T43 Installed Transcend SSD observations **PICTURE LINKS***

[scr71822]

I found a new Transend 64GB SSD and installed it in a T43 I picked up (1.86ghz, 2 GB ram ATI x300, 15 SXGA). I ran the crystalmark on my drive before and then the SSD after. It was clearly faster even on the PATA bus, going from 36 seq read to about 72m/ps. The seat of the pants feel was good. My SATA disk (in HDD adapter in bay) booted normally in about 21-25 (Xp slapsh screen to Login XP login prompt) seconds now it was about 15 with Win XP SP3 (same OS cloned to the SSD). So I went about last night trying to tweak it for speed and reliability. Used the SSD SSD Tweaker Utility to tweak XP settings. So far I am pleased and have seen boot times (from XP splash to WIndows Logon) as low as 11 seconds now. That I like. I'm looking for a processor to swap into it either a 2.13 or 2.26 to complete my build. I did notice that my Battery reports over 3 hours now runtime as opposed to 2:40 minutes it used to be.

PATA with SATA adapter and hitachi 60gb 5400 rpm disk



PATA Trascend TS64GSSD25-M 60gb with aligned partition



Disabled Write Cache on the drive and installed Flashfire. A lot more responsive now.



And finally this is what I cam up with when I enabled Cachwith Flshfire the number that is covered is an 8.



Edited to Add

Standard T43 with Transcend TS64GSSD25-M PATA SSD Drive vs Hitachi 60gb SATA 5400rpm Drive in the Bay using HDD adapter.

Had too many trojans/Virus on my old image so I re-imiged it with a ghost backup.
Uninstalled the Hard Drive Protection since I don't need it anymore.
Running the Mod no 2010 BIOS.
I had to run a mess of windows updates so I may ghost it to my Hitachi SATA Drive defrag/compact then ghost it back to my SSD (just an attempt to speed it up by having it all contiguous.)


FYI, this laptop is installed with the BIOS actived Computrace and the files it installs acts like a ROOTKIT Virus and messes with the bootsector and after reformat and reinstall it comes back. Slows boot times down considerably. I called Computrace and left a message to find out how to deactivate. For some reason now on the SSD Microsoft Security essentials now finds them on boot as a VIRUS.

[RealBlackStuff]

A standard T43/p requires PATA drives in the hard drive bay.
It can have an extra PATA or SATA drive using a 2nd HDD adapter in PATA or SATA version.
A modified T43/p uses SATA drives in the hard drive bay.

Could you please be more specific about what drive you used where?

[Johan]

While I appreciate this very interesting T4x-SSD-user report (because, as you may know from reading elsewhere on this forum, I am one of the T42/p-owners who have long been interested in upgrading my PATA-T42/p’s with a fast SSD) I find your post somewhat confusing. Therefore, I kindly ask you to elaborate a bit on your specific setup, and the performance achieved – thanks in advance!

First, please tell us what specific PATA Transcend SSD did you use (its type number?); was it the “relatively cheap” MLC version or was it the far more expensive SLC version? (reason for asking is – apart from clarification – that Transcend MLC’s are not generally recommended for putting an OS on; see the note at this page). Feel free to report the disk speeds by posting CrystalDiskMark images... see the thread How to post pictures? about how to include an image in your post (and please observe the forum-limitation that images should be sized max. 50 kB). In relation to Transcend PATA SSD's, the thread SSD PATA 44-Pin for T4x may perhaps be of interest...

Second: How on Earth have you managed to get your T43 to boot XP in only “21-25” seconds with a 5400 rpm SATA HDD (which specific model?) mounted in the UltraBay caddy?? I have never tried to boot any of my T42’s from a HDD placed in the UltraBay, but as far as I recall reading, if not booting a ThinkPad from a (bootable) drive in the internal, primary HDD bay, but if in stead (like what you did first) booting the T43 from a HDD in the UltraBay, then there is first some amount of time-out before actually beginning to boot on the device in the UltraBay. So, I am truly puzzled as how you could possible boot (whatever this specifically means?) in only “21-25 seconds” on the SATA-HDD in the UltraBay? Also, how did you manage to achieve this blazing fast boot time - did you use the modified BIOS? (see T43 no more error 2010 (picture warning) to circumvent the (in-) famous "2010"-error as e.g. discussed in the sticky Problems with non-ThinkPad option drives on T43 ThinkPads).

