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Day 1 of SSD and some interesting...observation

F

fakebun

Member
Hi guys... I installed my OCZ agility 3 60gb SSD just now and I installed win7 and I have noticed something and am wondering if I did anything wrong.

1. during the installation, the COPYING WINDOWS FILE went almost instantaneously, but EXPANDING FILE part it took forever. So the overall installation speed was not fast, at least not what I expect SSD speed to be.

2. after installation I noticed that starting up (at the windows animation logo STARTING WINDOWS) was about the same time as before. Where it says welcome and the time it took from there to desktop was fast, but every time I format my drive and reinstall windows, it's always fast. I don't know if that fastness is contributed by SSD or just clean drive and clean installation of win7.

3. using winrar to unzip a big file (3gb+) is taking a long time.

Thank you
 
hey, congrats on the purchase! Seems like everything is working fine, but to make sure, what are you system specs, and is AHCI enabled in bios?

Also, I believe unzipping a large file is dependent on more things than just the disk it is on, such as the unzip program, CPU speed, etc.
 
Many of the activities you cite are related to processing speed, not disk activity, i.e., expanding file, and Winrar activity.
 
The expanding files part took a long time for me as well...but I noticed it was reading from the Optical drive so I blame it on that.
 
corkyg said:
Many of the activities you cite are related to processing speed, not disk activity, i.e., expanding file, and Winrar activity.
Click to expand...

This.

Well, that and Windows itself is just plain slow at a lot of things, especially I/O. I recently installed Win7 in VMware Workstation 8 with the vmdk on my SSD and while the install was faster than normal, it wasn't nearly as fast as I expected it to be.
 
Make sure you installed Windows with AHCI enabled in the BIOS, this is important.
Make sure you didn't have other, normal hard drives attached to your system while installing Windows on the SSD. Also, make sure that it actually did install on your SSD drive!

And finally, what kind of system is this installed in? I noticed a dramatic improvement in speed on my E5200 system when I first installed a 60GB Vertex2, and again saw improvements when installing Vertex3 and finally Chronos Deluxe in my current system.

Boot times and all loading times were cut down dramatically. However -- having put an ADATA S510 SSD in my netbook, I didn't notice a huge difference. Why? Because the processing power of the E350 APU is pathetically weak. So normal usage like Firefox lags and initial boot responsiveness (loading things immediately after taskbar is up) is pretty slow compared to my main system.

So things like what kind of motherboard, processor and RAM can have a --HUGE-- impact on the perception of speed after upgrading HDD to SDD.
 
So you know that windows startup animation where the four dots swirl around, collide, and form the windows logo that then begins pulsing?

When i installed my SATA III SSD (Plextor M3 128GB), the animation would not be able to get past the collision part to form the windows logo to pulse before presenting the user login window - the SSD was fast enough to beat the full animation of the windows startup.

Where does your computer finish with the startup animation?

Also, I could get to the login screen even faster if I disabled the windows startup logo altogether. So now my computer just shows a brief black screen instead of the startup animation, then presents the windows login screen. you can disable the animation under an option in the "msconfig" program.
 
corkyg said:
Many of the activities you cite are related to processing speed, not disk activity, i.e., expanding file, and Winrar activity.
Click to expand...

This. I put a Chronos Deluxe 240GB in my ICH9 SATA II laptop with a single core Celeron 900 2.2GHz.

When working with a large RAR, I barely see the "HDD" access light blink now and then, but the CPU is constantly at 100%. Even then it only took about 7 minutes from starting Windows 7 64 Home Premium setup from a USB 3.0 thumb drive capped at USB 2.0 port speed to first desktop load.

It's nerfed to hell on this little laptop, but it's still way faster than the 5400 RPM 250GB Hitachi it replaced. Being CPU or PCIe limited instead of disk I/O limited is always a good thing.

So yeah, basically CPU limited or programmed timeouts in your boot process (drivers, etc). Turn off anything in BIOS that you aren't using, etc. I even have my optical drive disabled unless I need it for ripping to a USB 3.0 thumb drive.

Desktop with 4 x Wildfire 240s doesn't allow the Windows 7 logo to complete (POST and RAID scan = all my boot time). Windows 7 64 Ultimate installs via USB 3.0 from my Patriot Supersonic 64GB in less than 5 minutes to first desktop load. An Agility 3 on an old nForce 4 system (forced to SATA I grr) with XP doesn't even show the XP logo, it goes from POST to desktop faster than the display can sync up to the rapid back to back display mode changes.
 
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thanks for the response guys.

im using i7-920 with 6gb ram (forgot the speed). mobo is X58 chipset and only SATA 3gb/s.

My startup animation went beyond complete and even stayed there for a while. I enabled AHCI in the bios but I also noticed there is another option that says SATA/IDE controller I think. I changed to that AHCI because if I leave it in IDE, my HDD would not show up.
 
You'll need to either re-install windows now in AHCI or do the"registry hacks" for it to run correctly. Windows needs to be installed with the bios in AHCI for the enhancements to work.
 
ya after I installed the SSD, I went into bios and changed it to AHCI. I installed windows AFTER I change it to AHCI
 
KingFatty said:
So you know that windows startup animation where the four dots swirl around, collide, and form the windows logo that then begins pulsing?

