I Am Tyin' To Chill

This may not be a good post but it is to those of you that are about to buy an SSD.

I recently purchased two OCZSSD2-2VTXE120G 2.5" 120Gig OCZ Verte3x 2 Drives. Once installed the size is reported at 107.13 Gig.
Thats a loss of 12.87 Gigs. That is 10.725% less than advertised.
I am accustomed to drives being less than the size printed on the device. But don't you think 10% is a little steep.
The following is a quote from their web site concerning the ssd's:
Consumers may see a discrepancy between reported capacity and actual capacity; the storage industry standard is to display capacity in decimal. However, the operating system usually calculates capacity in binary format, causing traditional HDD and SSD to show a lower capacity in Windows. In the case of SSDs, some of the capacity is reserved for formatting and redundancy for wear leveling.
Going from 120 Gig decimal to "binary" (1028?) would mean a loss of 3.36 Gig. That I would understand. The link in this post is to a news blivot that indicateds to me there has been some dissatisfaction with these drives. They are offering a remedy which a lot of people will not bother with.
I Think I have been had. Maybe not. But I have got that feeling.

OCZ Forum - New update on the 25nm OCZ SSD drives

Read all of this News posting.

In the GB range the difference is 7%. 100GB decimal equal 93GB binary . it is 100Billion bytes in both cases. But where you lost the other 3% beats me. My 2 months old Vertex 2 of 90GB shows up as 83.7 GB which exactly the 7% difference.

SSDs reserve extra space for over provisioning:

Over-provisioning essentially refers to “spare area” that is reserved for background operations that are fundamental to the drive’s performance. NAND natively has around 6 percent over-provisioning built in, so as SSD capacity goes up so does the corresponding percentage of over-provisioning. This increase in “spare area” results in greater performance in the larger capacity drives.

Click to expand...

Second-to-last paragraph here:

Micron Innovations Blog » The 64GB RealSSD

Some manufacturers play it a little loose when reporting capacity. I guess their rational is that the drive is using it, even if you can't. I know some of the seemingly odd sizes you see (60GB, 100GB, etc) are due to that particular manufacturer being a little more forthright about it.

OK

I guess I need to quit whining. It just seemed like a lot of space to me.

Yeah, the overprovisioning is there, but it should not show up as missing space from the specified capacity. Your disk should show as 111.6GB binary. Why it shows only as 107.13 beats me.

Check in another place. Type system into Start/Search and hit Enter. Then open Components > Storage > Disks and see what it says there.

Win Sys Info

Win sys information lists them as 107.3. Western Dig tools says 115.

Info

Let me add some info that may be relevant and may not be.
When I set the disks up I plugged them into an external dock and booted with a Acronis 2011 disk. I did not format them. I cloned the OS disk and the other disk. Since it worked I reasoned the format was taken care of by Acronis. I then shut down and installed the disks. Everything worked with out a hitch.

There is still something wrong. Did you align the disk before you cloned the OS? Check the alignment: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/113967-ssd-alignment.html?ltr=S

Alignment

The large partition was 1024. The reserved partition was 101 which is not divisible by 4. I'll do some fresh back ups and work on the alignment.

Later

Actually, if you multiply 101 by 1024, it'll give you 103424, if you divide that by 4, that's 25856

The SSD is aligned

Punkster said:

Actually, if you multiply 101 by 1024, it'll give you 103424, if you divide that by 4, that's 25856

The SSD is aligned

Click to expand...

Hmm, I am afraid I do not get it. The reserved partition is most likely the first partition on the SSD. So how does this multiplication apply?

Good Math

Ok Punkster then they are both aligned. One more reading on size -- Bios say 115G

I used the Tute to alingn the disk and then layed down a saved image. I didn't improve anything. This thread got out of hand for chill out. When I post back I better move it to hardware.

whs said:

Punkster said:

Actually, if you multiply 101 by 1024, it'll give you 103424, if you divide that by 4, that's 25856

The SSD is aligned

Click to expand...

