SSD partitioning and free space (not alignment!)

hello,

after reading over months on this forum (thx alot) I decided for a MX nano 120G SSD for my Dell D430. I will freshly install Win7, so alignment shouldn't be a problem. still, two questions stayed unanswered (because of so many different oppinions I tended to not trust every post on every forum ...)

1) partitioning: I plan one 60GB partition for win7 and apps, another 60GB partition for data. possibly, I will later try to squeeze in another smaller one to try out new OS.
a) do I have to pay attention to specific SSD issues when creating more than one partition the first time? should it be 2 primary or 1 primary and 1 extended with logical ones inside?
b) I would let the win7 installer do this, so alignment shouldn't be an issue. in any case the system asks me, I will set 4k as block size, right?
c) if I re-partition at a later moment (eg resize the data partition to make room for another partition) -> are there some SSD-related problems?

2) there is the information that SSDs need some free space to operate well. I couldn't pinpoint whether SSDs already have some free space for themselves reserved (some GB beyond the 120GB I see) or I have to take care of that myself, as this is probably also HW-related
If I have to take care of that myself for a MX nano 120G:
a) how much free space should I provide (in % of the drive size)
b) does this have to be free, unpartitioned and unformated space? (and not unused space of a formatted partition)? would it matter if this unpartitioned, unformatted space is at the beginning or the end?
c) if the free space merely means unused space of a formatted partition: do I have to provide this for every partition or is free space on one partition for all partitions enough?

I'm already so curious about the performance. I started with SSDs roughly one year ago with a ProIV SSD but had many problems due to controller and firmware-update issues. I switched back to a 5400rpm drive which is ok but still way slower than the ProIV was. hope this time everything goes well from the beginning.

starfish7

 

partitioning is virtual on ssd so you should just look that there are 40% free space on your partitions all together. If it will be less you will decrease performance but it doesn't mean that you can't do that.

 

40% ? that is too much. Most SSD has a natural 7% free space due to the 1024 vs 1000 thingy.

If you are paranoid like me, keep it to about 17-20%(total, i.e. 10% free space of the visible size) and it should be fine. This is the optimal point based on Intel's study.

It is not a hard ceiling and don't lose sleep if you can't have that. even the natural 7% works fine for 90% of the situation.

 

well at first time ssd created it was saying about 50% free space needed. Yeah, I know that TRIM did not exist that time.
Produsers usually take 1chip (8GB i guess) for firmware and for reserve. Other space disappears because of that 1024=1000. but depending on brand that reserve space may vary.

 

Depends on the brand as to whether they use overprovisioning on the SSD. Check your specs for this. I always hook up my SSD's as an external and format and align @ 4K before sticking it in the computer and installing the OS. When you do this, you don't have to format or wonder if it's using the correct alignment during the OS installation. You could even create your partitions when hooked up externally to make sure you get exactly what you want.

 

Hello,
about a month ago I installed WinXP SP3 (after dumping Win 7 due to slow UI and hardware incompatibility) and everything worked fine: I aligned with GParted and also disabled automatic defragmentation. I didn't do the Bar-Edit trick so far, as performance was very well and similar to other user experiences with a SSD and a D430.

yesterday I did trim my SSD as described in this forum: "sdelete -c c:" My PC crashed during it (don't know whether blue screen or not, I was asleep and found the PC not finding a hard drive when trying to reboot) and since then my computer is extremely extremely slow! starting Windows XP takes about 10 minutes.

I disabled the also yesterday enabled SSD tweaks of SSD tweaker (ver 1.9.4. could there be a correlation?), reinstalled the chipset drivers, but nothing changed ... still, booting takes ages and PC is generally very slow - and the HDD LED is constantly on.

I just ran sdelete again and it takes very very long - shouldn't it be very fast, as I already did it yesterday? could there be a correlation between the slow boot-time and sdelete (I think sdelete is only improving performance when writing to the SSD, but booting Windows does mainly read from SSD, right?)

I also found a very interesting error in the log files which happend during the night, when most likely the PC crashed:

Het stuurprogramma heeft een controllerfout gevonden in \Device\Ide\IdePort0.
meaning: "The driver found a controller-error in \Device\..."

can anybody help me? I don't want to reinstall again! everything worked well until yesterday and the crash ... I did trim also before but never had any problems with it!

