Extending the life of your SSD - Two Questions

[thatsright]

I have Win7 installed on a Intel 80GB SSD Gen 2.

1. Later on to improve performance (albeit a drastic measure), I can format the drive and re-install Win 7. What if I create an image of my Win 7 setup with the built in Win7 backup image create and then restore it onto my Intel drive after I format it? Will this get me 'like new' SSD performance or do I need to format the SSD and re-install everything one by one?

2. I am an avid photographer and though of using a portion of my SSD to work on my photos. I thought it was a good idea, but now I have doubts. Because it involves lots of repetitious copying/delting files. i.e. I dump 8 gig of photos on the drive. Work on them and then delte the folder. Thats a lot of data changes. Will this quickly impact the performance of the SSD?

 

[Red Squirrel]

I have Win7 installed on a Intel 80GB SSD Gen 2.

1. Later on to improve performance (albeit a drastic measure), I can format the drive and re-install Win 7. What if I create an image of my Win 7 setup with the built in Win7 backup image create and then restore it onto my Intel drive after I format it? Will this get me 'like new' SSD performance or do I need to format the SSD and re-install everything one by one?

2. I am an avid photographer and though of using a portion of my SSD to work on my photos. I thought it was a good idea, but now I have doubts. Because it involves lots of repetitious copying/delting files. i.e. I dump 8 gig of photos on the drive. Work on them and then delte the folder. Thats a lot of data changes. Will this quickly impact the performance of the SSD?

For 2 I would just use a regular sata drive. 1: they are much bigger for same price and 2: there will be lot of read/writes.

Also put your swap on the regular drive, and not sure if win7 has such options but see if stuff like temp can be moved to that drive too. Idealy you want as little writes as possible to the SSD.

 

[MJinZ]

Run Intel SSD Toolbox.

Done.

 

[Makaveli]

What I just did on my recently purchase intel 160GB SSD.

1. Moved the page file to my storage drive.

2. Moved the browser temp folder to storage drive.

3. All download folders moved to storage drive.

4. disabled superfetch not needed with an SSD.

5. disabled drive indexing

6. disabled the prefetcher

7. Moved the Temp and tmp folder that uses sits in c: to my storage drive.

Now when I view the resource monitor and disk activity there is alot less writes to the SSD then when at default.

 

[Voo]

You have TRIM so you don't win anything from formatting your drive.. just make sure that you have the current firmware and you're fine.


Also I don't think it's a good idea what Makaveli is doing - surely he get's fewer writes to the drive, but I would at least the temp folders and browser cache folders on the SSD.. after all we want the SSD to increase the performance.
Also prefetching/superfetch should be disabled by Win7 automatically if it detects a SSD (same with defragging).

But back to the life time of the SSD :
MLC flash has around 10k write cycles, which means in a perfect world you could write ~780TB of data to the drive. Because the wear leveling algorithm is far from perfect, TRIM,.. let's say we get only a tenth of these writes.

That'd still be 78TB of data. I'd use the drive for some time and look how much data you've written to it (the SMART data shows it).

If you wanted to use the drive for three years you could write 2TB of data every month onto it..

 

[Makaveli]

You have TRIM so you don't win anything from formatting your drive.. just make sure that you have the current firmware and you're fine.


Also I don't think it's a good idea what Makaveli is doing - surely he get's fewer writes to the drive, but I would at least the temp folders and browser cache folders on the SSD.. after all we want the SSD to increase the performance.
Also prefetching/superfetch should be disabled by Win7 automatically if it detects a SSD (same with defragging).

But back to the life time of the SSD :
MLC flash has around 10k write cycles, which means in a perfect world you could write ~780TB of data to the drive. Because the wear leveling algorithm is far from perfect, TRIM,.. let's say we get only a tenth of these writes.

That'd still be 78TB of data. I'd use the drive for some time and look how much data you've written to it (the SMART data shows it).

If you wanted to use the drive for three years you could write 2TB of data every month onto it..

i assumed that also and was wrong. Superfetch and the prefetcher was still enabled on my system after a fresh install with the trim firmware. There are reports of this all over the web aswell.

