# New SSD user questions



## Heldelance (Feb 27, 2013)

So I decided to finally cave and get myself an SSD to replace my OS drive (the HDD was about 6-7 years old).

I've already bought the drive since most of what I've seen says it's good. I got the Samsung 840 Pro 128GB.

Being new to SSDs, I have absolutely no idea if they need any special setups, I assume it'd be like plugging in a normal HDD.

In a thread about SSDs (while I was hunting for which one to get), it said to enable something called the AHAICP (not sure if that's the right spelling). I assume from what they said that this is either on the mobo or when you install Windows, how do I go about turning it on and will it allow me to use normal HDDs alongside it?

Also, I've noticed that SSDs have firmware drivers, is this something I need to install before installing my OS or can I do it without problems after? 

I won't be using that drive for anything but the OS (my games go to my 2TB drive) and most non-game programs (like Office, etc).


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## silkstone (Feb 27, 2013)

You need ACHI mode, this is set in the bios and you can flick the option between IDE and ACHI. Nothing else special is required (assuming you are using windows 7 or 8), i wouldn't worry about flashing the firmware if you don't encounter any problem, but if you do want to, you can do it after you have installed windows.


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## HammerON (Feb 27, 2013)

I like this guide:
http://www.tech-forums.net/forums/f128/ssd-tweak-guide-236563/


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## Jetster (Feb 27, 2013)

HammerON said:


> I like this guide:
> http://www.tech-forums.net/forums/f128/ssd-tweak-guide-236563/



Don't disable the page file. there are programs that need it. You can make it smaller. Windows 7 has been optimized for SSDs. So now so there is not much you need to do

1. Update the firmware
2. In the BIOS, hard drive section switch to AHCI mode
3. Disable system restore for more space 

If you clean install it should shut off defrag, and turn on trim by defalt

That's it


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## n-ster (Feb 27, 2013)

page file 1-2GB to SSD and the rest on HDD


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## micropage7 (Feb 27, 2013)

n-ster said:


> page file 1-2GB to SSD and the rest on HDD



you could read here


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## Aquinus (Feb 27, 2013)

Jetster said:


> Don't disable the page file. there are programs that need it. You can make it smaller.



Not that it makes a difference, but it has been quite a long time since I've encountered an application that explicitly wants swap space. Ever since I upgraded to my i7, I figured I had enough ram where disabling it would be fine and ever since my rig has run flawlessly. Back when I ran XP I had issues disabling the page file, but never in Windows 7 in a fairly modern application.

I think it's important to note that disabling the page file in itself won't do much of anything either way. However what is important is the space that the file consumes. Having only 120Gb of space makes you decided what you do and do not want on it.

So I would re-locate the swap file to another rotation media hard drive, because if you ever truly need it your performance will be crap anyways. I would also disable hibernation as it always keeps enough memory on the drive Windows is installed on to copy the entire contents of memory to the drive. Since you have 8Gb of ram, it sets aside that much.

So between moving the page file and disabling hibernation you're saving yourself anywhere from 10-16Gb+ from your SSD that you wouldn't otherwise have, 8-13% of your SSD's space is significant.

Also, make sure not to pack the SSD full. At work we just had a SSD fail pre-maturely. It was filled 95%.  Try to give yourself no less than 20% free at any given time to let the SSD do wear balancing.


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## silkstone (Feb 27, 2013)

The only other thing I have done is to move the temp directory to a USB 3.0 drive. There really is no need to turn of indexing, or system restore. You need the pagefile and windows will not write to it (much) unless it needs to.

I disable hibernation, but only because I keep my computer on 24/7 and it's really not needed with the boot speeds on a SSD.

What Aquinus says about keeping 20% free space is valid, if you want best performance out of it, do not fill it to the brim.


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## Heldelance (Feb 28, 2013)

Thanks for the guide all! Gonna try setting this baby up over the weekend.


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## Aquinus (Feb 28, 2013)

silkstone said:


> What Aquinus says about keeping 20% free space is valid, if you want best performance out of it, do not fill it to the brim.



Not just performance, you'll kill the drive a lot faster if you fill it to the brim.


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## n-ster (Feb 28, 2013)

I like to not format the whole SSD and leave 10~20% as unallocated space that the SSD can use for garbage collection or wtv


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## silkstone (Feb 28, 2013)

n-ster said:


> I like to not format the whole SSD and leave 10~20% as unallocated space that the SSD can use for garbage collection or wtv



I would assume wear leveling still works as it is done by the ssd controller. But is this effective for TRIM as it is an OS dependent feature?