 

Is ssd firmware up to date? What is your SSD? Trim function is automatic and start itself when computer idle so maybe when you forced computer to trim it started doing some task and therefore it crashed. I would start process idle tasks before trim, I would ask someone to create bat file with 2 commands:idle and trim if it is possible. Ask him if he can help you with that file.

PS Why did you choose XP? I have old HP with DDR-333 RAM, single-core cpu and HDD and I decided to use windows 7 no matter how big XP fan I was.

 

Hello, there is no firmware update available and yesterday everything worked fine - so that shouldn't have caused the problem. I have a MX Nano (MXSSD1MNANOZ-120G) so no TRIM support and TRIM has to be started manually. Actually, I also had Google Desktop Search running and indexing yesterday (but disabled today in the morning as I thought this might have caused the problems) during the TRIM, probably was not very smart (but again: TRIM only does zero the free space and when GDS is reading all the files indexing, they shouldn't interfere a lot ...). I don't know about the idle task though ..

concerning XP: I tried Win7 and I didn't like it: my webcam didn't work/crashed Win7, my microsoft(!) keyboard special functions didn't work any more, my TV card didn't work any more. I tried some hacks found online but at the end many didn't work or only worked partially. The UI is definitely better but also slower. I all, I didn't find it worth the better UI to deal with non-working hardware and slower UI performance (updates take ages, file explorer is much slower, couldn't bluetooth sync my mobile phone, etc etc etc) I'm limited to 2GB RAM in my D430 and otherwise I love the D430, it's just the perfect solution for my uses. and I'm just not willing to buy a complete new notebook (including fitting docking station, probably newer mobile phone, etc) just because of a somewhat improved UI ....

 

Oh. I would suggest you do a reset format or similar thing with SSD. Google tasks were really excessive. Before that PLEASE try roll back to the restore point before crash. It will help if problem is with missing or corrupted files.

Yeah it is slow file explorer in Windows 7 but I am very surprised you are saying this about Windows installed on SSD! Looks like your processor is weak.

Mine HP has 1.5 Gb RAM (2GB max) and I bought new processor. It is MUCH faster now But my heart bleeds when I see how my younger sister use it All display is dirt etc. I wish I had 4 years ago better CPU and 1.5GB RAM in that lappy

ADVISE. Buy new CPU from eBay. I suppose you have Intel Pentium M? You can buy 1.8Ghz Sl7enfor about 20$ or 2.0Ghz for 40$ +-5$ Sl7em

 

Hi James,

what do you mean with "reset format"? you mean formatting and reinstalling WinXP? I actually try to prevent that, I don't want to spend another day reinstalling everthing again ...

I don't have a system restore, I always deactivate it ;-) So far, I never needed it. I also mistrust the whole system restore stuff, I'm not sure whether it actually works as it should. haha, that's the revenge now ...

What I will try is to do a TRIM today in the afternoon without anything running beside, probably this solves the whole thing.

ad windows xp: My D430 has a ULV (ultra low voltage) Core2Duo of 1,3MHz - the fastest CPU available for that Notebook. apparently it's still too slow for windows 7. I definitely cant upgrade the CPU, it's soldered to the mainboard (the D430 has something like 1,6kg). but I guess the bottleneck is actually the GM945 graphics controller - had a performance score of 2.1 in the Windows 7 performance test ...

 

starfish7707,

I think that you've backed your SSD into a corner and the only way to recover it's performance is by Secure Erasing it.

First, you're using it on an ancient O/S that doesn't support TRIM. Then, you hammer it with sdelete and you finally have brought it to its knees.

Take your data off of that drive, SE it and stop trying to 'optimize' your system to death again.

Good luck.

 

hi tiller,
I just did some research about secure erasing (didn't know that's also a way of maintenance foor SSDs). As far as I understood SE, it is the same like TRIM, except that SE zero's all blocks (=losing all data), while TRIM only zero's the free blocks.

If you say, I had hammered it to its knees by using TRIM. what else should I use to retain performance? According to nando4 posts, my SSD doesn't have TRIM anyway, so even with Win7 I would have to execute TRIM once in a while ...

I just want to understand myself, thx!

 

That secure erase is exactly what I was talking about saying reset format. Just was not sure how it is called. I do not know what it really does but i know that it completely rolls back it to factory speeds. But it reduces lifespan. I guess it is low-level formatting using special format tool.
Use garbage collection and I think you will not need use sdelete. Otherwise do what I said before: ask someone to create bat file for you with processing idle tasks and sdelete but I would not do that. Your system still will not be capable using SSD on max because CPU is a bottleneck.

