Samsung 840 500GB Question/Tips

Background. Please see specs below. My daughter's (Christmas ’08) HP DV4T-1000 (SATA II limited) is still in great shape and she used it last year in college as her freshman notebook. With only the Intel P7350 dual core 2GHZ processor however, she started having issues (long program starts and waits with layers) while running Adobe InDesign. Over the summer, I upgraded the notebook to 8GB RAM and installed an Intel P8700 2.53Gz processor. The notebook worked much better with InDesign, but was still a little sluggish with layers. I considered just getting a new notebook but thought I’d give a SSD a try… and if it didn’t do the trick I’d just move it to a new rig. I installed a new Samsung 840 500GB two nights ago and …. My Goodness… what a difference! Daughter ran InDesign yesterday (5 page brochure w/ multiple pics) and … no issues, very snappy!

I’ve gone through all the Magician settings and confirmed AHCI Mode, Trim Enabled, Prefetch/Super Prefetch Off, Indexing Off, OP… etc., but still have a couple of green bean SSD questions.

1. What do you do with Browser temp file settings with a SSD installed? Some I see suggest making it small, others say make it big (like 500mb) to help wear leveling, other say move it to another drive (not a viable option here). Over the summer I’ve watched how my daughter uses the machine and
after a day of doing whatever she does, CCleaner usually deletes 250 -300MB. Maybe this isn’t really enough to be concerned about?

2. What are the issues with Sleep and SSD’s? I don’t really care about sleep with the unit on external power but on battery I’d like to have the unit sleep so the fan stops running if left unattended. I just did a test and the unit seems to work fine returning from sleep but I’ve read some folks say it just adds
wear to the drive. Thoughts?

It would be really nice if she could just select sleep, put the notebook in its foam padded sleeve, and move to the next class. This year she’ll have a history class where copious notes are required followed directly by Advertising (InDesign use) 20 minutes later. Would it just be best to turn the notebook off?
BOOT time is about 18sec now excluding connecting to Wi-Fi and shutdown is like 5sec +/- 2.

3. Is CCleaner is an issue? Maybe run once a week instead of every day?


That’s it! Nothing serious. WEI hard drive score went from 5.8 to 7.8 and the AS-SSD score is 587 (SATA II). I was just hoping that perhaps someone here with years of SSD experience (like 2.0 or KLF perhaps) might have a few tips.

Best to all and thanks,

Dave

 

Run CCleaner as many times as you want (as long as it is just removing files and not doing a drive wipe...).

Erasing any old data/files will simply clear the nand cells (if you allow it to idle enough after CCleaner is finished so that TRIM can eventually kick in).


Browser files? Reset IE (or your browser of choice) to defaults and don't worry about this. Doesn't affect any modern SSD one way or the other (but a poor setting may hurt the systems usability).


As for the sleep issue. I disable Hibernate, Sleep and the pagefile (with 8GB or more) right after a clean install. Never had a system run stable for the lifecycle of my ownership with sleep enabled - even if it runs well for a few months or in one case for a couple of years before that system started giving problems.

As you've mentioned; boot times are so fast now that to me, sleep is not only unnecessary - with an SSD the issues could be much more serious (corrupt data) which would require a reinstall. I don't risk this with my systems.

Yeah, it is pretty amazing how usable the computer becomes with an SSD with ample capacity - even on older hardware.


I would also undo the 'magician' tweaks that disable superfetch/prefetch and especially undo the disabling of indexing too. These settings don't help/hinder the SSD at all but they can/will render the usability of the system next to useless with regards to indexing (especially on Win8).

Which version of Windows is the notebook running?


Other than that - I would also disable the 'magician' from automatically starting up. It doesn't add anything useful (except maybe check for updates to itself 'unreliably') and is another program at startup that can be effectively disabled with no loss of function (run it manually monthly to check for updates to software and firmware).


With the OP'ing - how much capacity is in use? What gbI would recommend is to 'shrink' the C: drive to as small as possible (leaving enough free space (~50GB or so) to allow for the temp and Scratch disk usage your daughter normally needs).

With the remainder left as 'unallocated' capacity - the system will incur the least WA (write amplification) while running GC (garbage collection) and TRIM routines. This in turn will give the highest sustained performance for the drive over it's lifetime.


To 'shrink' the drive:

Right click on Computer,
select Manage,
select Disk Management (on far left),
select the C: drive partition, right click and select 'Shrink'.


Don't worry to OP 50% or more (if possible with the above caveats) - if she needs more capacity in the future - you can always go back into Disk Management and 'Expand' the drive to the new capacity needed.


Hope this helps.

Good luck.

 

Thanks for the reply.

After complete Win 7 Pro 64 setup and all additional software and files installed, the drive currently has 199GB used, 220GB available, 46.5GB OP.

-- I just pulled Magician from the start-up… good one!

-- I put the Browser cache (IE10) at 250MB.

-- Killed Sleep and hibernation was already off.

-- Double checked disk align. We’re good.

