Be Excellent To Each Other

Right. Drive came today. Drive model is the Corsair X32 Extreme series. I paid £116 delivered. They're really hard to track down tbh.

I posted a pic of the box earlier. Kinda dissapointing for something so expensive. No documentation, no manual, no stickers and no screws. You can tell Corsair are cutting it fine to keep costs down. Any way, I tried to use Drive XML or something but it would only detect FAT32 drives. Not sure if there was another version but what the hey, I have Acronis so it was only lazyness preventing me from installing that. It had to be a clone because I only get 3 activations with my Windows license due to it being technet. Either way Acronis worked fine. Scheduled a clone and rebooted. Then you get this -



Cloning took about two minutes, then you get a message to say it was successful.



Then it was time to boot windows. And quick? fuck me this thing is stupid quick. As you can see Win7 has a small footprint. And I have yet to move all of the files for the internet and shit away to other drives.



Corsair have done an excellent guide on stopping the drive writing as much as you can here -

http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=82516

Basically it shows you how to offload any annoying stuff onto a platter drive to stop the SSD writing all the time. Keeping it clutter free and nice and quick.

Did a quick Win7 rating and have gone from 5.7 to 7.1



And some videos. Now bear in mind my PC has fucking awful POST times. Basically because my board has RAID enabled and thus has to check all of my hard drives and hardware (of which there is a lot.)

Before video. With all of my posting bollocks the PC took 1 min 29 secs. And, it was still churning away when I stopped filming.



And the aftermath. From pressing on the power button it now takes 1.02.



Funny because the 27 secs it has shaved all come off of the boot time itself.

Can someone who knows please edit this post and make those videos show properly here? I'm fucked if I know how to do that.

More benchies and comparissons coming later

Your post time is comical.

No they haven't - some random guy from the Internet called Dave did. Dave is a graphic designer. His nerfing of the page file strikes me as odd, as fast page file read / writes would be a huge advantage of an SSD, I'd have thought.
Thinking about it, moving the scratch folder seems kind of strange, too.

Still. I look forward to some benchmarks.

I thought that - what's it doing? Does is check all the RAM or something odd?

Yeah if you have the page file on a standard drive it is going to slow down your uber drive.

Microsoft agree with you, Grim...:

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/0 ... s-and.aspx

It checks everything and posts it to the LCD 'poster'.

DRAM, CPU, NVRAM, VRAM USB you name it. Then of course there's a matter of getting through the Raid bios which has 5 drives to check.

And if you do a 'hold power button in' shutdown? Itll refuse to boot until you depower the PSU for about 10 secs and plug it all in. It's just safety features tbh. Especially with the over clocking options it has.

The very idea that you'd put your pagefile anywhere other than on the fastest disk you have is bizarre.

Why do you care about disk writes anyway, JC? You're fully TRIMmed up, right?

Extreme series do not support TRIM yet. The older P series have their bios update but the X series is still waiting.

Indeed, my own research has just come to the same conclusion. Still, though. How often do you write loads of stuff to the Windows partition? Not often. The real-world performance drop of these SSDs isn't that significant.

Have you put yours in your Macbook Pro yet Doc?

The graphics look shit on your screengrabs JC.

No. It'd be the only disk in the system, so I'd need a big one -- 128Gb or more. That's £400ish. Too rich for my blood.

OK. I did grab that app you linked to and installed it Doc but it confused the crap out of me and I wasn't sure what to do with it.

Thus I did a quick google and found an app called HD tune pro which has a free read only 15 day trial.

Now I will admit that I did rush this test a little but the results are still pretty conclusive.

Here is the raptor in a simple read test benchmark.



Compared to a Corsair read test



Note. That test took about 35 seconds on the raptor compared to about two seconds on the Corsair.

Moving on to a raptor bench



Bear in mind Windows was still loading. But it's still fucking bad.

Now let's bench the Corsair with the same test.



Just to make sure let's put the Corsair up against Seagate's fastest moving parts drive. This is their Baracuda SATA2 at full pelt.



