- Mar 5, 2011
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Hi, I recently purchased my first SSD, which was a used unit off a forum. While I have had no experience with SSD's, I have been reading SSD reviews on Anandtech for a year or two now so I know some basics. However, I come to you with many questions in order to better understand this drive.
Background:
-- Bought 120GB Vertex 3 second hand for a terrific price of $65. It has ~100 days of uptime on it and was probably not TRIMed because the original owner used it in a Mac.
-- Popped into primary X58 rig, updated firmware from 2.02 to 2.25 and secure erased with OCZ Toolbox
-- Moved into Asus U3S notebook from late 2007 and clean installed with Vista Business 32-bit. It runs a C2D proc with GM965 Express chipset which supports SATA II but no AHCI, only "Enhanced mode." (I don't know what that means)
Bootup and program loading is noticeably faster, but my old drive was only a 160GB 5400rpm snail. Boot time was literally cut in half, but it still takes almost a minute to get to the login screen. Running CrystalDiskMark, I got this:
As you can see, 4K and 4K@QD32 is quite poor. My guess is that the lengthy installation process of the OS and programs + OS updates (many of which had to be rerun because Vista is stupid) wore out the drive. Given my circumstances, I am not able to TRIM the drive (more on that in a bit). It was suggested on another forum that I try secure erasing unused disk space with CCleaner, a process I am familiar with on HDDs. Even with my limited understanding of SSDs, I had my suspicions, but I didn't have any other leads and thought it wouldn't hurt to try.
Well, it hurt. Here is the result:
Hoping the SandForce GC could improved the situation, I let the drive sort itself out while cruising the internet for answers over the next hour. I then reran CrystalDiskMark and got this:
So GC is working to an extent, but why are my 4K read and writes so slow? what exactly happened on a logical level? and what are my options now? I can't pop the drive into my primary Win7 rig to let it TRIM because that rig is running in SATA RAID mode for my primary RAID 1 array. I don't want to change the RAID mode to AHCI and risk breaking the RAID 1.
Looking forward to words of wisdom. Thanks! (sorry for the lengthy post)
Background:
-- Bought 120GB Vertex 3 second hand for a terrific price of $65. It has ~100 days of uptime on it and was probably not TRIMed because the original owner used it in a Mac.
-- Popped into primary X58 rig, updated firmware from 2.02 to 2.25 and secure erased with OCZ Toolbox
-- Moved into Asus U3S notebook from late 2007 and clean installed with Vista Business 32-bit. It runs a C2D proc with GM965 Express chipset which supports SATA II but no AHCI, only "Enhanced mode." (I don't know what that means)
Bootup and program loading is noticeably faster, but my old drive was only a 160GB 5400rpm snail. Boot time was literally cut in half, but it still takes almost a minute to get to the login screen. Running CrystalDiskMark, I got this:
As you can see, 4K and 4K@QD32 is quite poor. My guess is that the lengthy installation process of the OS and programs + OS updates (many of which had to be rerun because Vista is stupid) wore out the drive. Given my circumstances, I am not able to TRIM the drive (more on that in a bit). It was suggested on another forum that I try secure erasing unused disk space with CCleaner, a process I am familiar with on HDDs. Even with my limited understanding of SSDs, I had my suspicions, but I didn't have any other leads and thought it wouldn't hurt to try.
Well, it hurt. Here is the result:
Hoping the SandForce GC could improved the situation, I let the drive sort itself out while cruising the internet for answers over the next hour. I then reran CrystalDiskMark and got this:
So GC is working to an extent, but why are my 4K read and writes so slow? what exactly happened on a logical level? and what are my options now? I can't pop the drive into my primary Win7 rig to let it TRIM because that rig is running in SATA RAID mode for my primary RAID 1 array. I don't want to change the RAID mode to AHCI and risk breaking the RAID 1.
Looking forward to words of wisdom. Thanks! (sorry for the lengthy post)
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