 

When you have no TRIM, you have no TRIM. Period.

What you're doing with ssdelete is killing the drive. A SE will bring it back to original performance levels.

TRIM doesn't 'zero' the blocks - it cleans them - literally prepares them to be written to again. When you run ssdelete you are simply writing to them and they have to be cleaned and written (with real data) again - this is how you're 'killing' your drive.

The best you can hope for is to SE the drive, use it normally as long as possible and if/when your normal use (forget about all those 'tweaks/optimizations' too) makes it too slow again, SE once more to bring the performance up to snuff.

You will need to continually do this until you either move to a modern O/S with real/proper TRIM and also to a more robust SSD (that also natively supports TRIM).

What you need to keep in mind: TRIM is not 'writing 'zeroes' to the nand' (which is what ssdelete does); TRIM is trying to reduce the read/erase/copy/write cycle of 'dirty' nand chips by cleaning the nand cells that contain 'invalid' data (data we've either erased or otherwise don't want) and preparing them to accept our next write request (and doing simply a write, instead of a read/modify/erase/write cycle which dramatically slows down an SSD to a crawl - as you've experienced firsthand).

See:
AnandTech - The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ

For a better explanation of the read/modify/erase/write 'dance' an SSD must do when all it's nand pages are 'dirty'.

 

Once a file gets deleted, the block it was written to, will be marked as a used block and it will be treated as invalid block and won't be available for new data to be written.

 

yalcin19,

Not even close. Please read the Anandtech link in my post above.

 

actually, quite close.

 

hello,

thanks for the replies. I try to understand as much as possible, but I still have a hard time, sorry

@tilleroftheearth
you write: "TRIM doesn't 'zero' the blocks - it cleans them - literally prepares them to be written to again. When you run ssdelete you are simply writing to them and they have to be cleaned and written (with real data) again"

so TRIM preparing blocks to be written to again, right?
but I don't get TRIM with ssdelete (or sdelete?), because you write "run ssdelete you are simply writing to them and they have to be cleaned and written" (so ssdelete doesn't clean them while TRIM cleans them, but not zeroing them)

but then you write: "TRIM is not 'writing 'zeroes' to the nand' (which is what ssdelete does);"
so again, TRIM is not writing zeros (I understand that now), but then you write: ssdelete (or sdelete) does

also, why does eg nando4 write here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...age/531052-1-8-zif-pata-ssds-available-3.html

"Can perform a periodic Tony Trim to NULL out empty blocks so GC can scrub the drive to 'as new' write performance levels. Even simpler is to schedule sdelete to do this instead, eg: 'sdelete -c c: & sdelete -c d:'"

in the help of sdelete it says:
parameter -c = "Zero free space (good for virtual disk optimization)"

The bottom line:
sdelete (or ssdelete) IS NOT TRIM!! (while nando4 says so in his post). or is sdelete = TRIM but ssdelete <> TRIM??

Apparently I don't see through and I'm very unsure whom I should believe or not.

Thus, is there any concise and straightforward explanation (the anandtech site doesn't talk about trim or zeroing) of the what these technologies or methods actually do and which method I have to use with a specific OSs and SSD:

- TRIM
- sdelete (or ssdelete?)
- GC
- SErase (while I understand most of that so far I guess)

------------------
update to my pc: yesterday after I could start my OS, I worked on it a couple of hours, but gladly only had to write documents and surf the web which was acceptable. I didn't do a TRIM or something but I reinstalled the chipset drivers (as I noticed my computer will stall (eg no sound in videos, etc) as soon as the SSD is accessed - although I now think that was quite useless) re-enabled the prefetch function again over SSD tweaker and after ~6 hours I tried a restart. And I got almost the same fast speed as before! It still takes a bit longer, but whatever, i'm happy to be able to use my computer again (I can even watch HD movies again). I don't dare to put more load on my pc (eg GDS indexing)

 

nothing is like trim if you don't have trim available.

trim informs that this data-region is EMPTY, that means the ssd can prepare it as best.

anything else does NOT inform the ssd, that this data-region is empty. it just writes different data to it. now if it's filled with zeros (or ones), it's FASTER to rewrite later again. but it does not mean the ssd knows it to be an empty region. it doesn't. it always have to look at this data as being important. can't move it around that much, have to remember "where it belongs", etc.

with trim, an ssd can do what ever it likes with the trimmed region.

