Win7 keeps on putting system partition on hybrid ssd

eatup · 28 Sep 2013

@whs. That did the trick. What I did was pre-create a 100MB partition on the mechanical using those tricks. The 100MB partition sorta irks me a little, but it's no biggie...

gregrocker · 28 Sep 2013

Anak said:

The SRP provides three crucial functions for your system, they are:

The Boot Configuration Data Store (BCD), this contains boot configuration parameters and controls how the operating system is started,
BitLocker Drive Encryption, in case you want to encrypt your drive, and
The Windows Recovery Environment.

So it is logical that your SSHD wants to place the SRP in the flash/caching section of your SSHD to provide a quicker boot.

Thanks Anak for explaining the difference with the chip onboard the HDD, and how the System Reserved partition is likely directed to the SSD chip to speed up boot.

Given this analysis it would be interesting to see if boot speed is faster with the SRP placed on SSD chip rather than in the HDD as it may have done by partitioning out the SRP.

Lady Fitzgerald · 28 Sep 2013

gregrocker said:

...Given this analysis it would be interesting to see if boot speed is faster with the SRP placed on SSD chip rather than in the HDD as it may have done by partitioning out the SRP.

While I can't say for sure, I suspect everything gets put on the HDD portion initially and some gets moved by the firmware to the NAND, based on usage. What I can say for sure is the boot speed on my SSHD has improved since I installed it. When I first installed it, it booted at the same speed as the original HDD, which in itself is encouraging since many reviewers experienced a significant reduction in initial boot times before the SSHD eventually "learned" to boot faster. After only six restarts, I'm noticing an improvement.

The big improvement, so far, has been on my two really pokey programs to open now open extremely fast. MediaMonkey and calibre (both have huge data bases) used to take 30-45 seconds to open. From the word go, they took only five seconds or less to open. That alone has justified getting the SSHD.

whs · 29 Sep 2013

hirobo2 said:

@whs. That did the trick. What I did was pre-create a 100MB partition on the mechanical using those tricks. The 100MB partition sorta irks me a little, but it's no biggie...

I am glad it worked. Happy surfing.

Anak · 29 Sep 2013

hirobo2 said:

whs said:

Run these commands in elevated command prompt and then install to that defined partition. Then you get no 100MB system partition.

Diskpart
List disk
Select disk n (where n is the number that was given for your target disk in List disk)
Clean
Create partition primary size=x(this is optional. "x" is in MBs)
Format fs=ntfs quick
Active
Exit

@whs. That did the trick. What I did was pre-create a 100MB partition on the mechanical using those tricks. The 100MB partition sorta irks me a little, but it's no biggie...

Great work whs, an Elegant solution!

I was so caught up in trying to explain the peculiarities of hybrid hard-drives I "couldn't see the forest for the tree's".

If you, hirobo2 or anyone else could explain so its clear to me:

When hirobo2 re-installed the OS, does the install place the system reserved into the created partition or is it empty?
If it is empty, how does the OS boot?

Layback Bear · 29 Sep 2013

Great question Anak.
My 3 brain cells hasn't got a grip on how this is done in a normal fashion of installing Windows 7.

SandeepP · 30 Sep 2013

hirobo2 said:

@whs. That did the trick. What I did was pre-create a 100MB partition on the mechanical using those tricks. The 100MB partition sorta irks me a little, but it's no biggie...

Hi hirobo2,

Its great to hear it worked fine and you were able to get the system partition on the SSD part of your hybrid drive.

If you have any further queries in future feel free to reach out to us.

gregrocker · 30 Sep 2013

Wouldn't you want the 100mb SysReserved partition on the SSD to make the boot faster, as explained by Anak earlier?

How does boot speed compare now with when the PC was new with SysReserved on SSD?

whs · 30 Sep 2013

As far as I know, the SSD part of a hybrid disk serves as a buffer (cache) to the HDD and is not seperately addressable. The buffering is completely controlled by the hardware. I doubt very much that the SSD part can be seperately set in the BIOS.

If anyone has different information, I would be interested to learn.