Few questions regarding setup and preparations for a new SSD

[Ashkael]

Hello all,

I recently ordered this Intel SSD. I've read a bit about SSDs and I'm excited to try them, but being a complete novice to storage setups I've got a couple questions that I was hoping someone could help me with. I currently own a Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB drive as well as a Western Digital Velociraptor 300GB.

My plan is to do a fresh install of Windows 7 64-bits on the Intel SSD and use it as a boot/OS drive, use the Velociraptor exclusively for my 150+ GBs worth of games, and the Caviar Black for music, movie and general storage. I know I am supposed to enable AHCI in the BIOS before installing Win7!

For reference, my motherboard is an Asus P6T Deluxe V2.

1. My i7 920 processor is currently overclocked to 3.8 Ghz. Should I reset all of my BIOS settings back to stock values before installing my SSD?

2. The TRIM command. Does my OS take care of this automatically or do I have to do something to make sure it's working?

3. More on TRIM. I saw in another thread in this forum that installing my motherboard's chipset drivers is a bad idea because it could disable TRIM support for my SSD. Problem: if I don't install the chipset drivers, I'll have a whole bunch of unrecognized devices and other errors in my device manager. What do I do?

4. The Page File and its size/location. I keep seeing LOTS of arguments about this one (some on this forum too). Some people claim that with enough RAM you can turn it off, others advocate leaving it untouched, yet others say to leave it on but to limit it's size/make it static or even move it out of the SSD. I currently run with 6GB of DDR3 RAM, and the performance monitor on my G19 tells me I barely fill 60% of it on really intensive games like Crysis or the Starcraft II beta. What should I do? Is it really that big of a deal to leave the page file on your SSD?

5. When installing Windows 7, a dialogue box comes up asking about partitions. Remember I'm a complete novice when it comes to storage. Should I be concerned with this screen at all or should I just let Windows do its thing?

6. I've seen plenty of arguments in favor of disabling or keeping on certain services (Superfetch, for example). Regardless of whether or not these arguments have a sound basis in fact, would it be a bad idea to disable some of these services if I'm using two HDDs in addition to my SSD?

That's basically it. Thanks in advance for any help. Also, don't be afraid to critique my proposed storage setup, as this is pretty much a learning experience in storage for me.

 

[Zap]

1. No. If you are positive your overclock is stable, then it should be fine with an SSD and with installing Windows.

2. Basically you need an OS that supports it (Win7 does) and a drive that supports it (Intel G2 does). Unless you muck about and disable whatever service is responsible for that stuff, I don't think you will have a problem. You can run Crystal Disk Info to verify your drive supports it and run the following command from an elevated command prompt (right-click, run as admin):

fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify

You will get back one of the two responses (parenthesis explains):
DisableDeleteNotify = 1 (Windows TRIM commands are disabled)
DisableDeleteNotify = 0 (Windows TRIM commands are enabled)

Since you are doing a fresh Win7 install on an Intel G2, you are good to go for Trim. You can check just for peace-of-mind, curiosity or edification.

3. There are Intel "chipset" drivers and Intel "RST" drivers (Rapid Storage Technology). I think it was RST that used to block Trim, but it has been updated (if you download latest version 9.6.x). Really though, the Intel drives are robust enough to function well even in the absence of Trim.

4. It is pretty much proven that some programs are negatively affected if Page File is not enabled, even if nothing uses it. Rather than worry about it, just leave it enabled. Now, because $/GB are really high with SSDs, set it to a very small and static (same min/max) size. Also, leave it on the SSD because if anything at all decides to hit up the Page File, then it will be fast.

5. Just let Windows do its thing.

6. Just leave everything else alone and don't worry about it.

Your proposed setup is good. Windows and apps on the fastest drive where they would see the most benefit. VelociRaptor 300GB that you already own for games since games usually don't benefit from faster access (WoW is an exception - if you play that then put it on the SSD, but if you play that then you probably don't have 150GB+ of other games, LOL). WD Black 2TB is overkill for storage (Green is fine), but you already have it so no biggie.

 

[Ashkael]

Wow! Thank you very much for the info! That pretty much cleared all my questions about SSDs.

And yeah, about the 150GB's of games. Let's just say I used to play WoW and when I finally quit, I had a LOT of catching up to do.

 

[killster1]

ok so i have a problem, i guess i should just not use trim? I had / have drives that seemed to be disappearing in windows 7 ultimate 64bit, i tried to install Ver:9.6.0.1014 Date:3/23/2010 of the intel drivers and it says "this computer does not meet the requirements for software install" so i went and downloaded some older drivers and not sure if it fixed my problem or not

planning on installing a 128$ kingston 64gb or a 80gb x25-m in the pc with hd problems but maybe i can justify upgrading mobo cpu ram if this driver that supports trim wont support my x48 motherboard?

 

[Zap]

killster1, are you running RAID? If not, no need to install the Intel RST drivers. Just enable AHCI in BIOS.

 

[Sunburn74]

Honestly the only things I think you need to do are:
1) turn off hibernate so that its not stealing hard drive space equivalent to your max ram (reclaims additional hard drive space for you)
2) turn off system restore and reclaim even more hard drive space (combining steps 1 and 2 reclaimed like 10-13 gb for me as I have 8gb of ram to start with)
3) turn on write caching and prevent windows from flushing the cache

Thats about it. I think intel says you can write up to 50gb a day for like 10 years before finally killing your drive. Little random writes of 4k over the course of a day can't even come close to your max limit (i doubt you even hit 500mb of random writes a day, heck even 100mb)

Take comfort that intel's eyes, really all you have to do with their drives is make sure defrag is off. The rest is gravy.