disabled you will be golden.

Tiller is right though. It appears that the more system restore files that are on your system, the worse performance and longer it takes optimizer to run. Very odd as it should be instantaneous... so shut her off and be safe.

 

I never used system restore anyhow. I use WHS as my system restore.

Haven't had a chance to hook it up yet (kids are playing babysmash on the computer) but on the case it says "FW: 02HA", on the website firmware 02HD, dated 11/30/2009. I'm surprised these SSD's have been sitting around this long. I would think they'd ship with the newer firmware after it was released. Maybe that's why these are cheap, it's a stockpile Intel found in the back room or something, lol.

If all works out, I may start saving up for a 160GB, but by the time I have enough money they'll probably have the G3's out. I'd prefer a minimum 200GB for my notebook PC, but looks like Intel only offers up to 160GB.

 

Tiller, Can you provide some links for me to read up on your claim? I have heard passing reference that it is a problem with standard spindle hard drives but would like to see evidence that it is still a problem on SSD's.

When I got my Intel drive (160Gig G2) last week it had the old 02HA on it, was a little miffed by that, I would think it would have been the lastest version 02HD.

Edit HT: where you get your mine is the same as yours

I agree that turning off system restore is a good idea.

HTwing, you can run crystal disk info to verify that trim is enabled. (If you didn't already know)

link:

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

 

I bought mine at newegg, 80GB G2 for $224.99.

Thanks, will run crystalmark when I get everything situated.

 

That is interesting, I got mine at zipzoomfly, 160gb G2 dated 10/31/09. I am truly surprised these things are sitting around as long as they are.

By the way I did update mine to the 02HD and it went without a hitch.

 

If you need to flash, I followed these steps and had no problem flashing.

Also, concerning TRIM, it looks like only MS drivers natively support trim. However, since the MS drivers didn't like my eSATA hotswapping, I went to IRST and just run the SSD Toolbox manually every week or so.

 

Using the Intel bootable CD, the flash went well. No problems. However, I couldn't get my Windows 7 to boot off my flash drive, was driving me nuts, thought it was the SSD. So now installing of DVD (sllloowww).

Also, I didn't have AHCI turned on before, but now I do with the SSD. Only problem is with my desktop motherboard, AHCI BIOS takes a good ten seconds to activate for some reason. My mobo is older, so probably the reason, but annoying nevertheless. I wasn't sure how well it would work in IDE mode, and wanted to make sure I could get TRIM to work. I think I can do it manually from the toolbox, but wasn't completely sure, so would rather go through a slow install process, and 10 seconds extra on boot, with added benefits once I'm in the OS.

I dunno, maybe I'm completely wrong. Not going to update motherboard just for this stupid thing. It runs perfectly fine, and will update when I decide to go with an i7. (currently Core 2 Quad Q9550, 8GB (4x2GB) DDR-800, GTX 260 core 216)

 

I ordered the same as you.. It arrived today and I installed it, everything worked fine even though my drive arrived with 02HA. Upgrade process went smoothly. Very impressive however, my Windows score is now 7.3 and the boot time went from 32 seconds to 13 seconds.

 

Stickler for absolute perfection but, 40GB in this day in age? I have a 160GB 7200RPM Hitachi travelstar and it's already filled to the brim, what's the point of getting an SSD for "speed" when it inefficiently, and according to you, requires that much space to work optimally, it's like having a 10L gas tank and only filling it up to 5 because it works better that way.

 

Ok, another dilemma. What about pagefile? I set it to custom min 512MB max 4096MB. I have 8GB RAM, just don't want it to consume 8GB of space if I don't need to. I also turned off system restore and hibernate. I never hibernate my desktop, only sleep.

 

You do not need another 8GB on your drive for a pagefile, the old adages of some random multiple of your RAM are less applicable today as the more RAM a system has the less it requires a pagefile/swap. I'd even go so far as to say 4GB is plenty for any current computer uses...

 

If I remember correctly, Tiller's numbers are for SSDs he tested from other manufacturers (not Intel) in his systems that he then returned. Davepermen (who tends to have a lively discussion with Tilleroftheearth over these matters ) maintains that as long as you stay under 80% for an Intel, you'll never notice a thing.

