X25M-G2 Bench check & install (Vista)

[spufaru]

Finally got around to installing my X25M-G2 (80gb) as my primary boot drive with a fresh install of Vista 64 (SP2). System is a core i7 920, 6gb DDR3, Gigabyte EX58-UD4P mobo.

All I did was plug it in & enable AHCI prior to Vista install. Haven't upgraded the SSD firmware yet (drive is the G2C1 bought about 4 months ago right after the password lockout fiasco). Here are the ATTO benchmarks:

How do they look and is there anything important I should do? Two things I noticed -

1) Cold boot time doesn't seem terribly snappy compared to my 7200rpm conventional drive

2) Vista is tying up 33.3gb/74.5gb after updates with no apps installed - I assume ~10gb are being tied up by system restore points, anything else I should get rid of?

 

[Makaveli]

Post AS SSD benchmark scores aswell as HD tune please.

 

[spufaru]

Look okay? And see my post below please - thanks

 

[spufaru]

Regarding Vista 64 boot time, I'm disappointed that I'm getting almost the equivalent time either booting from my SSD or the 7200rpm conventional drive. Both have Vista 64 Home Premium installed.

With AHCI, it's about 40 seconds total (17 seconds from BIOS screen -> "Windows loading" then another 23 to desktop) on either drive; I figured the SSD would boot much faster. I'm using the Intel ICH10R SATA AHCI driver 8.9.0.1023 (6/4/2009).

I went back to IDE a few times with similar results, although I got a few occasional boots that only took 35 seconds on the new drive.

The bottleneck appears to be my 7200rpm drive, which I hear grinding away during the Windows loading sequence even if I'm using the SSD as primary drive. If I disable the conventional drive in Vista then restart, I get much faster boots (29 seconds total).

Is there anything I can do to optimize the boot sequence?

 

[rcpratt]

23 seconds from Windows loading to desktop is too slow, unless you have 40 programs launching on startup. None of my HDDs are crunching when I boot up on my SSD, so I'm not sure what could be causing that.

Your scores are a bit slow, but should go up when you update the firmware.

 

[spufaru]

23 seconds from Windows loading to desktop is too slow, unless you have 40 programs launching on startup. None of my HDDs are crunching when I boot up on my SSD, so I'm not sure what could be causing that.

Your scores are a bit slow, but should go up when you update the firmware.

I did about a dozen tests booting to the SSD, disabling my conventional 7200rpm HDD through device manager gave me a load time from "Windows loading" to desktop of 12 seconds, while having the 2nd drive enabled consistently took 22-23 seconds. It was definitely being accessed during the loading process.

Not the worst thing, plus I plan to upgrade to Win7 in a week or two so I'm not sure if I should obsess over the above Vista issue.

I was about to update the firmware tonight but my CPU cooler died, will try again tomorrow and post results as soon as I get a replacement, assuming I didn't brick my core i7 920 chip

 

[lopri]

1) Did you run the SATA disk in IDE mode? AHCI mode (a preferred mode for SSDs) takes longer to boot.

2) Try the following forum. I'd take the information selectively, though.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?p=318866#post318866
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=67056

I've just got an X25-E (for a loved one) and been testing, and while it's very impressive but I don't get the urge to go out and change my disks to SSDs just yet. I think it's because of the cost and the capacity