 

hi daverpermen

thanks, now I get it!
I can't really upgrade to a TRIM 1,8" SSD, would cost around EUR 300. and a TRIM enabled SSD wouldn't be of much use in a non-TRIM OS like WinXP I guess ...

so, would you also recommend to not sdelete (=zero out) anymore because of SSD wear but instead just wait until the SSD is too slow and do a backup + SErase + recover?

thx alot

 

Sorry to chime in.
I agree that for a SSD and an OS with no TRIM support Secure Erase is the preferred way to restore performance.
But it also depends on the implementation of SE in the firmware.
If I do SE to my Samsung 470 128 GB it takes about 4 min. It would have taken more time if all blocks were cleared(erased).
Just my 10 cents.
With Secure sae

 

I didn't read through all of these posts, but to answer a few:

2) IIRC, The SSD manufacturers set aside a certain amount of space that cannot be used or included in partitions.

Reset format, I believe, is James D's way of saying Secure Erase.

Why don't you trust system restore? Given that you have a SSD, you should limit the amount of space SR can take up, but you better have a good backup plan if you plan to keep it turned off.

Allow me to explain my view on SR. It works. I've never had any problems with it. You can undo so many mistakes by moving back to a restore point. If you don't have SR enabled, this means that you should have a System Image backup from which you can restore your C:\ drive when anything goes awry. Right now, you're talking a 60GB C:\. Now, let's say that you install something and it screws things up. You try to uninstall and it won't work. Well, since you don't have SR, you can't step back to before the install. Now, you're only option is to restore from the System Image. This can be anywhere from 20-40GB, depending on the contents of your C:\ and even larger if you don't partition at all and keep all of your data pooled together. 20-40GB per write per recover can deal some damage to the life of your SSD (in theory), when SR has virtually no impact.

 

Hi anseio,

thanks for the input! I still don't know ;-) so far, I never used the SystemRestore (even now the problem was not Win-related but SSD related).
in previous times a regularly had a full system backup (norton ghost) and I think I needed it once. so in fact it was never worth the effort (ok, SR wouldn't be a lot effort, I know). but while a loss of data (which I backup every 1-2 days to an external hdd) could be fatal, a loss of the system partition is tiresome and annoying but not fatal ...

But back to the SSD problem:
The wikipedia page about write amplification finally made everything clear for me
Write amplification - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

also very recommendable is the wikipedia page about trim:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM_(SSD_command)

sad that I didn't find those pages earlier ...
what I still don't know whether there are some tools for non-TRIM controllers to simulate the TRIM function (eg a partial SErase). I don't think it can be so difficult to inform the controller which LBA references are dead and can be scraped when GC.

I just wrote an email to the mach xtreme support which possibilities I have to TRIM my EWS720 SSD or whether we can expect a firmware update. So let's see

 

I also posted about this issue just the other day... http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...579985-ssd-ram-drive-worth-2.html#post7551464

I haven't gone through the entire thread here, but if your drive doesn't have a garbage collector or you are not using a TRIM enabled SSD/OS combo, then your best bet is to find something like the "Tony Trim" (do a search) process. As mentioned, SSD pages have to be "empty" to be written with a group of 1s or 0s. So you will need a tool which will set each each cell within the page as empty.

 

ok, I just got the reply from the mach Xtreme customer service concerning whether there is a way to replace/imitate TRIM with the MX-NANO:
-----
Dear Sir,

No. The MX-NANO series product not support Trim command but we have
GC(Garbage Collection) function.
The GC function almost like Trim command it will keep performance good with
your SSD and the function will active automaticly.

Thanks
-----
that somehow contradicts that TRIM and GC depend on each other but well ... probably its a "special" GC or probably some marketing-blabla.

I started to test the performance of the MX-NANO on a regular basis to check whether the write performance considerably deteriorates. I will, for the record, post those performance tests after a couple of months here. As my user behaviour is always the same (I don't do fancy installs or reinstalls all the time but mostly use my notebook for email,documents,web,music and up and then a movie) I guess this could be representative.

 

That is what I wrote 10 days ago.

 

That is what I wrote 10 days ago.

You forgot to add that you also like to test the performance of the MX-NANO on a regular basis to check whether the write performance considerably deteriorates which is slow killing. If I had been your SSD I would ask you either send me back to store or just shoot me