Solid-State Drives (SSD)

[targetbsp]

I was about to post myself and ask if anyone had a guide to backing up the ssd and restoring it with the partition still aligned.  Preferably using free software that doesn't need Windows installed as I previously used Acronis from within a Windows partition that I no longer have!

Does Acronis trial include the ability to restore from a dos or linux emergency disk or something?

Or does anyone know if Snapshot works In windows 7?  Because I'm guessing I could use snapshot to back it up to my mechanical drive, stick diskpart and snapshot on a bootable usb, flash the drive using whatever procedure Crucial require, boot from the usb, create the partition aligned and just do a restore from snapshot?

[sonicsonic]

i managed to get the ssd in raid as 1 drive when restore with acronis home2010 rescue cd

and found some info that you should not restore mbr then go to windows repair and it will boot  aligned

i did managed to fully backup the raid 0 ssd and restore( didn't actually restored in ver 2009 home acronis wasn't able to pick ssd raid as 1 drive

[DaZ]

Gparted GUI.

In this pic I'm shrinking the main partition down to near the data limit and moving it slightly over to the right.

This will create 10Mb of free unallocated space at the beginning of the SSD.

Note that 'round to cylinders' is not selected, you don't want this selected at any stage.

[DaZ]

Gparted terminal window

Command parted /dev/sda (not shown in pic below, this selects the drive)

Command print (displays drive and partition info of the selected drive).

Command mkpart primary 512s 1023s (this instructs gparted to create a very small partition within the 10Mb of unallocated space at the beginning of the drive).

You can see the small partition created stops at 524Kb.

(This does not look correct for alignment... but trust me it's fine).

Exit the terminal window and re-launch the gparted GUI.

Move the main partition right up to the end of small partition.

Resize the main partition to take up all of the remaining free space again.

Apply

Delete the small partition at the beginning of the drive.

Exit

Boot from your Windows DVD and select the repair option.

It should then automatically detect the windows installation and repair the MBR.

Restart and enter your BIOS and re-select the correct booting drive, save and exit.

That should be it.

[kallogan]

Very good tip. I crashed all my system again yesterday by doing some stupid trials and i didn't let Win7 create my partition after that when reinstalling and my random 4K writes were 8 instead of 11 so i tried this. Result : random 4k writes 11,76 MB/s. So it really has an impact !!! Sequential speed were fine and remained the same.

Thanks.

[SSDUser]

Hi all,

I just did a clean install of Win 7 and am wondering if it set my partition correctly (I'm using 3 drives in Raid-0 mode)?

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Primary            100 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2    Primary            357 GB   101 MB

Thanks!

[SSDUser]

---

SSDUser wrote:

Hi all,

I just did a clean install of Win 7 and am wondering if it set my partition correctly (I'm using 3 drives in Raid-0 mode)?

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Primary            100 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2    Primary            357 GB   101 MB

Thanks!

---

Anyone?

[seveniaperse]

Thank your for this very clear tutorial .

I have 225 system ssd not well aligned partition (32 256 offset).

I already updated to 1819 revision.

Win7 has updated the driver and I checked if Trim was active and it is as far as I can know (with the notification thing)

My performances are ok even if not exactly as good as before.

           Sequential Read :  224.655 MB/s
          Sequential Write :  120.623 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :  160.115 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :  108.485 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :   30.974 MB/s [  7562.0 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :    9.205 MB/s [  2247.3 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :   32.681 MB/s [  7978.9 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :    8.516 MB/s [  2079.1 IOPS]

My question is what is the real risk if I do not re-align the partition ? Can I live with it or not ? I did not get that very clearly.

Thank you

[seveniaperse]

I finally did the realignment of my disk as described above.

did first a backup with Acronis home 2009 just in case

and a few hours later

realignment done offset = 524 288

first check with CrystalDiskMark

no good at all

did a wiping

Final result is clearly inferior in reading and a bit superior in writing.

So if dealignment is a performance only issue, one could consider to spare this painful operation  :-)

Before

           Sequential Read :  224.655 MB/s
          Sequential Write :  120.623 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :  160.115 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :  108.485 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :   30.974 MB/s [  7562.0 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :    9.205 MB/s [  2247.3 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :   32.681 MB/s [  7978.9 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :    8.516 MB/s [  2079.1 IOPS]

After (realignment and wipe)

           Sequential Read :  202.174 MB/s
          Sequential Write :  143.248 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :  137.925 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :  128.660 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :   17.898 MB/s [  4369.7 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :    8.557 MB/s [  2089.1 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :   30.421 MB/s [  7427.1 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :    9.021 MB/s [  2202.4 IOPS]

[targetbsp]

A little off topic but it looks like mechanical disks are about to go the way of SSD's and need 4k alignment!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8557144.stm