Are the Intel G2 SSDs telling Windows 7 they are a SSD upon install?

[MJohn29]

New/empty 160GB G2 with latest firmware from 10/26/2009.

P55 chipset on a Intel DP55KG motherboard with latest BIOS.

Storage controller set to AHCI in BIOS.

Installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Upon install, checked for automatic SSD optimizations that are supposed to be done if and only if the SSD properly notifies Windows 7 that it is a SSD.

Noticed that defrag was turned ON (the Intel SSD is my only drive in the computer)

Prefetch and Superfetch both turned ON per the registry

Drive Indexing turned ON (not sure if this was supposed to be turned OFF or not).

Whats up with this? Are these drives not communicating with Windows 7 properly upon install?

[idata]

My Win7 64 bit install did turn off defrag for the system/SSD drive (C). In fact, if you look at defrag scheduling, there is no check box to select the C drive for scheduled defrag.

[idata]

There are many others who did not have it turned off with Windows 7. This is apparently a bug in Windows 7. Windows 7 is supposed to detect an SSD by zero rotation of the disk. Isn't that simple? No rotation, drive is an SSD. Some people report defrag off and many others report defrag on. What is not stated is which version of Windows 7 are the people using? I am using Home Premium 64-bit Windows 7. Perhaps this is a bug in certain versions, maybe not, but the fact remains Windows 7 is supposed to detect the SSD by zero rotation of the disk.

[idata]

FWIW - I did a fresh install of Win7 x64 Home Premium on an X-25M G2 160GB and Win7 did not recognixe the drive as an SSD. I received Win7 from Sony as a free upgrade for my VAIO laptop.

[idata]

This is from the MSDN FAQ on SSD's in Win 7:

Will disk defragmentation be disabled by default on SSDs?

Yes. The automatic scheduling of defragmentation will exclude partitions on devices that declare themselves as SSDs. Additionally, if the system disk has random read performance characteristics above the threshold of 8 MB/sec, then it too will be excluded. The threshold was determined by internal analysis.

The random read threshold test was added to the final product to address the fact that few SSDs on the market today properly identify themselves as SSDs. 8 MB/sec is a relatively conservative rate. While none of our tested HDDs could approach 8 MB/sec, all of our tested SSDs exceeded that threshold. SSD performance ranged between 11 MB/sec and 130 MB/sec. Of the 182 HDDs tested, only 6 configurations managed to exceed 2 MB/sec on our random read test. The other 176 ranged between 0.8 MB/sec and 1.6 MB/sec.

This is where I got the random read thing from...

[idata]

It is interesting Microsoft chose Random Writes to determine if a drive is a SSD. It looks like the SSD had to have random reads above 8 MB/sec to qualify as a SSD. And it looks like they used 4k Blocks, which i believe is a poor choice. My 160 SSD in a Mac gets approximately 9.9 MB/sec for random read. So that 8 MB threshold gives very little wiggle room. The problem Microsoft will have is how does one determine that it is SSD when there are probably some RAID configurations that can give the same performance. Microsoft doesn't explain how they benchmark, how many times they run the benchmark to obtain the results. I'm pretty sure they had to use the big name SSDs and Intel should have been one of them. It is also interesting that they threw this random read test at the last moment, which begs the following question: If WIN7 was built for SSD's why was this done at the last moment when their was a trial period for over a year where people were testing SSD. Microsoft said "The random read threshold test was added to the final product to address the fact that few SSDs on the market today properly identify themselves as SSDs. 8 MB/sec is a relatively conservative rate." Me thinks Microsoft broke something at the last minute. This would not be the first time.