Show us your SSD performance

whs said:

One thing I do not understand though is why my "burst rate" dropped so much.

I think the Burst Rate test (whatever it does) is flaky sometimes, particularly on SSDs. I've had it vary by as much as a factor of 2 in tests run in succession. Maybe it occurs so quick on SSDs that if the OS happens to be starting something at that very moment, the OS sucks up the bandwidth. On regular drives the results may be evened out because of the smoothing effect of the (relatively) longer period of time it takes to run on them. Who knows.

Great performance, by the way.
Tom

Well I'm back, it only took me a month to get my drive and install it. However as you can see my numbers are less than stellar compared to the other Intel drives posted here and I believe that my issue is the dreaded alignment problem (I guess cloning the drive was not the way to go). So I have another question, if I reinstall Windows can I then take my system restore image and just put everything back at one time or am I going to have to reinstall everything individually in order to keep it all "aligned". Thanks in advance for your help.

Tom

BTW Where do I have to stick the english dll (be nice) for the benchmark to find it.

b00bie said:

Well I'm back, it only took me a month to get my drive and install it. However as you can see my numbers are less than stellar compared to the other Intel drives posted here and I believe that my issue is the dreaded alignment problem (I guess cloning the drive was not the way to go). So I have another question, if I reinstall Windows can I then take my system restore image and just put everything back at one time or am I going to have to reinstall everything individually in order to keep it all "aligned". Thanks in advance for your help.

Tom

BTW Where do I have to stick the english dll (be nice) for the benchmark to find it.

I came up with a trick to clone an unaligned partition into an aligned partition. I wanted to run Windows Home Server on an OCZ Vertex and with WHS there isn't the luxury of reinstalling and have the installer properly align it like in Vista and W7.

So I created the smallest partition possible (8MB) on the Vertex using Windows 7, leaving the rest of the drive as unallocated space. The 8MB partition was aligned and the starting partition boundary for the unallocated space was also aligned. Then I cloned my WHS install partition to the unallocated space. I've used both Acronis 2010 and Partition Magic free for this. On two eSATA docks, the 3GB clone took only a couple minutes. Now my cloned WHS OS partition is aligned. I deleted the 8MB partition, marked the cloned OS partition active and now the OS is the "first" paritition on the disk and bootable. Put it back in the WHS box and it worked like a charm... WHS running on a 30GB Vertex (installing WHS to a drive less than the required 75GB was a whole 'nuther trick).

For your system restore image, maybe creating the "dummy" partition will solve that alignment problem too.
Tom

Hi zrtom

While I appreciate your fast reply to my dilemma, unfortunately you are way beyond my ability when it comes to Windows 7. I was barely able to do this the first time and have no experience with either of the programs that you mentioned. Unless you want to drop by to help I really need an answer as to whether or not I can reinstall and restore the drive. Thanks again.

Tom

Hi all. Here is mine Crucial C300 SSD Bench on a SATA II.

b00bie said:

Hi zrtom

While I appreciate your fast reply to my dilemma, unfortunately you are way beyond my ability when it comes to Windows 7. I was barely able to do this the first time and have no experience with either of the programs that you mentioned. Unless you want to drop by to help I really need an answer as to whether or not I can reinstall and restore the drive. Thanks again.

Tom

hi, i had the same problem with my intel 80GB, what really help me was this guide.

How to setup Core V1/2, Solid, Apex, Vertex SSD with aligned partitions using USB (if available on the drive) or SATA. Updated to show how to use Vista recovery disk

then once i had the alignment, i just used Acronis and cloned my windows 7 64bit over..
works perfect. :)

he also made a video on how to do it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUu9InlfD_c

Hi

If I follow this can I use my current windows restore image or MUST I use Acronis. Thanks.

Tom

You are probably better off with an Acronis clone because that can adjust to the disk size.

Forgive me for being so dense but after looking at the link and watching the video, I am still confused. It appears that the drive has to be a spare drive, so that means that the SSD has to be moved to a different SATA connection and I have to put back my old drive to make the clone from and boot from that drive to accomplish this. Can someone just explain it to me VERY SLOWLY as to why reinstalling windows on the SSD and allowing it to reformat the drive to the proper size and then restoring it from the restore image will not work. Quite frankly I don't have the confidence that I can accomplish the currently outlined method and might just live with what I have rather than screw it up completely. Thanks again for your patience and help.

Tom

b00bie said:

Forgive me for being so dense but after looking at the link and watching the video, I am still confused. It appears that the drive has to be a spare drive, so that means that the SSD has to be moved to a different SATA connection and I have to put back my old drive to make the clone from and boot from that drive to accomplish this. Can someone just explain it to me VERY SLOWLY as to why reinstalling windows on the SSD and allowing it to reformat the drive to the proper size and then restoring it from the restore image will not work. Quite frankly I don't have the confidence that I can accomplish the currently outlined method and might just live with what I have rather than screw it up completely. Thanks again for your patience and help.

Tom

Because

Window's 7 backup and other backup programs image the whole drive, including the free unformated space before any partition. By alignment, it means that you are creating your first partition after the 63rd sector or the 1023rd sector or any other setup that makes it aligned. The point is there has to be a predetermined amount of free space before the fire partition to ensure that it is aligned.

If you were to simply reinstall windows, it will not delete any existing partition but will just install itself on the already misaligned partition. Misaligned means it's not starting at the proper sector.

If you were to delete all the partitions, then reinstall Windows, it will create a partition for you, which will be aligned and it's fine until there. But when you restore the image, it will restore the whole drive back to how it was before. It doesn't matter what partitions you've already aligned on the drive.

Alignment refers to the position of a partition, not some physical property of the drive. So when you restore restore the image, you're restoring one or more of the misaligned partitions back to the drive.

Now you could back an image of just the misaligned partition and attempt to restore it onto an aligned partition. The success of this depends on how the backup program works. If it simply write the data bit to bit in order on the new partition, then it stays aligned. But if it deletes the partition and creates a new partition to write the image on, it depends if the software creates the new partition aligned or not