Notes from my SSD upgrade

[jvarszegi]

I have received the drive, and will receive an external enclosure in the next day or so. I don't want to do a full install, but would rather clone the OS onto the new drive.

1. Would something like Acronis be able to clone the 160 GB drive onto the 40 GB SSD? I read something on a forum indicating that the partitions would have to be the same size. I was unable to shrink the C: volume down to 40 GB using the Windows 7 disk manager.

2. Would the Thinkpad backup and restore be able to do it? I mean, could I use it to do a direct clone of the drive onto a USB external drive? I went into the ThinkVantage tools, hoping I'd be able to make a backup set onto my current external 500 GB drive which holds a lot of personal files (and then restore it onto the SSD in my laptop), but it appeared to want to format the whole 500 GB.

3. Would Windows backup and restore be able to do the clone?

Thanks a lot.

[Wiz]

1. Yes Acronis should be able to restore a image backup from a 160gb HDD to a 40gb HDD or SSD as long as there the image contains less than the total space on the target HDD/SSD
2. I assume you talk about Rescue & Recovery? I never really used it so don't know
3. I don't think the Windows backup can restore to a 40gb HDD/SSD unless source and target are the same size. I'm not 100% sure though so you could give it a try

Using both Acronis and the Windows backup your USB disk will not be deleted in the process since you just create a image and then restore the image to the SSD. Not sure about R&R, but i believe it should be able to do the same.

There is one thing to think about though.....

Since SSD's tend to perform at their best when the operating system’s partitions are created with the SSD’s alignment needs in mind, all of the partition-creating tools in Windows 7 place newly created partitions with the appropriate alignment. The alignment of NTFS partition to SSD geometry is important for SSD performance. You can read some more about the issue in this thread:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum ... .php?48309

If you google for something like "aligment ssd" you should find a lot more info as well. This thread refer to Windows XP, but i read some that claim the SSD became misaligned because of using such a tool like Acronis to clone a HDD to SSD. I never done this (clone HDD to SSD) myself so not sure if they did something wrong or if that will be the result of using Acronis.

You can find some info here as well from the Acronis forum:
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/5178

And here is a nice tool to check if the SSD is "aligned" or not if you decide to try Acronis or a similar tool:
http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/other/157

If you create the partitions using Windows 7 during the installation of Windows you should not have to worry about this problems since Windows 7 should place newly created partitions with the appropriate alignment. I never been using a misaligned partition on a SSD so cannot speak from my own experience I read that many claim they got a performance increase if they went from a misaligned partition to a aligned partition using a SSD so i would recommend to make sure it's aligned. This could be one of the reasons why some people didn't get the peformance boost they expected when they bought a new SSD.

[jvarszegi]

Thanks a lot for the info. I hadn't run across the alignment problem in my reading, but I have decided to do a fresh install.

I've never used a 64-bit OS. Would it potentially cause driver or other software issues with 32-bit code? And would there be noticeable performance differences, besides the ability to use over 4 gigs of memory?

[Wiz]

Thanks a lot for the info. I hadn't run across the alignment problem in my reading, but I have decided to do a fresh install.

I've never used a 64-bit OS. Would it potentially cause driver or other software issues with 32-bit code? And would there be noticeable performance differences, besides the ability to use over 4 gigs of memory?

You need 64 drivers when running a 64 bit OS so make sure Lenovo support 64 OS for your computer. If not you will probably run into problems where you cannot find all the driver for your system. Most 32 bit applications run fine on a 64 OS. For some type of applications you might need a 64 bit version to work at all. Example of such program would be antivirus, VPN clients and other applications that include drivers to work properly. It doesn't necessary have to be a native 64 bit application. Some applications they have a seperate 64 version, but the the difference might be some included 64 drivers while the main application is still 32 bit. With regards to the performance i didn't notice any difference so you shouldn't expect some kind of performance boost. 64 bit Windows does not support 16 bits applications though in case you still need 16 bit support. Most games should work fine as well unless 16 bit.