So the Corsair outperforms the Seagate by about 30% in a synthetic benchmark.

Doc. If you can show me what to do with that other software I will happily run it.

Would have been a drop in the ocean before Fanny Stupid turned up and ruined everything.

Thanks for embedding the vids Craster. Appreciate it..

Also, watching over those videos again I wanted to point something out. The test on bootup was just to get to the desktop. In the raptor video (before) the PC wasn't what I would call ready to use. However, I didn't want to run the camera any more due to file size and uploads. With the SSD however? about a second after I stopped the video the activity light for the hdd went out.

Gah, want - and not just for performance, but also to extend the life of the shitty battery in my Lenovo - extended life ones cost way over £100, so while the display is the biggest factor, this is a cheaper way to get some of the benefits.

You'd be surprised how much less battery life an SSD gets you. Laptop HDDs spend most of their time spun down under most workloads, remember.

TBH Doc I doubt I will bugger around using that guide of theirs. I thought about it earlier and the only real concern to me was temporary internet files and cache etc. Thing is I run a disk cleanup once a week any way and delete it all. So it doesn't matter if it's on the SSD or somewhere else.

Must say the Raptor was a waste of cash. It's crap tbh. It was only scoring 5.7 in Win7 and isn't anywhere near as fast as a good modern SATA 2 drive. Ah well, it'll be a good thing to have in an external case for backup files and Acronis images

Mine doesn't, for some reason, even just surfing on Win7.

It's lupus

Dig around under Control Panel | Power Options | Change Advanced settings.

The spin-down time doesn't matter if the drive is being accessed, though. Unless Windows 7 does fairly extreme write-back caching.

No, but if you're just browsing it shouldn't be accessing the drive unless it's extremely RAM-starved. Start | run | perfmon and put some of the disk counters on, to see if the drive is really being accessed. You can then attach those counters per process and figure out what's doing it.

Just ran Atto benchmark (the one Corsair say to use) and almost got 200mb a sec read lol.

Same test on an empty 250gb SATA300 Baracuda.



So basically the SSD can read twice as fast. Write seems dissapointing. Only thing I can put it down to is running the benchmark on a drive with Windows on. I ran the test on the raptor with it booting windows and not booting windows and it wrote much faster when not running windows. Odd.

It'll be adding to, updating, comparing attributes with, or reading from the cache. So unless the OS (or the drive controller) were to extremely aggressively hold things off and read ahead from disk, it'll be accessed.

What is a "pagefile" and should I have one?

If you've not deliberately turned it off, you have one.

OK well I think I have reduced the shit write speeds down to a few variables.

1. It could be that I didn't do a fresh install and Win7 sets up for an SSD when you install it. I cloned it from a mechanical drive and cluster size etc is apparently important.

2. I am using a 32bit OS. This could have an impact.

3. Those write speeds may only apply to Linux.

4. The benchmark app is being weird.

5. My bios could be having an effect. I hear that some people get half the speeds I do.

I'm not bothered. I didn't buy it to write to and the 32X drive does 200mbps max. I'm like 200k short of that which is bloody fast.

So all happy campers here

Have you ever considered flashing your bios?

I flashed my bios once, but I got away with only a caution.

I would suggest that you really shouldn't have done a clone.

Yeah I know. Sadly I only have three Windows activations per license. So I'm reluctant to do a fresh install. Not only that it takes about three days all told to get everything back to normal. If the speed increases were minimal I would do it but they're huge.

If I knew whether a clone counts as an activation that would help.

It's the cluster size. One of the Corsair techs has said that the clusters on this SSD need to be 32k. They are currently 4k.

So I am going to boot some linux disc if I can find a blank cd and reformat the drive to 32kb clusters then restore the image

Do you think, maybe, and I'm not at all trying to be funny here, but the time spent making it work is massively greater than the time saved when doing stuff, for the lifetime use of the disk?

Probably. I just formatted it to 32k and ran a test. Same speeds. So it's not the allocation clusters.

Just putting back the image now

Bloody hell I am glad I made an image. For some reason cloning wouldn't work. So I restored an image. Phew.