Toolbox 2.0.1 menu selections greyed out

[idata]

Toolbox 2.0.1 shows drives and I can click between them. It also works on "exit" and "refresh" buttons but none of the menu buttons work and are greyed out.

Config; Intel SSD 120gb X25-M G2 working fine on port 0. Have one partition at 83GB and leaving rest empty as suggested on Internet. I suspect firmware current but tried Cystaldiskinfo and it doesn't see any drives. Vista Device Manager doesn't have the "Device Instance ID" selection shown on this site but one of the ID labels had this extension 2CV1. I assume the remainder was cut off. Using MS drivers.

Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H AM2 mobo. Bios updated. AHCI mode with MS driver, Vista 64bit. Have second AHCI plate drive for storage. No RAID. Superfetch, hibernation and defrag disabled.

Any ideas?

[idata · Accepted solution]

You really don't need to make a 80GB partition on a 120GB SSD... There is no benefit as it sets a hard limit on avaliable space.

The issues are due to the drivers:

* I do not believe the MS or AMD AHCI drivers allow pass through of the SMART or drive information.

* The Vista AHCI drivers do not support TRIM.

[idata]

Thanks for the depressing news. If I understand, toolbox only works on Win 7 and Linux, on Intel boards. AMD, VISTA, and XP are out.

Is there anyway I can manually run this by temporarily doing something different in VISTA, maybe change to IDE mode run the TRIM manually or do some other temp config change to run manually and then switch back?

Can I pull it and stick it in a linux machine and then have that machine run TRIM on the drive, clean it or whatever it does, and then stick back in mine?

Would it be completely restored if I just do a format once a year and start over, or does the toolbox do other things that saves the drive?

Regarding using only part of the disk space, another site said performance went up because the disk would use the unused part of the disk for something in its operations. They had a chart of test showing the trade off of space sacrificed and better performance. Seemed convincing so I did it.

Thanks for you help,

Michael

[idata]

Your first statement is basically correct, Windows 7 is the only MS OS that supports TRIM. Also the Toolbox will only run on Intel chipsets and the correct drivers. Regarding the AMD side of things, meaning your mother boards chipset and drivers, the Intel forum is obviously not the best place to get information on those things. I would strongly recommend visiting the AMD support forums and search for solutions to your situation, I'm sure that topic has been thoroughly discussed there.

Regarding partioning your SSD as you did, into user space and a saved space for the SSD controllers use, indeed was suggested for SSDs, the purpose was to have more free space available for the SSD controllers Garbage Collection function to work with, and was also meant to help with "wear leveling" in an SSD.

What DuckieHo didn't quite say, is that at least in Intel SSDs, the actual creation of a "scratch" or saved partition area is not necessary, since the Intel SSDs controller will simply use whatever free space is available in the user partition for the same purpose. Therefore a specifically defined saved partition is not necessary. That may not be true for non-Intel SSDs, and was also not known to be unnecessary with Intel SSDs. Your intent was good given what continues to be the mystery of dealing with SSDs.

The problem with putting your SSD in another PC to "trim" it is this: TRIM tells the SSD controller which pages and blocks are no longer valid data. The SSD does not have that information, but the OS does. But how would the OS in a PC that was never connected to the SSD know what data on it is no longer valid? All it can do is read the file folders and then send TRIM commands from then on when files were deleted or changed. Unless I am missing something, that technique will not work as you hoped it would.

But doing a secure erase, rather than a format, would put the SSD back to its new condition. A format won't cut it, the Secure Erase function in the Toolbox is necessary, and could be done on any PC with the Toolbox installed, no problem. Well,maybe any Windows 7 PC. You could also use the free HDDerase tool on your SSD to acomplish the same thing.

[mmokk]

deskjockey wrote:

Thanks for the depressing news. If I understand, toolbox only works on Win 7 and Linux, on Intel boards. AMD, VISTA, and XP are out.

the toolbox optimizer can run under vista and xp. the whole point of the optimizer is to provide users of operating systems that do not natively support the trim command the ability to 'trim' all of the invalid data on the ssd.

switch to ide mode. if that doesn't work, it is probably an issue with the ide drivers. try changing them to the 'standard dual channel pci ide controller' (pciide.sys).

you can also try connecting your ssd as a secondary drive on another pc with toolbox installed, then run the optimizer that way.