[HELP] SSD questions

Kipper said:

whs said:

Kipper, the only measure I would do is disable defrag and eliminate the hibernation file. None of the others I have done and my system works beautifully - since 6 months.

Hey, I hear ya.

These are just the things I have done to try and max out the performance; I know some guys who have not done anything after the SSD install and have not problems either.

I just tossed'em up here with some easy to follow steps in case anyone felt like trying them

Understand. I just posted my position so that people see that it is not really required to disable all those functions. Disabling some of them may be even counterproductive. E.g I found that my system reacts faster with Superfetch than without it. And reducing the page file to the minimum (which I believe is 200MB) may not be a smart move either - depending on what applications you run. I noticed that the page file is being used when you do virus scans, even with 3 or 4GB of RAM - (watch the hard page faults in Resource Monitor > Memory tab during a scan).

Thanks for this great posts above. Just bought my Intel 80G and all important info and tweaks are welcomed. Especialy about possibly harmfull Defrag feature. I'm very happy with that. Absolutely improovement [seeking time!!] for my music appys. I keep it as C:/ drive with all main applications installed keeping my sound libraries on D:/ drive. Just thinking to buy another one to my other puter.:)

Great info guys!
I actually did a few tweaks and disabled superfetch and defrag.. but I did not update the firmware on the SSD before installing the OS, came on a .iso file from Intel's site and I didn't have any empty cd's. Can I do it now or would that empty the drive?

Tried and failed.. the update tool did not find the drive.
Google turned up some info about switching from SATA to IDE mode, whatever that means.. but my BIOS doesn't have any features like that at all. Tried updating my nForce630i, but that did nothing. Any workarounds?

I use OCZ SSD's,
The FW update did need to be in IDE mode. I do not know about Intel SSD's but it could possibly affect drives content. OCZ has somthing called Sanitary Erase. This returns the drive to an empty, fresh out of the box state. You do want the drives clean if you do a clean install.
Disable defrag in component services
Disable superfetch in the registry
Leave prefetch enabled

My scores:
W.E.I.- 7.6, 7.9 for drives
ATTO - 475Mb/s writes and 625Mb/s reads
3DMark06 - 23700
Have yet to have a B.S.O.D. "knock on wood"
Luck

TechTune said:

Tried and failed.. the update tool did not find the drive.
Google turned up some info about switching from SATA to IDE mode, whatever that means.. but my BIOS doesn't have any features like that at all. Tried updating my nForce630i, but that did nothing. Any workarounds?

What FW is it using now?
You may need to connect the SSD to a PC that does NOT have a Nvidia chipset, flash the FW, and then put it back in your PC.

The FW flash itself will not hurt the DATA stored on the drive. Or at least shouldn't.
Theres always that off the wall chance something bad may happen, as with anything.
But this would be rare & not at all the norm.
Power loss or something of that nature during the flash would be bad.

Maybe the Read Me/PDFs that come with the FW Update tool may help.
Found this from it:

Wishmaster, your right.. contacted Intel and they sad it was either conflicting with the chipset or the lack of ACHI mode in BIOS.
I could just pop the drive in my laptop and see if that does the trick, but more research turned up that to use the Intel Toolbox for SSD optimization you need to have the drive in ACHI/Legazy mode. Switching between lap-/desktop everytime I want to use the toolbox is not an option
Trading it for the 300gb VelociRaptor..

nVidia chipsets seem to have issues with many types of SSD's.