-- Page File. That’s an interesting one. I ran the Magician (4.1) software for “Maximum Reliability” and it set the page file at 100MB initial size and 1024MB Maximum. We’ve been tinkering with the notebook for two days with the SSD and the pagefile.sys is still at 102,400k. Running stuff like Adobe InDesign or Premier Elements makes me wonder if she’d hit the “low memory warning”. Windows uses like 500MB of memory and shared video memory grabs another 1GB leaving about 6.5GB available. I considered turning the page file off but fear crash if she pushes the envelope. I was even considering increasing the maximum size to 2048. Once I drop her off at school next week, this thing needs to be as it has been… rock solid.

-- Indexing. I’ve always turned off indexing, even on standard HDDs. Just always seemed like indexing took up more resources than needed and I never minded the very occasional slow search. Perhaps that's just a bad habit from XP days. I just did an artist search via iTunes with indexing off and it seems pretty fast. Maybe the SSD effect?

-- OP. This one is a bit confusing to me. The specs on the drive are 512GiB nand with 500GB storage available and as always 465GB on windows after format. So with the current 46.5 OP (10%) do I have 46.5 OP or really 46.5 + 12 spare area = 58.5GB? I wish they’d just put this crap on the drive instead of making us do base conversions. see note here.

Thanks for the help and any additional insight is much appreciated.

Dave

 

Win7x64 Pro? Boy! I haven't used that in 1440 days...


No, search within a program isn't broken (it has it's own search database) - searching for files on the computer is broken with indexing off (maybe to a lesser effect on Win7?). Also, bringing up the start button and searching for programs gets broken with indexing off...


I don't let the actual amount of OP worry me - it isn't important to know in the day to day use of the drive. What I do know is that with (much) less than 30% left as 'unallocated' - the SSD's performance slowly (to me: quickly) erodes to below acceptable levels (worse case: below HDD levels - with stuttering, pausing and other program glitches because of the looooooong delays between user/program 'input' and actual drive response... even programs have a limit to their patience; they crash).

This 30% I calculate by taking the actual formatted capacity of the SSD - and multiply by 0.70 (to be used).

More specifically; when I'm installing the O/S, I choose custom install, select the SSD, choose create partition*** and punch the MB's indicated into a calculator and then multiply by 0.70 and that is the capacity of that specific drive I use (or less, if I can get away with it).


*** if the drive has been used before (with no OP'ing):

I delete ALL partitions on it.
I create a single partition (yeah, Win7/8 will create two or more...) and Format it.
I leave the system at this stage for at least half an hour (this is where GC and TRIM kicks in and brings the SSD to as close to 'as-new' as possible without doing a SE on the drive).

Now, I delete all partitions again.
'Pretend' to create a single partition (note the actual MB's writable on this SSD - it varies from unit to unit...),
Calculate the MB's at the 70% level (let's say 203000 for this example - so the MB's available would have been 290,000),
Create my C: drive partition - 102600 for Win7, or 103000 for Win8.
Create the D: drive partition - 100400 for Win7 or 100000 for Win8.
Now, I format the D: drive (so that the drive letter is assigned immediately after install/bootup by Windows).
Next, I choose the C: drive and click 'Install'.


For the pagefile: take the biggest file that your daughter might ever use and with the pagefile off - create new layers, edit/modify add and do as much as you can to this file - if Windows or your program doesn't complain about no pagefile - she should be fine (and you should notice a snappier system with it off).



The amount of OP in % to leave for a drive is an interesting question - but real world use on many different controllers has led me to the 30% rule - in addition to whatever the manufacturer and the GB vs. GiB conversions allow.


Again: OP'ing doesn't give you a faster SSD - it simply allows your SSD to operate as fast as possible, for as long as possible with no worry about the specific workflow (workstation class; not server class workload, of course) you throw at it.


Glad to have helped a little.

Cheers!

 

Ok... I just changed the OP to about 140GB (30%) of formatted drive space and I think I'll tinker a bit with the swap file. I just realized that InDesign "may" create its own scratch disk... not quite sure yet.... but if so...and as suggested... I may ditch the windows swap file entirely.
I may play with indexing a bit some more also.... at-any-rate....

Thanks Tiller for the time in response and for sharing your experience. Big Help!!

For what it's worth... Rep to ya... LOL....

Best, Dave

 

Tinkering again…. Oh No!

I was looking at the SSD again through Disk Manager and found an interesting difference in data. While the primary display indicates Disk “0” as 465GBs total capacity, when you change the size of the partitions the change display indicates the total available space as 476GB. Though I find it interesting that the two values differ and wonder how this is accomplished, at least I now see where the difference in 512GiB nand and 500GBs storage space is displayed as spare capacity on the Samsung SSDs. Therefore, you actually have about 11GB of unaccounted for OP on this drive… even when using the Magician software. Pretty Cool.

I still have indexing off and have no issues searching the drive. Found over 2100 .ini files. Perhaps this is more critical in Win 8 than Win 7?

Still researching the InDesign scratch file issue….

FYI, Dave