For the memory it depends how much will be available based on the computer. For example on a T500/W500 with switchable graphics enabled you get 2.5gb of ram available for the OS even if you have more installed when running a 32 bit OS. With a 64 bit OS you get the amount of ram installed and no such limit on the same models. A 64 OS have a limit as well of course, but it's much higher than what the computer/chipset support anyway so not that relevant.

Not sure what kind of SSD you bought, but hopefully a G2. You might already be aware of the trim issue, but if not you could read about it as well and what is required for trim to work when running Windows 7. It can be done manually or automatically, but it depend what kind of SSD and what kind of driver you use.

[jvarszegi]

What a wealth of helpful information. Thank you! It seems like it is a G2 drive (so I lucked out, since I wasn't aware of the difference when I bought, being mostly concerned with power draw and SATA support).

I am going to reinstall Windows 7 this weekend. I located an ISO file for Windows 7 Pro 32-bit. I just now realized that the Windows 7 product key is not on the laptop, and I can't find it in the Thinkpad box.

Should I just use a key finder and hope for the best?

[jvarszegi]

Found it, hidden by the battery.

[Wiz]

Found it, hidden by the battery.

Yeah it's hidden well so someone believe it's missing from their computer before they find it.
If you do a clean install of Windows using the product key behind the battery you might find that automatic online activation fail. In that case automatic activation by phone will most likely work. If the automatic activation by phone also fail then you have to talk to someone from Microsoft. If the online activation should fail you will be given a list of phone numbers to call for the activation and should find one phone number for your country.

For trim to work in Windows 7 you have to use the Microsoft AHCI driver. If you install the driver from Intel you have to use Intel SSD Toolbox and run trim manually or create a schedule so it will run automatically. Intel will release a new driver that support trim as well, but currently the Intel Matrix Storage Manager driver does not support trim without using the Intel SSD toolbox.

[jvarszegi]

The installation of the drive and clean installation of Windows 7 are done. Everything seems to be running smoothly. Performance is noticeably improved. The battery is reporting 5:30 left right now, with a 99% charge and Power Source Optimized mode, with the processor set to "Low". Browsing works fine with these settings. I have yet to install Microsoft Office, etc. I will work on that and the TRIM driver in the morning. Thanks again!

[jvarszegi]

I appear to be getting over five hours now with the screen at level 5 / 15 and the processor set to "low", browsing and doing office work. For anyone reading this, note that I have many things disabled in the OS (using Windows Classic theme; no disk indexing, as I don't need it; no Windows System Restore, as I plan to do occasional OS backups using ThinkVantage tools and more frequent file-based backups of a subset of files; camera disabled; etc.).

My disk shows 21.7 of 37.1 GB free. I have installed almost all of the SWTools stuff; 1.7 GB worth of Microsoft Office; TrueCrypt security software; and Virtual CloneDrive. I also have on the drive about 5.1 GB of work-related files (this includes a big 5-gigabyte file that stores other data inside it, with enough room to grow for a few years already), and have left the ~2 GB of SWTools files in place just in case I need them. The entire Windows folder is at 8.06 GB on disk at the moment. I feel like I have plenty of space to grow if needed, install programs, etc. and still have a bit left over for music files.

It seems like the laptop is even less warm now. As I type this, plugged in and hence at max performance settings, having had the machine on for hours installing stuff and making settings changes, the bottom is generally cool, with a slight bit of warmth on the underside roughly underneath the left palm rest area. Again, though, you have to remember that I am not stressing the video card, e.g. by using Aero Glass.

It would be hard to notice the slightly lighter weight, but I guess every little bit helps.

I have disabled the Thinkpad shock protection feature, as I figure the drive is inherently much more shock-resistant.