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## n-ster (Feb 28, 2013)

google SSD over provisioning... Main reason is to keep the SSD speeds as if they were new all the time, and I believe it somehow helps with longevity too


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## Heldelance (Feb 28, 2013)

I'll keep the overfilling thing in mind. I generally don't get anywhere near that since I tend to clean out stuff when it hits about 60%.


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## silkstone (Feb 28, 2013)

Is that clearly defined system space or is it taken from anywhere on the SSD?

I understand how keeping unallocated space could help with wear leveling. But, does TRIM work like this? I mean would you be better keeping 20% of the disk space free over having unallocated space?

I would assume that the wear leveling feature is a low-level function, so it would be able to shift data to any space on the disk. But if TRIM is not a low-level function, what you are doing could be detrimental to performance.

I don't know how it works clearly, that's why i ask.


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## n-ster (Feb 28, 2013)

idk, but from what I've read, if you format that space even once, the effectiveness of the OverP is reduced  by a lot, so I guess it is a clearly defined space... Besides, the ssd can't switch between unformatted space and formatted space


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## Jetster (Feb 28, 2013)

n-ster said:


> I like to not format the whole SSD and leave 10~20% as unallocated space that the SSD can use for garbage collection or wtv



can you link to something that suggests this? I don't see how that could help anything

I just set up my first RAID0. And an SSD RAID at that


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## n-ster (Feb 28, 2013)

Jetster said:


> can you link to something that suggests this? I don't see how that could help anything
> 
> I just set up my first RAID0. And an SSD RAID at that





n-ster said:


> *google SSD over provisioning*... Main reason is to keep the SSD speeds as if they were new all the time, and I believe it somehow helps with longevity too



^


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## silkstone (Feb 28, 2013)

n-ster said:


> idk, but from what I've read, if you format that space even once, the effectiveness of the OverP is reduced  by a lot, so I guess it is a clearly defined space... Besides, the ssd can't switch between unformatted space and formatted space



If it is clearly defined space then that would suggest that it would not be possible to use that space for wear-leveling thus decreasing the overall lifetime.

I've just read the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification#Over-provisioning

It's slightly confusing as the blurb mentions un-partitioned space while the bar chart mentions free space and TRIM. (relating the level 3 OP)

...after readin a little more i came to this:

"Free user space

The SSD controller will use any free blocks on the SSD for garbage collection and wear leveling. The portion of the user capacity which is free from user data (either already TRIMed or never written in the first place) will look the same as over-provisioning space (until the user saves new data to the SSD). If the user only saves data consuming 1/2 of the total user capacity of the drive, the other half of the user capacity will look like additional over-provisioning (as long as the TRIM command is supported in the system).[28][31]"

so it seems that if the Unallocated space has been TRIMed or never written to, it can be used. So then if you were to partition off a few gb of extra space, if it contained any data it would eventually be TRIMed and contribute towards OP.

Deos anyone know about this more clearly?


Edit - Found a link to a discussion about the topic. http://www.overclock.net/t/775483/d...-you-need-to-leave-unallocated-space-question

One person says definitively 'no,' but it seems it's up for debate. Almost all SSDs come with 7% level 1 OP

Further Edit: http://www.smartstoragesys.com/pdfs/WP004_OverProvisioning_WhyHow.pdf

The OP determines the maximum logical capacity of the drive, but the drive’s consumed logical capacity can change the amount of OP that is effectively reserved.

Not exactly sure what this means, but it could mean that the allocated free space could be used towards OP?

What i get from this is that OP increases the likelyhood of the controller finding a free block to write to, thus increasing performance. Trim renders this function somewhat obsolete as TRIM will erase blocks in the background. Thus having any amount of unallocated free space with TRIM enabled would function very similarly to OP. Another Thing I get from this is that if you use raid, which doesn't support TRIM, then arbitrarily increasing the OP space by setting free unpartitioned space will increase performance of the drive.

Edit (again) - after reading around, it definitely seems that manually OP the disk is a waste of time on newer drives and only relevant for RAID and drives using older controllers.

Edit - Another Source - http://www.edn.com/design/systems-design/4404566/1/Understanding-SSD-over-provisioning

It seems that when using TRIM that you get dynamic OP and so unless you are at 100% capacity of your SSD then having manually set unallocated free space is worthless. This would only be true for newer drives with a decent system of garbage collection though.