When i installed my SATA III SSD (Plextor M3 128GB), the animation would not be able to get past the collision part to form the windows logo to pulse before presenting the user login window - the SSD was fast enough to beat the full animation of the windows startup.
Click to expand...



Same here.
 
no I haven't

How can I tell if my SSD is working like it should? It is on AHCI. How can I tell from within windows?
 
After reading this I'm also thinking that I'm not getting the max speed out of my OCZ Agility 3. This is in a system with a Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 motherboard and the SSD hooked up to the Intel controlled 6GBps SATA port and not to the Marvell controller, I have an i5 2500K CPU if that makes a difference at all. The thing is I thought I installed everything in the correct order. I did have mechanical hard drives hooked up during the install process (didn't know that you shouldn't) but I did turn on AHCI in the BIOS before installing Windows 7. I have also installed the latest motherboard chipset drivers available. Is there something I forgot to do?
 
exdeath said:
Turn off anything in BIOS that you aren't using, etc. I even have my optical drive disabled unless I need it for ripping to a USB 3.0 thumb drive.
Click to expand...

How were you able to disable the optical drives?

I just went through my BIOS and I don't see how I can disable either of my optical drives. I see that I could switch their SATA ports from AHCI mode or IDE mode, but I just don't see how to disable them except for unplugging the power and/or the SATA cables.

Currently, the optical drives are set to AHCI mode and plugged into SATA ports. They cause a delay during the boot-up BIOS POST procedure, so it would be nice to disable them somehow without having to reach in and unplug cables. Perhaps my mobo just can't do it? (ASUS M4A89GTD Pro USB3)
 
KingFatty said:
How were you able to disable the optical drives?
Click to expand...
I can't, either, in the BIOS, nor have I ever seen a BIOS where you could do so without gimping SATA ports (IDE mode, then disable the IDE device). Making them external, or having a switch intercepting the cable, would be about the only way. OTOH, you could also leave the computer on most of the time, and not worry about it. Depending on PSU and peripherals, S3 will be, what, 10-20W?

fakebun said:
How can I tell if my SSD is working like it should? It is on AHCI. How can I tell from within windows?
Click to expand...
1. Windows boots. If you change the AHCI setting in the BIOS, it shouldn't boot anymore.
2. You see your SSD in the remove devices menu from the system tray.
 
what I did was I take an unused SATA cable and power connector and plug those into my SSD, secure it in tray, change it to AHCI, pop in win7 cd, then install. The HDD I was using just minutes before I put in SSD (still has windows installed) was still connected to my computer when I installed win7. any problems in those steps?
 
Cerb said:
I can't, either, in the BIOS, nor have I ever seen a BIOS where you could do so without gimping SATA ports (IDE mode, then disable the IDE device).
Click to expand...

Ah, hadn't thought of this. What do you mean by gimping? I'm wondering if I'd be able to do it without any gimping? More specifically, my mobo and BIOS have separate settings for SATA ports 5 and 6 where I've plugged in the optical drives only, so I could set those ports to IDE mode (presumably disabling the IDE devices, assuming my mobo allows that as I haven't checked) and set the SATA ports 1-4 to AHCI, where my SSD and HDD are plugged in. So if I do this, would you say I'm not gimping the SATA ports?
 
Read some good advice on another thread to free up some space, disable hibernate and reduce page file. I googled it and got a good explanation and halved my page file and disabled hiberate using dos command. Didn't realize windows sets page file to almost the amount of the installed ram. Why would you need that size with an ssd?
 
You don't need that size with an SSD. I would however set the "min and max" to the same size.
 
KingFatty said:
Ah, hadn't thought of this. What do you mean by gimping?
Click to expand...
IDE mode will not support NCQ or hot-swap. Not important for internal optical drives, but for SSDs and HDDs, you really want NCQ available. From what I read, that board has a JMicron chip for the eSATA and PATA, so you might be able to have AHCI for eSATA, while turning it off for a couple other ports.

I'm wondering if I'd be able to do it without any gimping? More specifically, my mobo and BIOS have separate settings for SATA ports 5 and 6 where I've plugged in the optical drives only, so I could set those ports to IDE mode (presumably disabling the IDE devices, assuming my mobo allows that as I haven't checked) and set the SATA ports 1-4 to AHCI, where my SSD and HDD are plugged in. So if I do this, would you say I'm not gimping the SATA ports?
Click to expand...
Probably. Native mode (sometimes just called "SATA"), if an option, might be enough to speed up boot times, too.
 
Cerb said:
Native mode (sometimes just called "SATA"), if an option, might be enough to speed up boot times, too.
Click to expand...

So if I had this, it would be a 3rd option for the port, letting me choose between: AHCI, IDE, or SATA?

Or is it a separate menu or something under a different menu setting separate from choosing either AHCI or IDE mode for the port? I don't recall seeing this, but I will look around in the BIOS.

Usually I wouldn't care, but now that I have SSD, it would make sense to reduce POST times by disabling or changing the setting for the optical drives.
 
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