 

OK guy's I'm in the same boat with my M11x. Just picked up a 256GB Samsung SSD. Is there any way to verify that TRIM operating? And how do I ensure that system restore is turned off? I like the aspect of being able to revert back if a driver doesn't work out, but I also want to keep the SSD quick and prevent degradation as much as possible. I poked around in the restore area, but I don't see an option to turn it off.

I've also read that Cloning is a bad idea with SSDs. Throws off alignment. Is this really the case? If so, what about restoring an image from a dvd, is that bad as well? Can it throw off the alignment?

Is there anyway to wipe the drive and start over and somehow regain the initial speed?

 

Watching with interest as I'm getting an intel 160gb G2 soon.

 

Welcome to the club...nice world isn't it?

 

Got my Intel 160GB a couple of weeks ago. Well worth it. Makes the computing experience what it should be. Do a clean install, turn off system restore, update the firmware (if required) and then simply enjoy.
What you'll experience is the computer responds quickly and efficiently - i.e. it is waiting for you versus the other way around.
If you still have your doubts after you install - go jump on a system with a mechanical drive and you'll quickly see the impacts the SSD makes on your computer.

 

Congrats and welcome to the group!

There is alot of discussion around pagefile and alot that supports its not being used with a ssd and sufficient RAM. I would suggest anything 4Gb and above is sufficient RAM. I haven't used pagefile for several years and never once ever encountered a problem. Having a ssd, I enjoy the extra 3.5Gb I have gained back in return.

Personally, I would like to see any support that wouls suggest that you should not fill a ssd as you would any normal storage device. I think this should be dismissed as a wives tale until as, to the best of my knowledge, there is not a manufacturer out there that would tell you that you shouldn't fill their drive.

There is NO way to verify that TRIM is working. You can eecute the DOS command FSUTIL BEHAVIOR QUERY DISABLEDELETENOTIFY which, if it returns a '0' tells you that the commands are being sent to the hardware. You can also download crystal DiskInfo which will show the word TRIM in once executed but this is only telling the same thin as the DOS command.

To shut down system restore follow ControlPanel/System/System protection/Configure and shut it off.

Now a bit more with respect to System Restore as I am involved on a few threads which discuss this. Two days ago, I used the Intel Toobox Optimizer Tool and was shocked to find out the optimizer took over 2 hours. On top of that my write speeds dropped like 20mb/s. I looked back at my scores and determined that this had only occurred since I reinstalled 2 weeks ago and forgot to shut down system restore. So... I shut down system restore and then did TRIM again and it was instant like it should be which, even after done and redone with restore on, was a few minutes less. I then checked my performance again and it was back up where it should be.

Very concerning and it kind of makes me wonder as I had never experienced performance drops on ssds prior to the whole TRIM theory being realeased where the world said I had two. Simply all my ssds worked as they did from day one. My theory is that the ssd TRIM is a response to the fact that there was system slowing from System restore file allocation and the reason wasn't understood prior. I believe the ssd, without TRIM, can do the standard read, erase old info, write new without performance drops as it appeared to me with all my ssds that didnt seem to experience any performance degradation over a few years time. The key seems to be that I never had system restore on ever.

The concern now might be the effect that haveing system restore on would have on a G1 Intel or non-TRIM caable drive where the owner is not aware of any way to do a physical optimization of the drive as TRIM and the Toolbox does...

Just a theory...lets see how she pans out over time.

 

Les, thanks for the info. Tried the "fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify" and it came back with a zero. Now is there a certain time that it takes to clean up the drive? If I delete a large amount of data, then the drive will take time to run TRIM?

Also got system restore turned off. Thanks for that. I suppose it makes sense that system restore would drastically slow the drives performance as it would have to shuffle information around the old restore points that take more and more room on the drive and are probably scattered over multiple blocks causing it to not be able to fully delete leaving various pages wasted.

