Experience moving to SSD: continued
In the last topic, I described my experience of migrating the main partition from HDD to SSD. During the discussion, many have questions about how to configure the OS for a new type of disk. I will say right away that I will consider Win 7, because I work under it.
In my investigation, I will rely on these sources of information:
SSD support in Windows 7 and SSD design tradeoffs .
1. What is TRIM?
The storage device does not distinguish between necessary and unnecessary data and treats all data equally. This does not interfere with conventional HDDs, but the SDD architecture is such that, before recording data, specific flash cells must be cleared. Since the cells are not cleaned individually, but in blocks (for example, 128KB each), pre-cleaning reduces the write efficiency. Over time, disk performance may drop significantly.
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TRIM is an attribute of the Data Set management command of the ATA protocol. It allows you to prompt the disk controller that specific data is no longer needed (for example, it has been deleted). In the case of SSD, this attribute will allow the controller to schedule flash cell cleaning for write-free time. It also gives him the ability to constantly shuffle the data for more uniform cell wear.
If the disk controller supports TRIM, Win 7 will use this attribute in all relevant disk manipulations (delete, format, etc.). You can check that TRIM is enabled with the command:
If DisableDeleteNotify = 0 then TRIM is enabled. Unfortunately, this does not mean that it works, because the driver needs TRIM support. If the SSD is not connected to RAID (that is, the BIOS is AHCI), then most likely you are using the standard MSAHCI driver that supports TRIM. In other cases, it all depends on the firmware of the RAID controller.
What is the difference between operating SSD and HDD?
Specificity of SSD is such that flash cells wear out during recording. A flash cell is an electron trap. With multiple recordings, the barrier becomes thinner and electrons begin to run away from the trap. In the end, it will not be able to guarantee a sufficient number of electrons to distinguish between logical zero and one. The smaller of those. the process, the smaller the number of rewrites the cell will survive. Therefore, the flash controller monitors the state of the cells and tries to distribute the recording of information uniformly over the entire available volume. This means that, unlike HDDs, the SDD constantly distributes logical information to physical cells. The flash controller also keeps track of the amount of recorded information and, based on its internal algorithms, calculates the expected lifespan which can be viewed via SMART, for example, the SSDLife utility.
To minimize disk wear, it is recommended to reduce the number of small records. Win 7 itself determines the type of disk and automatically turns off Superfetch, application launch prefetch which are nothing but the application cache. For example, the difference between the OS located on the SDD and the OS located on the HDD. I did not change these parameters manually. Parameter values can be viewed here .
In addition, there is no need to defragment, due to the specifics of the SSD, the data will always be physically fragmented, and forced defragmentation only increases wear. Win7 disables defragmentation for SSD drives itself. It is also not recommended to enable NTFS compression on temporary files, due to frequent recording.
Store the swap file on the SSD is possible and desirable. Paging file scripts are characterized by a large number of reads compared to writing (40 to 1), and relatively large write volumes, so the benefits of much faster access to data are more than harm.
What needs to be done in Win 7 after cloning from HDD to SDD?
1. Make sure TRIM is working. Check support for TRIM flash controller, AHCI mode in BIOS, support for TRIM driver (or default MSAHCI or RAID controller).
2. Make sure that defragmentation for SSD, Superfetch, prefetch is turned off.
3. Try other tips if they make sense. For example, the Internet recommends disabling the paging file cleanup when shutting down: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Memory Management \ ClearPageFileAtShutdown = 0
In principle, with the most important, Windows 7 will cope on its own and most likely you don’t need to do something extra. A reasonable approach would be to keep the OS and programs on the SSD, and the data (music, video) on a separate HDD. You do not need crazy reading speeds to play movies, so you can keep them on a regular hard drive.
But the transfer of temporary files to the HDD kills the very idea of using SSD because they need quick access to random data.
And of course, backup, backup and backup again.
PS I forgot to mention that the nice feature of cloning is that the activation of the OS does not crash.
In my investigation, I will rely on these sources of information:
SSD support in Windows 7 and SSD design tradeoffs .
1. What is TRIM?
The storage device does not distinguish between necessary and unnecessary data and treats all data equally. This does not interfere with conventional HDDs, but the SDD architecture is such that, before recording data, specific flash cells must be cleared. Since the cells are not cleaned individually, but in blocks (for example, 128KB each), pre-cleaning reduces the write efficiency. Over time, disk performance may drop significantly.
')
TRIM is an attribute of the Data Set management command of the ATA protocol. It allows you to prompt the disk controller that specific data is no longer needed (for example, it has been deleted). In the case of SSD, this attribute will allow the controller to schedule flash cell cleaning for write-free time. It also gives him the ability to constantly shuffle the data for more uniform cell wear.
If the disk controller supports TRIM, Win 7 will use this attribute in all relevant disk manipulations (delete, format, etc.). You can check that TRIM is enabled with the command:
fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotifyIf DisableDeleteNotify = 0 then TRIM is enabled. Unfortunately, this does not mean that it works, because the driver needs TRIM support. If the SSD is not connected to RAID (that is, the BIOS is AHCI), then most likely you are using the standard MSAHCI driver that supports TRIM. In other cases, it all depends on the firmware of the RAID controller.
What is the difference between operating SSD and HDD?
Specificity of SSD is such that flash cells wear out during recording. A flash cell is an electron trap. With multiple recordings, the barrier becomes thinner and electrons begin to run away from the trap. In the end, it will not be able to guarantee a sufficient number of electrons to distinguish between logical zero and one. The smaller of those. the process, the smaller the number of rewrites the cell will survive. Therefore, the flash controller monitors the state of the cells and tries to distribute the recording of information uniformly over the entire available volume. This means that, unlike HDDs, the SDD constantly distributes logical information to physical cells. The flash controller also keeps track of the amount of recorded information and, based on its internal algorithms, calculates the expected lifespan which can be viewed via SMART, for example, the SSDLife utility.
To minimize disk wear, it is recommended to reduce the number of small records. Win 7 itself determines the type of disk and automatically turns off Superfetch, application launch prefetch which are nothing but the application cache. For example, the difference between the OS located on the SDD and the OS located on the HDD. I did not change these parameters manually. Parameter values can be viewed here .
In addition, there is no need to defragment, due to the specifics of the SSD, the data will always be physically fragmented, and forced defragmentation only increases wear. Win7 disables defragmentation for SSD drives itself. It is also not recommended to enable NTFS compression on temporary files, due to frequent recording.
Store the swap file on the SSD is possible and desirable. Paging file scripts are characterized by a large number of reads compared to writing (40 to 1), and relatively large write volumes, so the benefits of much faster access to data are more than harm.
What needs to be done in Win 7 after cloning from HDD to SDD?
1. Make sure TRIM is working. Check support for TRIM flash controller, AHCI mode in BIOS, support for TRIM driver (or default MSAHCI or RAID controller).
2. Make sure that defragmentation for SSD, Superfetch, prefetch is turned off.
3. Try other tips if they make sense. For example, the Internet recommends disabling the paging file cleanup when shutting down: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Memory Management \ ClearPageFileAtShutdown = 0
In principle, with the most important, Windows 7 will cope on its own and most likely you don’t need to do something extra. A reasonable approach would be to keep the OS and programs on the SSD, and the data (music, video) on a separate HDD. You do not need crazy reading speeds to play movies, so you can keep them on a regular hard drive.
But the transfer of temporary files to the HDD kills the very idea of using SSD because they need quick access to random data.
And of course, backup, backup and backup again.
PS I forgot to mention that the nice feature of cloning is that the activation of the OS does not crash.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/120076/
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