Intel x25-m - Wait for G2 and installation?

[spufaru]

I have a new computer arriving (August 21ish) with OEM Vista installed on a conventional 7200rpm platter, which I'll be adding a SSD to as boot drive. Is there any compelling reason not to wait for the x25-m G2? I have a free upgrade coupon for W7, so I'm obviously interested in TRIM support.

A few other newbie questions:

1) What's the easiest way to get clean (I'll hold off installing anything until the SSD arrives) OEM Vista over to the SSD, just a fresh install and then format the 7200rpm drive which will be used for data? Should I register Vista on the 7200rpm drive or do the new install first?

2) Will my new machine typically have the necessary power adapter and SATA cable to plug into the new SSD?

3) Does the retail G2 box from Newegg come with a 3.5->2.5 adapter? And if not can I just tape the SSD to my drive bay?

Thanks

 

[rcpratt]

As to the first question, I'm not sure what the alternative is to not waiting for the X25-M G2? Getting a G1? I would wait for a G2.

1) Clean install is fine, or you can clone the drive using Acronis True Image (trial software is available), either way you're not going to have issues activating Vista - go ahead and do it the first time. There's also nothing wrong with installing all the programs you want on the HDD and then cloning it, it will work fine.

2) If you can install a SATA HDD, you can install an SSD.

3) No. Taping it is fine, I bought a fairly nice adapter just because I move my desktop around a ton.

 

[glugglug]

It doesn't come with an adapter, but its small and light enough you can be pretty creative in the mounting.

See if you can spot the SSD in this pic. Hint: it is NOT in a drive bay.

http://imgur.com/o82cf.jpg

 

[jimhsu]

Taped mines to an otherwise empty drive bay on the bottom. I could have left it simply dangling, but I ship my desktop via airline (carryon, of course) so that's not necessarily the best idea. The drive will survive banging into your components; your other stuff, maybe not.

 

[taltamir]

mine is just sitting on the side. its so small and light and durable...

 

[Cookie Monster]

I got myself this.

 

[WonderSausage]

Originally posted by: rcpratt
you can clone the drive using Acronis True

No, you should NEVER use a sector-based clone tool like Ghost or True Image to put data onto an SSD. If you must clone a drive to an SSD, use a file-based clone tool, ideally Vista/Win7 ImageX from the WAIK.

You must create a brand new partition on an SSD using either Vista or Windows 7 DISKPART (or simply Vista/Win7 Setup) in order for the partition to be aligned properly with the SSD architecture. If your partition is not aligned, you will encur extra flash cell writes for every write you make, and performance will dramatically suffer.

WS

 

[jimhsu]

But on the Intel X25 in particular it shouldn't matter because the filesystem doesn't even map to the corresponding LBA locations. The SSD handles that.
On the older Vertexes with old firmware, yes it matters.

 

[Cookie Monster]

So we can just clone/image our OS drives for example on to a X-25M without worrying about alignment sizes and what not?

 

[jimhsu]

http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/20...ssds-erase-block-size/ :

All of this being said, it?s time to revisit this question ? is all of this needed for a ?smart?, ?better by design? next-generation SSD such as Intel?s? Aligning your file system on an erase block boundary is critical on first generation SSD?s, but the Intel X25-M is supposed to have smarter algorithms that allow it to reduce the effect of write-amplification. The details are a little bit vague, but presumably there is a mapping table which maps sectors (at some internal sector size ? we don?t know for sure whether it?s 512 bytes or some larger size) to individual erase blocks. If the file system sends a series of 4k writes for file system blocks 10, 12, 13, 32, 33, 34, 35, 64, 65, 66, 67, 96, 97, 98, 99, followed by a barrier operation, a traditional SSD might do read/modify/write on four 128k erase blocks ? one covering the blocks 0-31, another for the blocks 32-63, and so on. However, the Intel SSD will simply write a single 128k block that indicates where the latest versions of blocks 10, 12, 13, 32, 33, 34, 35, 64, 65, 66, 67, 96, 97, 98, and 99 can be found.

---

One caveat though. Windows 7 might not properly detect a SSD when it is imaged from a previous installation. That means, for instance, that automatic defrag might be turned on.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: jimhsu
But on the Intel X25 in particular it shouldn't matter because the filesystem doesn't even map to the corresponding LBA locations. The SSD handles that.
On the older Vertexes with old firmware, yes it matters.

what? aligning has the exact same effect on a jmicron, indlininx, samsung, and intel. Intel is certainly susceptable to the performance drop from misalignment

 

[glugglug]

Originally posted by: jimhsu
But on the Intel X25 in particular it shouldn't matter because the filesystem doesn't even map to the corresponding LBA locations. The SSD handles that.
On the older Vertexes with old firmware, yes it matters.

It doesn't matter as much, but it still matters that you at least do 4KB alignment (which Acronis & XP do NOT).

Internal sector remap tables are most likely at least 4K granularity on ALL SSDs, including Intel, or it would make too much space eaten by the remap table itself.

Every modern OS uses at least 4K clusters by default, because files are paged in and this is the minimum x86 page size, so it is really stupid that the default partition alignment from most tools still only has 512 byte alignment.

You don't really need erase block alignment with an Intel SSD like you do with others, but it does help a lot to have it at least 4K aligned, especially for small reads & writes.

 

[sxr7171]

Originally posted by: jimhsu
Taped mines to an otherwise empty drive bay on the bottom. I could have left it simply dangling, but I ship my desktop via airline (carryon, of course) so that's not necessarily the best idea. The drive will survive banging into your components; your other stuff, maybe not.

I give up. Where is it?



Also, why would you image your old system on this new drive? Yes, I know reinstalling things takes some time, but seriously if you made the financial investment in an SSD for performance, why don't you also start fresh on the OS? Right from letting Win 7 detect your drive type, set up the partitions and alignment and just do its thing.

Sure it's a few hours of work, but really things install so fast on an SSD that you'll actually enjoy the process.

 

[taltamir]

actually... isn't proper aligning good for regular spindle HDD as well?

 

[glugglug]

Originally posted by: taltamir
actually... isn't proper aligning good for regular spindle HDD as well?

Currently doesn't really matter as normal HDDs have 512 byte sectors for backwards compatibility. But there is talk of future HDDs having 4K sectors which both matches OS cluster sizes and reduces the overhead needed for ECC. When this happens misaligned writes will require a read-modify-write sequence in the drive controller (and misaligned reads will need to read a bit extra), hurting performance.

Several articles such as this back in 2005 said that drives were supposed to start using 4K sectors in 2007. I don't know if they have yet though... this may have been delayed due to XP going away slower than expected.

 

[taltamir]

i meant the whole 63 bit alignment thing. with most HDD partitioning tools skipping the first 63 bits automatically.

 

[Cookie Monster]

Does HDDs suffer from mis-alignment also?