Care and Maintenance of SSD's

whs · 19 May 2014

This is a very strange alignment. Although it is properly aligned, 1.5GB is a massive alignment. I wonder what else is on the SSD. Can you post a snip of disk management.

Btw: here is my tutorial dealing with alignment. The verification chapter may be interesting for you.

Victek · 19 May 2014

whs said:

This is a very strange alignment. Although it is properly aligned, 1.5GB is a massive alignment. I wonder what else is on the SSD. Can you post a snip of disk management.

Btw: here is my tutorial dealing with alignment. The verification chapter may be interesting for you.

There's a 1.5 GB "recovery partition" which carried over from the hard disk (no drive letter assignment). I believe it contains the Windows 7 startup recovery tools, such as Startup Repair and System Restore.

Victek · 19 May 2014

ignatzatsonic said:

The alignment is OK. That number shown in the upper left 1573888 should be evenly divisible by 4 to be in proper alignment. It is; check with your own calculator.

In Diskpart, you would enter list disk to show your various hard drives. If your SSD is shown as disk 0, you would then enter select disk 0. The response should be "disk 0 is now the selected disk". Then enter list part. The response will show the partitions on disk 0. Look for the number under the "offset" column. It needs to be evenly divisible by 4.

Thanks, I appreciate your confirming that.

Victek · 19 May 2014

After doing some reading it seems like a test score of 301 is quite low. I don't know if it can be improved. I updated the driver for the Intel ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller to the latest version, but it had no impact on the score. I do have write caching enabled, but I haven't turned off "Windows write cache buffer flushing".

ignatzatsonic · 19 May 2014

I wouldn't worry about the score. My Intel 320 series 80 GB drive scores 357. Some drives score a lot higher.

The important thing is the access time and any SSD is going to have faster access times than an HDD.

I'm guessing you got that PNY for quite a low price. If you want to brag about benchmark scores that you likely would never notice in real life, spend a lot more money and get a Samsung 840 or whatever today's benchmark speed demon is.

crawfish · 19 May 2014

Here's yet another quick command to check alignment:

wmic partition get BlockSize, StartingOffset, Name, Index

The output on my main PC is:

Code:

BlockSize  Index  Name                   StartingOffset
512        0      Disk #3, Partition #0  1048576
512        0      Disk #0, Partition #0  1048576
512        0      Disk #2, Partition #0  1048576
512        0      Disk #1, Partition #0  1048576

You want StartingOffset to be divisible by 4096. Disks 1 and 2 are hard drives, and AFAIK, Windows 7 aligns all drives like this. I didn't have to do anything special.

Victek · 19 May 2014

ignatzatsonic said:

I wouldn't worry about the score. My Intel 320 series 80 GB drive scores 357. Some drives score a lot higher.

The important thing is the access time and any SSD is going to have faster access times than an HDD.

I'm guessing you got that PNY for quite a low price. If you want to brag about benchmark scores that you likely would never notice in real life, spend a lot more money and get a Samsung 840 or whatever today's benchmark speed demon is.

Thanks for the reply. I understand that differences between synthetic benchmarks don't always translate into perceivable performance. The difference between my old hard drive and the new SSD is unmistakable and I'm quite happy with it :)