Third: Likewise, for XP booting with the Transcend PATA SSD in the internal HDD bay, your claimed booting time of only “15 seconds” sounds hard to believe? For your information, I have been using both types of the Transcend PATA SSD’s (the slower MLC as well as the faster SLC model), as well as more recently an Intel X18-M SATA SSD in the internal HDD bay on my T42p with a 2.1 GHz Pentium-M CPU (SL7V3), and 2 GB RAM under XP, and the very fastest boot time I have ever been able to achieve (even under the faster-than-XP-booting Windows 7) is 35 seconds with the Intel X18-M (when I am referring to “boot” here I mean from powering up from cold and until the Windows desktop is shown). Could you perhaps report the times given by “Soluto” for your booting time? (a link to Soluto is e.g. found in the thread SSD runs slow on my T60 – see this post). If of interest, there are links to a number of threads related to SSD’s in T4x ThinkPad’s in the thread Upgrade Thinkpad to a SATA interface?; for use in my T42p with the 1.8” Intel SATA SSD I used the SATA-to-PATA adapter discussed in the first link in that thread. Question: Did you correct the partition alignment in the SSD before or after the cloning?

Fourth: Please be kind to share the specific “SSD tweaks tools” you used to speed up your booting time? Did you perhaps use some of the techniques/tools discussed in the thread Speed optimization/garbage management in PATA SSD’s under XP? Did you e.g install FlashFire?

Thanks in advance for an update – I am really impressed by the super-fast boot time and you report! I want that too!!

Johan

[Orclas]

I'm all ears to hear the answers to some of Johan's questions as well, particularly since I run a Transcend TS32GSSD25-M on my T40.

Fact is - now that I see the february thread - that I have some questions to Johan. I'll go ahead and post it right in his original thread (and hope the admins wont hit me with the you-should-know-better bat for thread necromancing ).

[scr71822]

I'm still playing with the drive in XP. The flashfire utility seems to have improved responsiveness as you can see by the last screenshot. Seemed to greatly improve writes to the drive by almost 5 times. There are still some issues with freezing especially with webpages that have a lot of embedded content. I'm going to play with XP for a little while longer then i am going to try Windows 7.

I chose to time from the start of the boot process to the logon because everyone has different apps installed and therefore longer or shorter logon times and for the purposes of camparison makes it impossible. That Computrace really chaps my butt as it seems to cause large delays in boot (It reinstalled the program after I had cloned it.)

35 seconds for desktop is very fast.

[Orclas]

Hmm, may have jumped to conclusion about flashfire, might need to test it again.

I may add that I have, subjectively, experienced a slightly better performance (mostly as in less stutter tendencies) after which I recently aligned my Transcend.

I used the simple trick of adding 2Mb of free space before the windows partition (luckily had a few MB's left over after it) with the help of Parted Magic and didn't even have to fiddle with boot loader and stuff, the machine just booted. After that, my offset was "any kb number divisible by 4", but whether this number is the optimal I have not had the time to look into (those things are half way over my head ).

[scr71822]

Has anyone tried:

Changing the cluster size from 4096 to 512 (smallest)?

The logic for it was presented as "A smaller cluster makes for slower access on a hard drive, but on a solid state drive, that is an advantage because most solid state controllers have to erase an entire block before it can write to it (the bigger the block, the longer the erase). This is true even if you are writing 100 bytes of data to the block"

[scr71822]

Well I just reformatted it with 512byte clusters to see if it is any faster. I'm installing Windows updates with Flashfire and SSD tweaker and no pagefile right now.