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## n-ster (Feb 28, 2013)

idk, I still did the OP on my SSD and my performance numbers dont really change. I'm at 40~67% used all the time anyways, so I never notice the missing gigs.

Might be useless but sok


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## silkstone (Feb 28, 2013)

Edit - Here is a PPP demonstrating sandforce's tech that makes OP less relevant - http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/Flash-Storage-Processors/LSI_PRS_FMS2012_TE21_Smith.pdf

Edit - My Vertex 4 has actually gotten a little bit faster over the space of 4 months.

New






Today





I have a further question, not sure if i should start a separate thread.

I'd like to encrypt the contents of my laptop, but i am using a Corsair Force 3 and i believe it uses a sandforce 2281 controller. I am not sure about this though, as it appears they released drives with different controllers. How could i check which controller I have?

I read that the 2281 does not support AES-256, does that mean that I will be able to Encrypt using a 128-bit algorithm?


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## EiSFX (Feb 28, 2013)

I know a few people already posted a guide but i found this one to be the best

http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds

This guide does more then just tweaks for your SSD its a full optimization guide to installing windows 7 or 8 to get the best performance and experience


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## silkstone (Feb 28, 2013)

EiSFX said:


> I know a few people already posted a guide but i found this one to be the best
> 
> http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds
> 
> This guide does more then just tweaks for your SSD its a full optimization guide to installing windows 7 or 8 to get the best performance and experience



A lot of that stuff is unnecessary/redundant. There are some good general tips though.


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## Aquinus (Feb 28, 2013)

n-ster said:


> google SSD over provisioning... Main reason is to keep the SSD speeds as if they were new all the time, and I believe it somehow helps with longevity too



Only enterprise grade SSDs typically have over-provisioning built into the SSD. On consumer drives you have to make sure that space is free yourself and at that point it's not called over-provisioning because you're provisioning the space you have available. Over-provisioned memory is typically invisible to the OS but not the SSD controller.

For example, Intel Lyndonville SSDs typically have 20% over provisioning. (Meaning a 100Gb drive has 20Gb for over-provisioning that you can't touch.


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## silkstone (Feb 28, 2013)

Aquinus said:


> Only enterprise grade SSDs typically have over-provisioning built into the SSD. On consumer drives you have to make sure that space is free yourself and at that point it's not called over-provisioning because you're provisioning the space you have available. Over-provisioned memory is typically invisible to the OS but not the SSD controller.
> 
> For example, Intel Lyndonville SSDs typically have 20% over provisioning. (Meaning a 100Gb drive has 20Gb for over-provisioning that you can't touch.



Incorrect. All SSDs have level 1 OP which comes in at around 7.3%


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## Aquinus (Feb 28, 2013)

silkstone said:


> Incorrect. All SSDs have level 1 OP which comes in at around 7.3%



I thought I was clear about this, clearly I wasn't. There is no *added* over provisioning. Meaning, yeah they have 7.3% but that is not enough if you start filling the drive. You should try to maintain 20% (after level 1,) anyways.


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## Jetster (Mar 6, 2013)

So i just bought a Samsung 840 Series 250 Gb. I did confirm that is comes with 7% set OP that cant be changed. Then the Magician Software firmware upgrade can add additional OP space if you desire. That was my understanding.
So this space is unallocated right? So it will show in the disk management and not on the system correct?


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## silkstone (Mar 6, 2013)

OP Level 1 is from the conversion from binary to base 10 and comes in at 7.3%.
Level 2 is system reserved space that you cannot partition or use for storage.
Level 3 is from free space (assuming TRIM enabled) and/or unformatted area.

For SSDs with modern controllers there is very little benefit of using level 2 OP unless you are using the drive in an enterprise environment (100% load). All SSDs have 7.3% level 1 OP. Not many drives come with level 2. Level 3 is made redundant by TRIM and other controller functions.

They are all ADDED space. You are basically saying over-over provisioning by saying added over provisioning.



Jetster said:


> So it will show in the disk management and not on the system correct?



Assuming it is level 1 OP, it won't show at all. What will show is a disk size of around 223GB rather than 250GB, meaning you have 27GB for OP. My binary isnt tha't good, so the conversions might be slightly off, but i think it's enough to get the idea.

Level 2 OP would also not show. Notice how you get versions of the same drive in 120GB and 128GB formats. They are physically the same drive, but you will usually find that the 120GB drive has the other 8GB set aside for OP by the controller.


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