Time for a new build! Been out of the game for a while.

[mfenn]

Hi Cerb, please can you expand on "Win7 SP1 aligns new partitions to 1MB on pretty much any storage device"?

I would be installing an old version of windows 7 and then updating it with SP1 after the install.

SSDs are internally organized into two main units, pages and blocks. A page is the smallest amount of data that you can read or write, but the SSD can only write to a blank page. A block is the smallest unit that the SSD erase (i.e. make all the pages blank). Pages are typically 4-8KB and blocks are typically 512KB-2MB.

The reason that alignment is important is that the OS likes to issue writes in as large of a unit as it can. This started off because HDDs handle large writes much better than small writes, but also has advantages for SSDs because it reduces effective bus overhead. If your OS writes are not aligned to SSD blocks, but instead overlap slightly, you're making the SSD to twice as much work (two blocks instead of one). Note: This is a gross oversimplification of what really happens, but it gets the idea across.

Not to fear, you can download Windows 7 SP1 Media Refresh ISOs right from Microsoft's digital distribution partners.

Also..do you think I should consider windows 8?

Windows 8.1 is fine, and improves on Windows 7 in a lot of ways. The Start Screen is a little annoying, but you can replace it with tools like Classic Shell.

 

[Cerb]

Hi Cerb, please can you expand on "Win7 SP1 aligns new partitions to 1MB on pretty much any storage d
Writing to a normal MBR 4KB file system block will need to read 2 4KB sectors on new HDDs, and may need to read 2 pages of an SSD's flash.
Then, the drive has to perform the modification of part of that data (in the case of SSDs, it may well be less than one page, too), then write the whole section back. This is called read-modify-write (RMW), and tends to be slow. Writing a 4KB file system block to a 4KB LBA, or virtually 4KB LBA (like many SSDs that report 512B), or the page size of an SSD's flash, etc., will not require such work, and be written without the ready and modify parts involved.evice"?

NTFS (and most file systems, really) default to using 4KB block sizes.
New HDDs, and some SSDs, have 4KB sector sizes.
SSDs that exhibit 512B sector sizes perform poorly if not used with 4KB or larger, so really, treat them like >=4KB, even if they officially aren't.

Writing to a normal MBR 4KB file system block will need to read 2 4KB sectors on new HDDs, and may need to read 2 pages of an SSD's flash.
Then, the drive has to perform the modification of part of that data (in the case of SSDs, it may well be less than one page, too), then write the whole section back. This is called read-modify-write (RMW), and tends to be slow. Writing a 4KB file system block to a 4KB LBA, or virtually 4KB LBA (like many SSDs that report 512B), or the page size of an SSD's flash, etc., will not require such work, and be written without the ready and modify parts involved.

Well, then, some early SSDs were picky about alignment to their blocks, which may be fairly large (we're up to at least 2MB, now, if some haven't already gone larger). Windows would align based on device size, but sometimes screw up, or not align far enough for some SSD. So, they decided to align everything to 1MB, as far as I can tell (even using a 32GB Sandisk Readycache, I get 1MB alignment). They did that as of the SP1 installer for Windows 7. Some SSDs still recommend access alignments of 32-128KB, so any power of 2 that large or bigger will work out. And, the OS will try to make writes aligned, when possible (FI, a 220KB write might be aligned to 256KB offsets), as that improves performance for both HDDs and SSDs. (and even that is a simplification)

Also..do you think I should consider windows 8?

If you have a usable Windows 7, license, no. Otherwise, sure, put up with it for a bit. Under the hood it's fine; it's the UI that needs work (for which it looks like 10 is mostly going in the right direction).

 

[jez006]

Thanks for the help guys

It looks like I'm going to push this build back a bit though - especially now that I've found the cause of the problems I was having on my current PC. I'll let you know when it does happen though.

Thanks again,

Jez