SSD advice please

I think you should not use RAID so you can get TRIM.

 

Well, after a day of using my PC with the OS installed on my new SSD I am extremely happy with it. Installed Crysis and had a fun couple of hours on that. I didn't think it would have an impact on the gameplay aside shorter times between levels but it seems my minimums were a lot better than they were. I wish I'd have tested to be sure, but I was only playing Crysis on my machine the night before installing the new drive and it felt quite stuttery in places. Now it's just smooth all the way.

/edit

Found something to back that up: SSD can double min FPS in Crysis

Bonus!

 

wouldn't putting them to RAID turn off TRIM support?

 

Some drives have a version of trim built into their firmware. some drives rely on the o/s to provide it

 

Those things are fast enough imho that you don't really need RAID. I think you'd benefit more in the long run with TRIM support than with the faster throughput of RAID.

 

I'm very happy with my new Samsung SS805 100GB SLC drive. Can't compete on pure numbers with new gen MLC drives but it's plenty fast for W7 OS drive and what was most crucial for me, protected from data loss thanks to SuperCap. Enterprise drive for the price lover than current MLC .

Boy oh boy I moved from 2x1TB Samsung F1 RAID 0 to this drive with my OS and there's no comparison at all . Very pleased!

 

In the most strict sense, TRIM is not "necessary." A good SSD controller should be able to consolidate empty spaces and erase them at idle time. However, in the case of deleting files, the OS simply mark those sectors as "available," so there is no way for the SSD to know which sectors are made available. This is where TRIM comes in.

Of course, in general, these available sectors will eventually be written over so they will eventually be reclaimed, although TRIM does provide potentially more empty spaces for better consolidation. The worst (or best) case is, supposed that you fill up the SSD with very little remaining empty space, then you delete a lot of files, without TRIM, the SSD would have only the spare spaces for consolidation and that generally leads to poor performance. However, as I mentioned in a previous post, it's a good idea to always maintain a sizable empty space on any HDD or SSD, so this "worst case" should rarely happen, if ever.

 

Ideally I could get Windows to not allow me to go less than a certain amount of gigs in free space on my SSD.

• Partition - don't think this will allow the SSD to use the space, so no.
• Limit user profile usage - won't help if I'm installing programs, or doing other adminy level stuff

Can this be done?

 

Partitioning the drive WILL WORK in reserving extra space for reclaiming if you do not use the sectors on it.

Behind the scenes the controller is managing ALL the flash cell blocks on the entire device, it doesn't matter what filesystem you have on top of it so long as an unused sector has nothing written to it. A partition does not use any particular flash cell blocks, they are referenced indirectly through a lookup table.

 

Anybody here actually doing this with SSDs?

 

I'm not doing that, but I still have around 70 Gigs free on my 120GB drive.

 

How dare you....
continue with this disgraceful behaviour and the Gaming Gods will smite thee...

 

If you have a nice SSD controller, then yes Actually, if you fill your MLC SSD nearly full, its performance won't be very good even if it has TRIM (of course, that depends on the size of its spare space).

 

To give a fuller picture, the SSD will still remain great for reads. Where it will faulter is in writes.

 

Reading around the reviews of my drive (or slightly different sized versions) it seems that they're getting better speeds than I am.

If anyone with a Kingston SSDNow Plus 100 96GB would like to share their benchmarks I'd be very interested in comparing. Here's mine, using HDTune:

Average Read: 147.5 MB/s
Access Time: 0.17 ms
Burst rate: 154.4 MB/s

 

You may want to post what motherboard you are using as well?