SSD Slowness

Hi,
I really didn't know a better forum to post this.

I purchased a SSH two weeks ago but I'm only impressed with it about half the time. The other time I get 40 second long instance loads and the fastest is still about 5 seconds. Its an OCZ 2e Vertex.

When I got it, I did a fresh install of Windows.
Aside from that I haven't done anything else. I'm not sure what I am suposed to do. Are there any utilities out there that can check/confirm that I am running at optimal settings?

I'm convinced I must be doing something wrong.
Boot speeds haven't really improved, the only time it is quicker is running applications to get them to load up faster.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

It´s kinda hard to tell what it is, but how do you have it connected ?

Maybe your useing a slow PCI solution, in that case you dont really get anything out of the SSD:confused:

I pulled one of my old hard drives and things seem a lot faster. Boot times are a lot faster. Anyone know why that would happen? The old HDD was my old Windows partition and it was a very old drive, like 5 years old.

The SSD is connected to a SATAii port, latest x58 Chipset drivers. I just ran an ATTO benchmark and I'm getting 300~ read speeds, so I guess it has fixed itself.

I'm hoping I don't get any stuttering now also. But all I have litterally done is pull out my old hard drive.

Your board may have been slowing the sata ports to match your older/slower drive if it was connected to a port that was paired with your new ssd. Just a hunch because you never know what mfgs are doing these days to save $$ and still push high performance products.

First thought is Windows is trying to index all the drives. Not needed with a SSD and I never use it on any drive.
Next idea would be a virus/ malware......doubt it but it happens

If you have a Windows7 or Vista setup, create a Datacollection within Performance Monitor. perfmon is going to expose exactly where the waits / latencies are and you can side by side them with your other disks. There are plenty of random and sequential read/ write tools that you can use to see and make comparisons in perfmon.

My first guess is that Windows7 isn't seeing your drive correctly due to drivers or you have it on a raid capable interface and windows doesn't want to optimize ssd on raid and that makes ssg run backwards in terms of performance.

Anyways, google some perfmon disk tutorials and your set for life, then work your way to the network and your system will be much faster and leaner for free.

Check that your motherboard is in AHCI mode.
That drastically speeds up an SSD drive.

My SSD is a Patriot Torq, and I found these to be useful.
Copy/pasting, from Patriot Memory Support forum:



Enable Write Caching
Description: This will show you how to enable write caching to have better performance for a storage device.

Instructions: Open the Control Panel -> System and Security -> Device Manager -> expand Disk drives -> Double click on the listed storage device that you want to enable write caching for -> Click on the Polices tab -> By default, "Enable write caching on the device" is checked under the Write-caching policy section. If not, then check it -> Select (check) the "Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device" box -> Click on OK -> Click on Yes to restart the computer to apply.



Disable indexing
Description: Indexing creates and maintains a database of file attributes. This can lead to multiple small writes when creating/deleting/modifying files. Searching for files will still work.

Instructions: Start Menu -> Right-Click Computer -> Manage -> Services and Applications -> Services - > Right-Click Windows Search -> Startup type: Disabled -> OK

Description: We also need to stop Windows 7 indexing the SSD. SSD drives seek so fast that Indexing is not needed. In fact, while Windows 7 is indexing the SSD it is slowing down your system.

Instructions: Go to Computer -> Right click on SSD Drive -> Properties -> Uncheck Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties -> Click OK



Disable Superfetch
Instructions: Open regedit.exe and browse down to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

Find the "EnableSuperfetch" key on the right-hand pane, rightclick it, hit modify and change 3 to 0 and hit OK.



Disable Prefetch
Description: Frees up RAM by not preloading program files.

Instructions: Open regedit.exe and browse down to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

Find the "EnablePrefetcher" key on the right-hand pane, right click it, hit modify and change 3 to 0 and hit OK.

It should be noted that if you enable write caching, you run a much greater risk of data loss if you suffer a power failure. If you do this, make sure you take steps to back things up. ;)

Only use an SSD with Windows 7. Older versions of Windows don't have TRIM support, which is something that keeps your SSD running at it's fastest.

make sure the SSD is not being defraged - win 7 by default will run a defrag job on all drives

go to http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/forum.php ... there support forums are awsome

i use http://sourceforge.net/projects/ssdtweaker/ this will allow you to toggle many windows settings without hunting them down

AHCI as mentioned is important to get all the speed you can out of the drive, it will require a reload of the OS if that wasn't enabled before install (for me atleast).

Power could be an issue -- too many sata devices on the same power line, or weak power supply. I've had a sata hard drive spin up but the SSD not recognized, and then put the SSD on its own power line from the power supply and all is well with the world.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by tallone2

make sure the SSD is not being defraged - win 7 by default will run a defrag job on all drives

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Windows 7 doesn't defrag ssd drives by default.

Win7 disables all the prefetch/superfetch/defrag automatically when it detects a SSD.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by d0z3rr

Win7 disables all the prefetch/superfetch/defrag automatically when it detects a SSD.

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Depends if he has this raided or similar encapsulated, many raid setups and drivers obfuscate TRIM and other features. Making a SSD setup horrible and will damage SSD's.

If Windows 7 automatically does all those things when it detects an SSD, then why did I have to switch them all over manually, and why are so many people making guides like this where it says to do it manually?

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...l=1#post442158

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mukade

If Windows 7 automatically does all those things when it detects an SSD, then why did I have to switch them all over manually, and why are so many people making guides like this where it says to do it manually?

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...l=1#post442158

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Windows disables defrag for ssd drives and it is also supposed to disable superfetch and prefetch for ssd drives fast enough. However this (disabling superfetch/prefetch) doesnt work properly in current versions of Windows 7. Hopefully it will be fixed in future servicepacks.

As for why are so many people making guides about things they don't really know anything about. I don't know? Ignorance is a bliss I guess.

from a hardware/product support view - i think its great that ocz has the information available and suggestions on what there equipment needs to run - and things to check (manual or auto settings), whether the OS does it manually or not.

i'm not 100% sure on how i got to seeing the defrag on for my SSD. I've since moved to a boot ssd drive and a larger game ssd drive and both of those by default have had the defrag off (clean install of win 7 pro X64). very few things are simple plug N play when performance is a factor.

SSD still are a little flaky to me.
I have one machine using a raid 0 of 4x drives with a pci-e raid card, it's smoking fast all the time.
I have another machine with just a single SSD drive and every once in a while it just locks up for 2-3 seconds, this seems to be a common complaint for SSD users, it's almost better to have it as a data drive ( where you put your games ) instead of a O/S drive.
I believe somehow external raid cards work better with them than most motherboards... probably because someone who's spent that much to have the raid card has more than one drive.

Sometimes, logging into game (ie, past character select, but not in game yet) will take as little as 2 seconds, even for Dalaran.
At other times, it can take 2-3 minutes for the log in process.
The average seems to be 30-45 seconds.

Once I'm in game, any loading is very quick.
The progress bar, for loading when taking a boat is fast enough that if I blink, I could easily miss it.