X300 SSD slow? being full slows it maybe?

Dear all,
i've been using X300 since august, the day i got it i installed Linux ubuntu and took 50% of the disk for linux and 50% for vista (guess what out of the box 25GB is already used for vista!)

anyhow i feel the machine is slow not really like an SSD, i do have 4GB ram though

but comparing it with other SSD devices such as Asus EEE Pc the 8gb disk it boots into xandros linux (the default os it has) in 8-13 seconds for mine its about a minute

also day-to-day tasks are pretty slow some how, is it because of the low processor ?

just to point out my linux partition is almost full:
root@T42P:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 29G 27G 501M 99% /
varrun 2.0G 124K 2.0G 1% /var/run
varlock 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /var/lock
udev 2.0G 56K 2.0G 1% /dev
devshm 2.0G 12K 2.0G 1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1 30G 24G 5.7G 81% /win

what might be the issue ?

Thanks in advance for sharing thoughts

 

I am not well versed in ssds but did you check if your disk is in compatiblity mode or not? this is a bios setting

 

what is compatibility mode ?

i will reboot in few and check that options though

 

Legacy OS like Windows Vista, XP, and Applications like Microsoft Office 2003, 2007, etc. have built in, inherent flaws with regard to SSDs.

Specifically, optimizations of these OS for mechanical hard drives like superfetch, prefetch, etc. tend to slow down, rather than help performance and is unnecessary to speed up reads in an SSD, but slow it down with unnecessary writes of small files, which SSDs are slower than a regular hard drive.

Things like automatic drive defragmentation with Vista does nothing for SSDs except to slow them down.

Properly optimized, even low cost 2007 generation SSDs test out as equivalent to a 7200 rpm consumer grade drive, and typical SSDs made in 2008 or later tend to outperform mechanical hard drives.

See the discussion here for a detailed discussion of SSD performance tweaks and what it takes to make them perform well with legacy OS and Applications.

Go to OCZ Forum, SSD Freezing Stuttering for more info. Google it.

 

i dont use windows i use ubuntu linux

 

SSDs tend to slow down when those get nearly full. Can't find the link though ..

 

ah thats why

doing windows vista clean, if it doesn't clean i'll blow it out

thanks guys

 

its not on compatibility mode its AHCI , whats better AHCI or compatibility ?

 

With magnetic SATA hard drives, AHCI will be faster as it will enable NCQ.

Anyone knows the effect on SSDs?
NCQ will likely not help SSDs at all, and there might not be a performance difference. But that is just a guess. If one were faster, I would expect it to be AHCI. I don't think you can go wrong by choosing AHCI.

However, note that if your drive is almost full, there's a chance it is badly fragmented and THAT could lower your performance. Try defragmenting it.

 

AFAIK SSD-s don't need to be defragmented.

 

That is a wonderful theory, except, after defragging, performance improved.

I suspect it has to do with the wear leveling software and moving things around into larger blocks that is closer to the "clean" block size.

See the discussion on OCZ SSD Forum.

 

i'm a linux user thus i dont defrag anyway

i think its time to wipe out windows and see how fast is it with another ~25GB free

 

Filesystem free space has no bearing on SSD performance.

Defragmenting any flash drive will shorten its useful life by virtue of consuming flash erase cycles.

 

then what might be slowing my X300 ? the processor?