And I haven't noticed any difference in the system with those browser cache and temp files on a separate drive.

System is just as fast as the fresh install.

 

[thatsright]

Where do I check if prefetch is on or off? How do I turnn it on or off?

I think I will keep my browser temp files on C:, as IE/Firefox will reference them frequently and I don't want to slow those apps down.

But I will now dump and edit my photos on the 'regular' SATA drive. The original plan was to dump fresh photos on C:\ drive. So lets assume I'm at a big event and I have 16GB of photos (easy). So I work on them for a week or two, and happy with what I've done. I then copy everything (originals + edits) to my regular SATA drive, leaving behind 18GB of data to delete on the SSD. This might not be such a hot idea as I will often do this....

 

[Makaveli]

This is from a post on the intel forum.

You can disable Superfetch by going into Services (Local) and changing it to Disabled.Type services local in the Start Search bar and click on View local services, then scroll down the list to Superfetch where you will see if it is disabled, on manual, or on automatic.


You can disable Prefetch by going into your registry and making the following change: Hkey_local_machine\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet \Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters, right click Enableprefetcher, hit modify and change 3 to 0 and hit OK. Once you click OK you can exit Regedit.


You should backup your registry before making any changes. Disabling Superfetch and/or Prefetch is entirely up to you.


I will continue to test with the browser cache on and off the ssd, but the swap file is staying off.

 

[skid00skid00]

In the case of Intel SSD's, it's 'common knowledge' that you can write 20GB a day to the drive, and expect a 5 year lifetime. In my case, I have 889 hours of up-time on my C drive, and have written 2.50 TB to it. SMART says I've used up ~2% of the drives' lifetime.

 

[Makaveli]

Where do you see the % of the drive lifetime in the smart section of the toolbox?

 

[skid00skid00]

Media wearout indicator.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Do spindle drives have this indicator as well? That is pretty cool to see. I just checked and it does show hours but can't seem to find an entry for total TB transfered.

Still pretty useful info though:

[root@borg ~]# smartctl --all /dev/sda | grep Power_On_Hours
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   088   088   000    Old_age   Always       -       11202
[root@borg ~]# smartctl --all /dev/sdb | grep Power_On_Hours
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0012   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       10408
[root@borg ~]# smartctl --all /dev/sdc | grep Power_On_Hours
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0012   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       10414
[root@borg ~]# smartctl --all /dev/sdd | grep Power_On_Hours
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0012   098   098   000    Old_age   Always       -       16445

 

[Makaveli]

Media wearout indicator.

ah thanks mine is still at 0%

 

[Swivelguy2]

What I just did on my recently purchase intel 160GB SSD.

1. Moved the page file to my storage drive.

2. Moved the browser temp folder to storage drive.

3. All download folders moved to storage drive.

4. disabled superfetch not needed with an SSD.

5. disabled drive indexing

6. disabled the prefetcher

7. Moved the Temp and tmp folder that uses sits in c: to my storage drive.

Now when I view the resource monitor and disk activity there is alot less writes to the SSD then when at default.

1, 2, and 7 directly reduce the performance of your system at a gain of potentially a slight increase in SSD lifetime.

4 and 6 reduce performance without any impact on your SSD lifetime at all - because prefetch and superfetch only read and don't (or very rarely) write to the disk.

 

[Makaveli]

1, 2, and 7 directly reduce the performance of your system at a gain of potentially a slight increase in SSD lifetime.

4 and 6 reduce performance without any impact on your SSD lifetime at all - because prefetch and superfetch only read and don't (or very rarely) write to the disk.

Quite a few people have said this, yet i've not noticed any slow down in my rig at all. My machine doesn't really touch the page file at all based on the applications and games I run they all fit into 6GB of ram in my machine nicely. Machines seems just as fast in my daily usage.

Thank you to all for the feedback tho, the testing it still on going.