Alright here is my final results Windows XP with Flashfire, no pagefile, 512B Cluster, SSD tweaker, USN Journal Diabled and paritition aligned.



I guess I'll run

[scr71822]

And now the wrap up with Windows 7 And all the same tweaks applied. I am happy no noticeable studdering.

WIndows 7 512B Clusters

Windows 7 All The same XP Tweaks applied.

[Johan]

@ scr71822:

Thanks very (very!) much for posting all your results; this thread is simply extremely interesting for me to follow (thanks to your efforts!), since I have long been playing around with Transcend PATA SSD's as well, in T42's - which (in contrast to the T43/p's) are having a native PATA main-HDD bay. As mentioned above, I have tried both the Transcend MLC as well as the SLC PATA SSD's in T42/p's (all under Windows XP only, so far), but my experience has been quite dissapointing (fairly slow boot, SSD becoming slower after having been used for some time etc.), compared to your results. Right now, I have installed a Transcend 32 GB SLC PATA SSD in my Mothers T42 (a PM 745, 1.8 GHz w/1 GB RAM and running Win XP Prof w/SP3 and also running FlashFire), and it runs VERY slow especially for the write-speed, as the following CrystalDiskMark will show:



In the above-mentioned setup, I had disabled Prefetch (and installed FlashFire, which ran during the above benchmark), but apart from that I hadn't tweaked anything else, as far as I recall. One very strange thing with this T42/PATA SSD is, that the read and write speed is completely unaffected of running or not running FlashFire (?!?), which I have no clue about why is so? I would obviously very much like to be able to speed up as much as possible my Mothers T42 with this SSD, using your approach (on a side note I should add, that although Mother is 82 yo, she would for sure like to have to wait *much* less when booting her T42 and/or launching programs!). Here's room for improvement, I trust!

Questions:

a) What version of FlashFire do you use, and did you do anything special when you installed it??

b) Do you know where that particular version of FlashFire, that you're using, can be downloaded from? (reason for asking is that the Windows executable-downloads at FlashFire's site seems to have been removed fairly recently... why I don't know? I have used FlashFire ver. 0.99 and 0.a0 (as far as I recall), but with little or no difference between these two, as far as I recall...

For Christmas-present from you I very much wish that I could have a detailled step-by-step "cook-book" style how-to guide, describing in all detail all the obviously superb tweaks you applied (under XP as well as under Windows 7) - such as "no pagefile, 512B Cluster, SSD tweaker, USN Journal Diabled and paritition aligned" etc. etc. (don't forget anything!) - to speed up your Transcend PATA SSD's so fine as shown... thanks very much for such an easy-to-follow guide (which I trust that many users will greatly appreciate to have as well!). Thanks in advance!

Just for the sake of comparison with your Transcend PATA MLC SSD results, I'd like to show the most recent T42p SSD benchmark results that I have recorded; the disk speed of a ThinkPad T42p (model/type 2373-Q2U), which is having a 2.1 GHz (PM765) CPU, 2 GB RAM, running Windows 7 Ultimate (w/SP1), and has an Intel 320 SATA SSD installed (the 1.8" microSATA version, 80 GB, Intel model SSDSA1NW080G301) in the main T42p PATA HDD bay using; this SATA SSD installed in the T42p using the eBay 1.8" SATA to 2.5" PATA adapter as discussed in the thread 1.8" SATA to 2.5" IDE converter? - see especially from this post and onwards); I just installed this Intel SATA SSD yesterday and these are the CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 results:



I should add to this setup, the 1.8" Intel SATA SSD in the T42p, that I am not quite sure if everything runs OK; I just had twoissue of the T42p "freezing", and I suspect that this may be caused by some unhappiness in the Intel SSD in combination with the eBay SATA-to-PATA adapter, but I will need to look more into this during the Christmas. Ooh, I should also mention, that I had installed and run the Intel Solid State Drive Toolbox (ver. 3.01) on this '320 SATA SSD; it runs very fast and the SSD was hence optimized in this respect.

