SAMSUNG 830 and Magician software on XP?

[Mars999]

I am looking at the 830 drive, and would like to run XP on it. So does Magician work in XP to trim the SSD? Will it setup XP to shutdown all unnecessary operations?

Thanks!

 

[Coup27]

I haven't ran Magician on XP myself but I will be this weekend if you want to wait for personal confirmation. It does state in the manual XP is supported so I would expect and assume it would work, both the program and the TRIM function within the program.

XP won't know to shut off anything. I would:

disable indexing - personal preference
disable system restore - it's crap on XP and eats space
disable hibernation - I don't use it and SSD's don't like it
ensure there is no scheduled defrag

I think XP has prefetch so I would disable that. Don't think it has superfetch.

 

[kbp]

Trim and XP ???

 

[Mars999]

I haven't ran Magician on XP myself but I will be this weekend if you want to wait for personal confirmation. It does state in the manual XP is supported so I would expect and assume it would work, both the program and the TRIM function within the program.

XP won't know to shut off anything. I would:

disable indexing - personal preference
disable system restore - it's crap on XP and eats space
disable hibernation - I don't use it and SSD's don't like it
ensure there is no scheduled defrag

I think XP has prefetch so I would disable that. Don't think it has superfetch.

Please do and post results. I would appreciate it!!!

Thanks!

 

[Coup27]

kpb - You are correct, TRIM does not work under Windows XP. This is why if you are using an SSD with Windows XP, for optimal performance you should get an Intel or Samsung drive. The reason is these are the only two manufacturers to offer toolbox programs which allow you to manually run the TRIM command. Although with enough idle time, the drives own garbage collection should do a good enough job of keeping the drive in a good state.

Mars999 - I've just finished a fresh format on an XP machine with an 830 and the Magician works fine. Performance Optimization (manual TRIM+GC) worked fine, but it did take 10 seconds for my drive to show as ready, but that's probably down to the old POS Dell PC I've been working on.

The only feature which does not work is overprovisioning. Since XP has no in-built ability to resize partitions this is why it doesn't work. If you want to OP your drive, you'll need to do it outside of this.

Magician also has an OS tune section and it recommends to disable superfetch and indexing under XP.

Remember to make your aligned partitions (and OP if you want to) elsewhere before entering the XP installer but after that you'll be fine.

If you need anything else let me know.

 

[Mars999]

kpb - You are correct, TRIM does not work under Windows XP. This is why if you are using an SSD with Windows XP, for optimal performance you should get an Intel or Samsung drive. The reason is these are the only two manufacturers to offer toolbox programs which allow you to manually run the TRIM command. Although with enough idle time, the drives own garbage collection should do a good enough job of keeping the drive in a good state.

Mars999 - I've just finished a fresh format on an XP machine with an 830 and the Magician works fine. Performance Optimization (manual TRIM+GC) worked fine, but it did take 10 seconds for my drive to show as ready, but that's probably down to the old POS Dell PC I've been working on.

The only feature which does not work is overprovisioning. Since XP has no in-built ability to resize partitions this is why it doesn't work. If you want to OP your drive, you'll need to do it outside of this.

Magician also has an OS tune section and it recommends to disable superfetch and indexing under XP.

Remember to make your aligned partitions (and OP if you want to) elsewhere before entering the XP installer but after that you'll be fine.

If you need anything else let me know.

Sounds great! So I could format the drive in Win7 I assume and then just install without a format with the XP DVD... I assume and the SSD should be aligned correctly....

Thanks!

 

[Coup27]

Pretty much. Any partitions made with the Windows 7 installer are aligned for an SSD. Under Windows XP there is no need for the 100MB system partition so do the magic trick where you delete the second partition and extend the 100MB partition into the rest of the space so you end up with one big aligned partition. Or if you are having more do what you to, you just don't need that 100MB one under XP. This is the stage to leave some unallocated for your overprovisioning if you choose to. After creating the partitions I would not bother formatting them at that stage, and once back into the XP installer choose quick format NTFS and go. Or if you are having multiple partitions, format them all but the one you are going to install to and do that in the XP installer.

 

[Mars999]

Pretty much. Any partitions made with the Windows 7 installer are aligned for an SSD. Under Windows XP there is no need for the 100MB system partition so do the magic trick where you delete the second partition and extend the 100MB partition into the rest of the space so you end up with one big aligned partition. Or if you are having more do what you to, you just don't need that 100MB one under XP. This is the stage to leave some unallocated for your overprovisioning if you choose to. After creating the partitions I would not bother formatting them at that stage, and once back into the XP installer choose quick format NTFS and go. Or if you are having multiple partitions, format them all but the one you are going to install to and do that in the XP installer.

Win7 creates the 100MB partition IIRC... SO why doesn't XP need it? They both use NTFS or is due to the 4k alignment?

 

[Coup27]

The 100MB partition is used in Windows 7 to place the boot information and also for bitlocker drive encryption and other such Windows 7 only features. By placing the boot information seperate from the partitions it made multi-booting a lot easier because the boot information was never actually tied into a partition. XP doesn't have any of these features so if you leave it then it will be a total waste of 100MB.