These are the specs for my rig

|| Core i7 920 D0 HT @ 3.6Ghz @ 1.25v ||
|| TRUE Black Rev.C + Scythe S-Flex 1900 rpm ||
|| P6-T Deluxe V2 || 6GB Muskin DDR3-1600 Cas 7-8-7-20 1T ||
|| Sapphire 4890 + S1 Rev 2 || Enermax Infinity 720 Watts ||
|| Logitech G15+G5 || Windows 7 X64 || Intel 160GB G2 SSD ||
|| WD 1TB Black Storage || WD 640GB Games/ISO's||

 

[railman]

Quite a few people have said this, yet i've not noticed any slow down in my rig at all. My machine doesn't really touch the page file at all based on the applications and games I run they all fit into 6GB of ram in my machine nicely. Machines seems just as fast in my daily usage.

Thank you to all for the feedback tho, the testing it still on going.

These are the specs for my rig

|| Core i7 920 D0 HT @ 3.6Ghz @ 1.25v ||
|| TRUE Black Rev.C + Scythe S-Flex 1900 rpm ||
|| P6-T Deluxe V2 || 6GB Muskin DDR3-1600 Cas 7-8-7-20 1T ||
|| Sapphire 4890 + S1 Rev 2 || Enermax Infinity 720 Watts ||
|| Logitech G15+G5 || Windows 7 X64 || Intel 160GB G2 SSD ||
|| WD 1TB Black Storage || WD 640GB Games/ISO's||

I have a system setup in a similar manner as yours and I agree with you that system performance is great, no slowdowns, no performance loss!

 

[railman]

Where do I check if prefetch is on or off? How do I turnn it on or off?

I think I will keep my browser temp files on C:, as IE/Firefox will reference them frequently and I don't want to slow those apps down.

But I will now dump and edit my photos on the 'regular' SATA drive. The original plan was to dump fresh photos on C:\ drive. So lets assume I'm at a big event and I have 16GB of photos (easy). So I work on them for a week or two, and happy with what I've done. I then copy everything (originals + edits) to my regular SATA drive, leaving behind 18GB of data to delete on the SSD. This might not be such a hot idea as I will often do this....

You should not have any problem with your deleting of data. You have a TRIM enabled drive. Trim does not run by itself, it must be invoked by, most commonly, a delete command. Once you choose to delete your photo data a TRIM command will be sent from the OS to the SSD controller which will execute that command. This execution will be immediate and all cells that contained the photo data will immediately be reset and marked as free cells ready to written to again.

 

[thatsright]

You should not have any problem with your deleting of data. You have a TRIM enabled drive. Trim does not run by itself, it must be invoked by, most commonly, a delete command. Once you choose to delete your photo data a TRIM command will be sent from the OS to the SSD controller which will execute that command. This execution will be immediate and all cells that contained the photo data will immediately be reset and marked as free cells ready to written to again.

Cool.

But, I don't think I'll dump/work on my photos on the SSD drive. I was really, reaaaaly looking for a big jump in read speed when Adobe Bridge CS4 catalogs all the photos, but I don't see any improvement in those times. I'll try it out a few more times, but I may just want to cut out the middle man as I'll have to put the pics on my WD Caviar SATA drive eventually.

I'll also see how Firefox performance will be with temp/cache files are on the SSD drive. If performance of the SSD slows noticeably, I'll move the temp files to a spindle drive. BTW, does anyone know where/how to move the Firefox cache folder to another drive?

We'll see.....

 

[Makaveli]

yep the firefox browser tweak is here

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showpost.php?p=442160&postcount=5

 

[skid00skid00]

thatsright, If you don't see Bridge being faster, then your cpu is maxed out making the thumbnails. You might want to try overclocking!

 

[thatsright]

thatsright, If you don't see Bridge being faster, then your cpu is maxed out making the thumbnails. You might want to try overclocking!

Funny thing you should mention this. I just had Bridge CS4 catalog about 350GB of photos. CPU usage occasionally peaked at no more than 70% with the 4 cores. Mem usage never went above 600MB. The whole process took about 4 hours.