So far, thanks once again scr71822 for sharing all your very, very interesting results - and thanks in advane for your continued interest in sharing all the cool details!

PS: Would you mind to add a "PIC" to the thread title? (required by forum rules, as a service to users with slow download speed). You do this by editing the "Subject" line in your very first post in this thread... thanks.

Johan

[scr71822]

For sake of comparison can you do Benchmarking with only 50mb test files?

1) The first one your drive is Almost Full that might be causing trouble for you. and its an SLC so it should be way faster.
2) I'll checkthe flash fire version.
3) According to the SSD Tweaker my PATA SSD supports Trim under Win 7
4) it's clear that the Intel is a better unit than the transcend.

[scr71822]

If you have a Transcend SSD I found a utility for it at the website:

http://www.transcendusa.com/Support/DLCenter/

Its called SSD_Scope and gives you access to info of your drive.

There also appears to be a newer Firmware available however it needs to be run in DOS mode and might erase everything and it is very poorly documented.

FirmwareVersion = [20110811]

[scr71822]

Well I am back on my old HD now My recommendation is don't flash the firmware to the latest that their utility recommended. I get a 0200 error in the POST now after a successful flash. Well it was fun while it lasted I was hoping for a more speed of course with the new firmware.....I opened a case with Transcend support.

[RealBlackStuff]

Error 0200 shows up after a T43 has had the PATA-to-SATA conversion, and there is no SATA HD installed yet.
The error disappears after installing the SATA HD.
Maybe your HD/SSD connection is dirty or the SSD not upside down?

[scr71822]

Nope it was the Flash program that bricked it up.

My drive has a SM2235 (PATA) controller and the flash looks like it use code for a SM2242 (SATA) and now I have a SATA drive with forty pins I guess?? It would be cool if I could defeat the PATA on the motherboard and run this drive in SATA mode Anyways I got an RMA and am shipping it back, I downloaded the new firmware when their utility said I had old firmware and downloaded it for me. I merely flashed it. It's strange after a few days of the SSD compared to the drive you can tell a big difference in the speed program load. Hopefully I'll get a new replacement drive soon...

[Johan]

For Christmas-present from you I very much wish that I could have a detailled step-by-step "cook-book" style how-to guide, describing in all detail all the obviously superb tweaks you applied (under XP as well as under Windows 7) - such as "no pagefile, 512B Cluster, SSD tweaker, USN Journal Diabled and paritition aligned" etc. etc. (don't forget anything!) - to speed up your Transcend PATA SSD's so fine as shown... thanks very much for such an easy-to-follow guide (which I trust that many users will greatly appreciate to have as well!). Thanks in advance!

Did you notice this Christmas-wish?

For sake of comparison can you do Benchmarking with only 50mb test files?

1) The first one your drive is Almost Full that might be causing trouble for you. and its an SLC so it should be way faster.
2) I'll check the flash fire version.
3) According to the SSD Tweaker my PATA SSD supports Trim under Win 7
4) it's clear that the Intel is a better unit than the Transcend.

Feedback about these issues:
1: Well, there's still some 4 GB free space, so I would guess that this is not the cause for the drive being so slow.
2: Thanks - I'm looking back to hear about that, and how yuo installed it - and tweaked it?
3: Is this also reflected in the Transcend datasheet?
4: Yes - but I'm still struggling with getting the Intel 320 with the PATA-to-STA adapter to become stable.

I will do the benchmark on the 32 GB PATA SLC SSD with 50 MB files during Christmas.

It would be cool if I could defeat the PATA on the motherboard and run this drive in SATA mode.

This is possible; have a look in the thread Upgrade Thinkpad to a SATA interface? and see the links therein.

Please keep us posted about your progress with getting your Transcend PATA SSD up and running again - thanks!

Johan

[scr71822]

To answer your questions Johan it was version .99 for 32bit for the Flashfire version.

My SSD is inprocess of being replaced so hopefully by next week it will be back in my hands.

