Solid-State Drives (SSD)

[Mel_P]

Looking at the various forums where these are discussed there is lots of speculation about changing BIOS settings, making sure you have Microsoft drivers and not Intel Intel ones, disabling this / that (e.g.. pre-fetch) / having a pagefile - or not - I am totally confused.

What we need is a true User guide from somebody who knows the real picture. All we seem to get is half baked firmware updates / a wiper that doesn't seem to do anything / NO guidance on how to ensure that we have the right drivers to support trim.

I now have ALL Microsoft drivers for the hard drive and controller - is this right - I don't know

(there is some discussion here http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18066552 but I am not sure anybody there knows)

Does anybody know - or do we have to wait a year till somebody pulls the information together and writes a guide. I think Crucial owe us this - just saying "install it" doesn't seem enough - it might be for spinning HDDs but from all of the problems we see it's not enough for SSDs - they need specific conditions and driers to perform near the speed we have been led to expect (and paid for

[targetbsp]

The thing is 'install it' should be enough.  If you plug the drive in and install Windows 7 on it - it should just work.  Alignment will be correct, the drivers will be correct for trim, Windows 7 is meant to (but didn't for me) disable all the appropriate stuff for you (this is how we know what to disable!).  If you want some background info about why the things we disable need disabled then I wrote quite a detailed post on it here: http://www.forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/Horrible-performance-with-RAID-0/m-p/6359#M14...

Yes, the microsoft drivers for the controller are what you want for trim support.

As for page file, you won't find anyone on the planet that agrees with anyone else about the page file.  Microsoft say don't have one unless you need one (due to lack of ram or badly behaving apps).  They also say that if you do need one an SSD is the best place to keep it.  For that reason I keep a small (256mb) page file on the ssd (for the purposes of a badly behaved app!!)

I'm not sure what bios settings you are referring to? Except maybe AHCI vs IDE?  The jury seems to be out on that one too.  AHCI is the newer standard but which one is faster seems to vary from computer to computer so you could only ever get a definitive answer as to what works best on someone elses PC and not yours.  Though I don't believe there will be significant performance difference between either choice.

[Mel_P]

I agree - but from the doubts you raise

"it SHOULD work"

"Windows is meant to"

"ACHI or IDE"

etc.

We need some definitive advice from the designers, not hope that between us we work out that right setup - after many people have bricked or very slow drives!!!  Crucial now want over £300 for something that does not usually seem to met its spec.

[targetbsp]

That's just the way I talk. I'm very non-committal. 

Windows 7 is programmed to disable the things that need disabled for you.  It didn't in my case but I installed to a hard disk and cloned to an SSD so I didn't exactly give it a fair try out.  Therefore I can't say with certainty that it does what it has been programmed to do as I have not personally witnessed it.

And as I explained no-one can give you a definitive on ahci vs ide because there isn't one. It seems to vary from board to board which is the faster of the 2 options. ahci adds a couple of new feature son top of ide - hot swapping of drives which has no effect on performance and NCQ which does improve mechanical drive performance but theoretically has no effect on a drive with an instant seek time such as an SSD.  NCQ allows a drive to obtain data in a different order than it was requested.  It's much easier to see in a picture why this would benefit a mechanical drive:  http://expertester.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/ahci-vs-ide-–-benchmark-advantage/