Hmm, I am afraid I do not get it. The reserved partition is most likely the first partition on the SSD. So how does this multiplication apply?

Click to expand...

The first partition (System Reserved) has 1024 KB of offset, right?

The C: partition has 101MB of offset, you can't divide MB by KB, it's like dividing Kilograms by Grams.. so you have to take those MB into KB, you multiply 101MB by 1024KB so they can be in the same unit

The result is 103424KB, when you divide 103424KB by 4, it's 25856KB, since there are no decimals in that number, it means the number it's divisible by 4, hence, the SSD is aligned

Punkster said:

whs said:

Punkster said:

Actually, if you multiply 101 by 1024, it'll give you 103424, if you divide that by 4, that's 25856

The SSD is aligned

Click to expand...

Hmm, I am afraid I do not get it. The reserved partition is most likely the first partition on the SSD. So how does this multiplication apply?

Click to expand...

The first partition (System Reserved) has 1024 KB of offset, right?

The C: partition has 101MB of offset, you can't divide MB by KB, it's like dividing Kilograms by Grams.. so you have to take those MB into KB, you multiply 101MB by 1024KB so they can be in the same unit

The result is 103424KB, when you divide 103424KB by 4, it's 25856KB, since there are no decimals in that number, it means the number it's divisible by 4, hence, the SSD is aligned

Click to expand...

I follow your logic in general - except that he said that the System Reserved has an offset of 101, not 1024. Am I missing something?

The reserved partition was 101 which is not divisible by 4.

Click to expand...

Hmm i didn't see that one coming.. but probably he meant the C: partition, usually when you install windows 7 (without alignning the SSD/HDD) it'll do it itself, the system reserved is automatically aligned so the other partitions are aligned too..

I guess we'll have to suggest the OP to upload a diskpart picture similar to mine on the attachment (check the offsets, wolfgang, that's why i deduced immediately that he was talking about the C: partition)

Punkster, he did not install Windows7 on the SSD but he cloned it from an image. I have done that a few times myself and if you do not align the SSD beforehand, it most likely gets srewed up - unless you use the Paragon cloning program that is designed for moving the OS to an SSD and does proper alignment.

It's OK. You were trying to help. I just wanted to make sure that the OP did not think that everything was fine and dandy.

Ohhh snap! i didn't know that he cloned from an image.. wasn't posted on the original post my bad...

Yeah it's probably not aligned then... i just read that he cloned it with acronis.. so, wolfgang, you say that the only reliable program to do the cloning is Paragon?? (without worrying that the SSD won't be aligned and stuff) that way i'll have it for future references hehe

Punkster said:

Ohhh snap! i didn't know that he cloned from an image.. wasn't posted on the original post my bad...

Yeah it's probably not aligned then... i just read that he cloned it with acronis.. so, wolfgang, you say that the only reliable program to do the cloning is Paragon?? (without worrying that the SSD won't be aligned and stuff) that way i'll have it for future references hehe

Click to expand...

Yes, that particular Paragon program works very well. I have tested it in real life. But it costs $19.95 - was offered for free from a German computer mag a couple of months ago. But you can, of course, do it manually. But with the 100MB active partition in the way, you have to jump thru quite a few hops. Here is a little tutorial I once made that you can download from here. It is a PDF document.

I have a small hunch, it could be that your page file(virtual memory) is huge and is taking memory off that SSD. I had the same issue with mine, I had 4GB free after a windows isntall and knew that wasn't right. turned out I had a 12GB page file. Bigger than needed I set it to 2GB and got all my space back.

computertech19 said:

I have a small hunch, it could be that your page file(virtual memory) is huge and is taking memory off that SSD...

Click to expand...

Great point!

You might check how much Hibernation is using, too. Windows 7 hides the file from you (hiberfil.sys) and it can sometimes hang around even after you disable Hibernation.

This all depends on where you are seeing the "107.13 Gig" number, though.