SSDs speed and Flashfire

[pcslookout]

Anyone used Flashfire with their SSD yet? Does it really make much of a difference to be worth it? Never heard of it before until now.

http://flashfire.org/xe/

 

[dawza]

As I understand, the program is made for slow SSDs, such as those found in netbooks. I use it with my Mini 9 and a slow SuperTalent SSD, and it absolutely make a difference. OS boot times are faster, there is no more random freezing while browsing, and the speed at which apps open is much improved. That said, there are more than a few reports of things going wrong (i.e. data corruption), so at this point I would not install it on any mission-critical machine.

I have been running the program under XP for a few weeks now without any problems. At this point, it has saved me the cost of buying a faster SSD, and has really opened my eyes as to how much of a drag a slow SSD can be even on an Atom-based system.

 

[JACKDRUID]

its an absolute must for netbooks...
I have a 8gb netbook that really lags... at first I thought it was the cpu or the memory... oc the cpu and upgraded the memory no improvement.

installed flash fire, and the the whole system came alive.

 

[EarthwormJim]

I put it on my netbook that has a jmicron based SSD (Patriot Warp V2), it made a nice difference. Instead of taking 2 minutes to boot up, Windows now boots up in around 40 seconds.

I never experienced any stuttering before hand, so nothing to improve in that area, but I am quite happy with the boot times.

 

[liarsenic]

Yeah, I have an EEE 900 with the 16GB SSD that would freeze for a couple seconds every minute or two, where you couldn't do anything until it stopped. Installed FlashFire, and as JACKDRUID said, it made the netbook 'come alive'....it was much faster and much more usable, with no freezing. I've been running it for a couple months now, and although since I'm now out of school (used it primarily in class) I don't use it as much, but I haven't encountered any data corruption.

It works by using the system RAM to cache writes to the drive, so instead of a bunch of random writes (which is what the slow netbook SSDs really suck at), you get less frequent sequential writes. So I guess if the netbook crashes between writes you lose what was cached in the RAM, but that's rare.