SSD: Poor Boot Times and Low WEI

[idata]

I just got an Intel X-25V and I installed Windows 7 Ultimate on it. It's currently taking up about 8GB. I've hardly installed any software other than the drivers and firefox.

When I ran that Windows performance test, my score came out to be 5.9, which is due to the SSD. I don't remember the numbers exactly, but I'll try to remember them:

• RAM random access memory - 7.5

• CPU central processing unit - 7.5

• Hard disk - 5.9

• General graphics performance on the desktop 7.4

• 3D graphics capability - 7.4

I haven't run any benchmarks. I have done everything on this page except for RAMDisk. I tried that, but it caused too many problems so I installed it. Even though, I got the info from OCZ forum, it still applies to SSDs:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?63273-*-Windows-7-Ultimate-Tweaks-amp-Utiliti...*

So, I:

installed the latest firmware

bios and OS set to AHCI

SSD is connected through SATA Port 1

and lots of other tweaks that are found on the page above

I used this software to determine my restart/boot time:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/720-restart-time.html

When I used it, the result was 48 seconds. That number represents the restart time, which includes shutting down and starting up. It took my computer 7 seconds to shutdown, which means it took about 41 seconds, give or take, to boot up. I read about other people who said that it only takes their computer 12 seconds to boot up. Others have said about 17, and a few even said 6 seconds. One of the main purposes for me getting the SSD was so that I'd be able to boot up my computer within 15 seconds, like everyone else with SSDs.

As for the WEI, I thought that was low because the Intel's SSD X-25V had low read and write speeds. But others with the same SSD have reported getting scores around 7.7 and 7.8.

Someone mentioned changing the driver to RST (post # 9 and # 10 on this page):

http://communities.intel.com/thread/11286?tstart=0

So, do you people have any suggestions as to how I can improve my SSD to be like yours, faster, speedier, more impressive, and hopefully, so I can get my money's worth. So far, I fee like I got a "slightly" faster hard drive.

This is my current setup:

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate CPU: Intel Core i7 860 MB: MSI P55 GD80 RAM: Gskill 4 GB

PSU: Corsair 650TX

Case: Antec Sonata Elite

Video: XFX 5770 Sound: integrated HD: Samsung F2 500GB (storage) Samsung F3 1 TB (storage) Intel SSD X-25V (OS installed on SSD)

Update: This one applies to Windows Vista, but he says that when he disabled his 7200 RPM drives and only used his SSD, that cut his boot time by 10 seconds. Does the same apply to Windows 7?

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vistaperformance/thread/ea530723-c3fe-4817-9de1-68c...

Update 2: Well, by upgrading the RST driver, I managed to increase the WEI of the hard drive (SSD) from 5.9 to 7.7. Now my WEI score is 7.4. But I'm still not satisfied with the boot time.

[idata]

The HDD I used was one I had lying around that just happened to be the same size as the SSD. For sure there are much faster HDD's out there, but the access times on even the fastest HDD is an order of magnitude worse compared to SSD and that is going to show with lots of small random reads in rapid succession.

Regarding some of your queries:

Read Single IOP Maximum MB/s:

I've seen single IOP speeds of 260MB/s for reads and writes. To better explain this:

"This metric basically reflects the highest data transfer rate observed by the hIOmon I/O Monitor for a single read I/O operation. 

This MB/s rate value is the amount of data transferred by the single read I/O operation divided by the amount of time that it took to perform the operation (i.e., the time duration of the I/O operation) as observed by the hIOmon I/O Monitor".

Idle/Busy time Percentages

As a general note figures in parenthesis are summaries covering the monitoring duration from start, whilst the other figures are reports from the last reporting period.

The end figure (in parenthesis) is "The current accumulated amount of time during which the hIOmon I/O Monitor observed one or more (file) I/O operations in progress or queued" HDD = 1min 58sec, SSD = 8.54 seconds. This shows that the SSD is significantly faster when processing random read transfers.

The next figure along is "The current busy time percentage" HDD = 98.4%, SSD = 7.1%. SSD barely breaks a sweat. HDD is busting a gut.

The Control I/O Operations section is recording TRIM instructions from the OS. It does not mean that the drive is actually executing them.

The typical specs that you see for SSD's can be "misleading" as they only apply to fixed given scenarios. With hIOmon it is possible to see performance figures that are relevant to your particular usage and from my experience it is normally a nice surprise.

EDIT: Also check out the fast IOP percentages between HDD & SSD

"The "FastIOPcounts" (e.g., the "ReadFastIOPcount"); these counts (for either read or write I/O operations) reflect the accumulated number of I/O operations respectively that were successfully completed in less than one millisecond as observed by the hIOmon I/O Monitor."

[RGiff]

Just have not had time to show a comparison , Now I know everyone has there opion on what is the best benchmarking software. So I thought I'd show both on my SSD. This is after alignment.Now I'm not sure whos right ATTO or AS SSD , You tell me ??

[idata]

Hello Robert,

you are right, there is no standard for benchmarking SSD drive read/write solutions yet. Every tools says it is the right one but does not prove that so users could be 100% sure they use correct one.

There is understanding of correct alignment requirements which is common for all benchmarking tools - the start of the partition must be aligned to physical start of drive.

Here is some interesting quote from Paragon made user guide for their PAT tool:

Why misaligned partitions are the problem for SSD?Misaligned partitions problem is even more important for SSD drives than for traditional hard disk drives. Many modern SSD has internal memory page size 4096 bytes or larger accordingly to 4K size, which are some analogue for 4K sectors. Thus all previously mentioned problems are the same for SSD partitions alignment.There is one crucial SSD issue besides file system speed decline (which is not so noticeable in comparison to traditional HDD). It is the SSD memory cells degradation after some amount of write operations. So if partitions on SSD are misaligned beside downgraded system speed you put your solid state drive in danger. After partitions alignment PAT eliminates all redundant read/write operations and thus provides speed boost and grants SSD longer lifetime.

[RGiff]

These readings that I posted are from one single SSD , I have another machine that has RAID 1 with two WD enterprise class drives 160GB each, I ran the PAT on that set up , And also got a noticeable increase in performance, SO this is not just a SSD issue.

[RGiff]

So I guess as advise to people who are going to clone a STD HD to a SSD , That they make sure it's aligned before they clone the drive to a SSD. Is that what you are saying.??