Any Idea how vista would run on an SSD? I know it doesn't have a TRIM capability, but I'm thinking of putting an SSD into my 1720 and wondering if it would be a lost cause as performance would degrade beyond HDD capabilities.

Thanks again +1

 

Just treat it like a HDD and let the OS handle all.
Maybe you want to disable system restore - that's it.

Things like disabling defragmentation are done automatically by the OS.

 

Just got the exact same Intel 80 GB G2 couple of days ago

Did a fresh instal of Windows 7 pro 64 bit and turned system restore off.

Working like a charm!

Quick question: should the automatic scheduled Windows defragmentation be turned off?

 

Tilleroftheearth's thread was here ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=436882). I think he may have had some more, or was just commenting in others for the rest of his experience. You should probably ask him directly for more details.

As well, just going off the way SSDs work, by leaving part of your SSD space open, there will be spare blocks available for wear leveling, so as you write to the drive, you can copy/write to an "open" block, and mark the previously used block as something that can be simply overwritten appropriately (reducing write amplification). In fact, as per Anandtech's SSD relapse, page 7 ( http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=7) that's a big part of why Intel's are so fast; they use all the open space on your drive as extra space to speed its writes. The next page expands on this, graphing how free space conforms to write amplification, for varying amounts of static data. And no, while a manufacturer won't tell you that you shouldn't fill the drive, they also may not tell you that as you fill the drive, it'll slow down, partly because even though it's slowing down, it's still much faster than any mechanical drive. Also note that this slowdown is really only for writing to the drive; reading data from the drive doesn't really suffer.

There is, actually, kind of a way to test, but it's a bit destructive, as it involves filling up your entire drive ( http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667&p=2), as you may not be able to notice any changes if you don't fill it up near capacity.

I'm not sure that system restore is the issue other people were having; as you can tell if you go through the articles, a lot of the slowdown is from filling up all the pages/blocks on your SSD. Having system restore will make this happen faster, as system restore will keep writing more and more data to your SSD, filling it up more quickly than you probably would otherwise. It may simply be that without system restore, you simply weren't writing enough to the drive to force it to do a lot of garbage collection when writing, and so you simply never noticed the single, very slight blip from the one garbage collection cycle, compared to the several slight blips from the multiple garbage collection cycles caused by the extra data written to the drive from the system restore.

Yes, although Windows 7 should do that automatically.

 

The defragmentation should be automatically switched off on Windows 7 - on Vista you need to do it manually.,

 

System restore isn't the only cause of degredation, it's just a big culprit of it happening sooner than on a system with it disabled. One way or another, you're going to write out every block on the drive. Normal usage takes a good bit of time, system restore speeds that up.

 

Interesting. For some reason on my Win 7 Pro (clean install) it was on, I had to manually turn it off.

 

I don't like Windows handling my pagefile in this case, because it wants to utilize 8GB (because I have 8GB system RAM) of my 80GB SSD, space is already limited.

Also, would it matter if you limit the size of your System Restore size using something like this:

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /Maxsize=10GB

(source: http://www.davescomputertips.com/articles/vista/change_vista_system_restore_size.php)

Either way I'll be turning it off, just curious.

 

How are you liking the general performance?

(And I forgot, is this in your desktop or one of your laptops?)

 

This is in my desktop because 80GB is just too small for a single drive. If I had a dual drive laptop I'd rather use it there because I use my laptop a lot more than my desktop. And I refuse to spend $500 on a storage drive. At the time I bought my Raptor (Over 4 years ago) it was 150GB, and somewhat small by standards then and cost me $300. Now I spent $225 (normal price is $300) for something half as big.

Performance, so far so good I guess. It definitely is more responsive, but not so certain it's worth the extra cost to be honest. Sure things load more quickly, and my OS boots up a little faster, but it shouldn't be a feature I pay a huge premium for.

I like it but it's kinda "meh". I think it's something that after you use it a while and go back to an HDD, you really think that the HDD is slow, instead of immediately thinking your SSD is fast. Kind of like HDTV. HD looks great, but SDTV looks horrible after you've watched HDTV most of the time.