I am thinking about doing a SATA T43 in the future when I get bored with the current project.

[scr71822]

Well I got a brandnew SSD same model and unfortunately it came with the new firmware which means that I still get a 0200 error on boot. I tried it in a T41 with the same error. So I contacted Transcend support trying to get either a new Firmware or a replacement drive with the old firmware...stay tuned.

[scr71822]

Well after three failed attempts at resolving the current drive incompatibility, they decided to send me a replacement PSD320 PATA SSD to beta test. Of course I did not turn them down. I'm hoping it has the Sandforce controller!! I'll post results after I get it.

Edited to correct error.

[Johan]

Well after three failed attempts at resolving the current drive incompatibility, they decided to send me a replacement 320GB PATA SSD to beta test. Of course I did not turn them down. I'm hoping it has the Sandforce controller!! I'll post results after I get it.

Wow, that's (hopefully!) good news! What specific SSD did you get (model/part-number?)... MLC or SLC? On their homepage I couldn't find any so large drive? Was it perhaps the PSD320?

If possible, I would very much appreciate if you could perhaps share with us a detailled step-by-step guide to SSD partition alignment. The reason for asking is that I have a 32 GB PATA Transcend SLC SSD in my mother's T42 (it is running Win XP SP3), and in my opinion it is booting too slow (compared to a 7200 rpm mechanical HDD), so I am sure that partition alignment would improve things. Right now, it is formatted with 512b block size... should this be changed to e.g. 4k? There are many guides to partition alignment scattered across the internet, and I am a bit confused which of these are correct and simplest?

In the thread Advanced Format Drives in ThinkPads and using Windows XP (in this post) a number of free alignment tools are discussed... perhaps one of these can be used for easy and free SSD alignment?

Thanks in advance and please keep us posted with information about progress with your new big SSD!

Johan

[scr71822]

My bad, I didn't read the whole email it is the PSD320 in 64gb size, there you go bursting my bubble..well as long as it works and is faster than the last I don't care.

Steve

[andi t43p]

My bad, I didn't read the whole email it is the PSD320 in 64gb size, there you go bursting my bubble..well as long as it works and is faster than the last I don't care.

Steve

Hi All,

if i use 2.5" SATA SSD HDD driver to mini 44pin IDE adapter in T43p, benchmark scores CrystalMark like you ? (64gb Samsung SSD)

tks
Andi

[scr71822]

if i use 2.5" SATA SSD HDD driver to mini 44pin IDE adapter in T43p, benchmark scores CrystalMark like you ? (64gb Samsung SSD)

Hard to say, some adapters are better than others. I am going to get a better PATA SSD and call it a day with my T43P.

Steve

[RealBlackStuff]

There's always the SATA Mod for the T43/T43p/R52...
See my signature!

[ajkula66]

There's always the SATA Mod for the T43/T43p/R52...
See my signature!

Exactly...

I have to apologize but I simply can't figure out the way to save the test results of Crystal Disk Mark...so I took a couple of shots...and I'm one lousy photographer...



and one showing the actual machine...

[andi t43p]

very2 well benchmark scores,
can you posting "health" in HD Tune255 ?

[ajkula66]

very2 well benchmark scores,
can you posting "health" in HD Tune255 ?

I've already posted it (as per your request) in this thread: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=103941

[scr71822]

Well I got my brand new 320 series 64gb PATA drive today. I plugged it in and no 0200 error on boot. That's a good sign, I am going to go to Win7 tonight and see how it compares...stay tuned.

[scr71822]

Well after 9 months of back and forth on the Transcend line of PATA (which incidentially share the same controllers as the Kingspec) there are a termendous amount of firmware incompatibilities. I have officially given up on the PATA SSD concept. I have requested that they send me the SATA version instead on the latest return. I'll run it in my caddy until I get bored of my T43p or it dies then keep the SATA III driive for my next endevour.

[RealBlackStuff]

Check out the SATA-mod link in my signature