One more thing, SSD's are freaky quiet. I'm so used to the spin up, it's almost like it's just a gimmick, lol. But I can see how that might be issue for troubleshooting. At least with an HDD you can tell if the drive is spinning up, you can hear failure signs, and have opportunity for some recovery as I've done in the past. SSD, I'm sure it will just quit one day without warning.

 

Add monthly checkdisks to your scheduler if you're worried. Intels are supposed to be super reliable, anyway, so don't worry too much. Regular backs are suggested, too, but I'm sure you know that.

I have almost the same opinion you do. I mean, I love the speed and everything, but I keep thinking to myself that I didn't need to drop $400 on the 160GB G2. As of this moment, with all programs and OS installed I'm using 45.5GB out of the formatted 149GB. I might add photoshop and maybe my Steam games to that total, but I bet I couldn't gotten away with a 80GB drive. Since I have a dual HDD setup with a Hitachi 7k500 it would've been no problem.

Oh well. When I decide to part with my G51, I'm keeping the SSD and selling it with the Hitachi. Future investment I guess.

 

Good point on the HDDs feeling slow after getting used to an SSD. I posted it in the SSD thread, but I got so frustrated with 30 minutes of installing programs on my parents' PC I ordered an X-18M G1 for my desktop and put my Vertex in their desktop. I couldn't subject them to a mechanical drive any longer.

 

I'm not so worried about it failing, but the fact that you won't have any indicators, or maybe you will. I dunno, just paranoid maybe. Would a chkdsk actually work with an SSD?

If an Intel 160GB SSD cost < $300 I'd buy it without much question, but at $500 (maybe less if you find a good deal) I just can't justify it. I mainly bought this to replace my aging Raptor, and prefer a fast drive for my OS and for a couple games that I like fast load times with. My Raptor may last me another year or two if not more, but I couldn't resist the deal and opportunity to try out the SSD's that everyone claims is so extraordinary.

 

Doesn't A-DATA have a deal with Intel to packages its drives? If so, then you can get a 160GB for $470 on Newegg. (It clearly says Intel on the drive and box, so it probably is a X-25M)

 

Sectors are sectors, so if you start having problems chkdsk will find them.

Which is exactly how SSDs are meant to be used. The non-time-sensitive stuff like movies and music can stay stuck on platters.

I do think, though, that SSDs will truly shine inside a laptop, since time*, battery life--however much you gain--and lower temperatures are benefits an SSD can help out with.


*By time, I usually assume you have some time to spare if you're sitting in front of your desktop, but that's not usually the case with a laptop.

 

Please post benches so we can verify. Congrats by the way.

 

What benches? There's gazillions out there for the Intel drives, which is why I wanted Intel, plus by the recommendations of respectable folks here.

 

Have fun with your new drive, you won't have any problems.
How much did you get it for?

 

$470 is still too much IMHO. $300 is my breaking point for ~150GB (equal to my Raptor), even now I think $300 is still a little high.

Thanks Angelic. It's $224.99 from Newegg.com. But by the time I sell my Raptor and a few other crap things on eBay for ~ $150 it'll be affordable. I've been wanting to try an SSD out for a while. So far I'm not as impressed as I thought I would be, especially for the cost. It's a welcome addition, don't get me wrong, but the premium you have to pay is not.

 

The intel can be had for around $425 if you do some searching and don't mind waiting for bing cashback. Babyhemi has 2 in the trading outlet now for $428 shipped...

 

Well see, what you need to do, is buy another one and run them in raid.
I suppose the raptor was fast as far as hard drives go, so you aren't feeling as large of an increase as the average user.

 

Still too much. But thanks.

True, and with two we're talking $450, so still, too expensive. And I don't believe TRIM is supported in a RAID 0 configuration.

 

One more question. Since this drive supports TRIM, would using the "Tony-Trim" method help any more, or just leave it alone? Thanks.

 

Leave the Intel alone - if you need to touch Trim - use the Intel toolbox.

 

just leave it alone.. Tony trim is a manual form of TRIM and with a G2 , u don't need to do anything as the drive will do the TRIM for u.