Regarding performance, my Windows Experience score didn't budge, still holding steady at 3.1 due to the processor, which is now the main bottleneck in the machine. (The score for the drive was 7.5.) However, many things seem like they happen faster. Booting up is now in the neighborhood of twenty-thirty seconds, depending on whether you include the boot-to-BIOS display time (it's not full POST, but it does wait to see if you want to go into the BIOS, and I can't figure out how to set it to fewer seconds). Suspending to sleep mode now takes about three seconds, which feels much faster. Launching Microsoft Word 2007 is under a second, especially as I have disabled the splash screen.

I am still a bit sad that I missed the better processor offerings, but I had to buy a machine now. I am still happy with the low-budget, cute little Thinkpad I bought.

[Wiz]

I have disabled the Thinkpad shock protection feature, as I figure the drive is inherently much more shock-resistant.

Nice to hear you got your computer installed and working fine. If you are talking about Active Protection System you can just uninstall this piece of software since it's for HDD only. So it's basically useless to have installed when using a SSD.
You might want to make sure you disabled defrag and boot optimization. Since defrag is pretty useless for a SSD and will only shorten the lifespan of the drive.
You might also want to consider disable readyboost, readydrive, superfetch and stuff like that as well when using a SSD.

[jvarszegi]

Nice to hear you got your computer installed and working fine.

Thanks a lot!

If you are talking about Active Protection System you can just uninstall this piece of software since it's for HDD only. So it's basically useless to have installed when using a SSD.

Yep, that's it. I will uninstall it. You're right, it's useless. There's no head to park.

You might want to make sure you disabled defrag and boot optimization. Since defrag is pretty useless for a SSD and will only shorten the lifespan of the drive.

Yep, I turned that off right after the hardware installation, even before I finished finding out how to flash the SSD firmware using a pen drive.

You might also want to consider disable readyboost, readydrive, superfetch and stuff like that as well when using a SSD.

I considered it, but then I found some info that at least some of those may be disabled by Windows 7 when doing a fresh install to an SSD, and other posts saying "do not under any circumstances do this" etc. So, being the nervous nelly that I am, I left well enough alone. The performance is pretty good now anyway.

[Wiz]

I considered it, but then I found some info that at least some of those may be disabled by Windows 7 when doing a fresh install to an SSD, and other posts saying "do not under any circumstances do this" etc. So, being the nervous nelly that I am, I left well enough alone. The performance is pretty good now anyway.

Yeah i agree since i usually prefer to follow the advice from Microsoft and not try to tune Windows on my own without really know what the effects are. I read a lot of tips how to tune Windows by a lot of people, but in most cases i find the tips to have no positive effect and sometimes make things even worse. Seems like some peoples concern is to make Windows boot as fast as possible while they don't really check if the system is any faster to use when finished booting. Disable a lot of services might make Windows boot faster, but the result could be that Windows is slower in use. I don't really care if my computer boot 5-10 seconds faster unless it also faster to use.

There is a couple of reasons why the tips to manually disable some of these services might be worth to consider though. Windows 7 is supposed to detect a SSD and disable some features that should not run on a SSD like defrag. For some reason Windows 7 does not detect the Intel X25-M G2 as a SSD since i had to manually disable defrag after a clean install of Windows 7. So the big question is if readyboost, readydrive and so on would have been disabled by default by Windows 7 if Windows actually detected my drive as a SSD.

But i also found this information:

Be default, Windows 7 will disable Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching on SSDs with good random read, random write and flush performance. These technologies were all designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could easily be a major bottleneck. See the FAQ section for more details.

Will Superfetch be disabled on SSDs?

Yes, for most systems with SSDs.

If the system disk is an SSD, and the SSD performs adequately on random reads and doesn’t have glaring performance issues with random writes or flushes, then Superfetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadDrive will all be disabled.

Initially, we had configured all of these features to be off on all SSDs, but we encountered sizable performance regressions on some systems. In root causing those regressions, we found that some first generation SSDs had severe enough random write and flush problems that ultimately lead to disk reads being blocked for long periods of time. With Superfetch and other prefetching re-enabled, performance on key scenarios was markedly improved.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/0 ... s-and.aspx

It doesn't make much sense that these features were left enabled by default because the Intel SSD didn't perform well enough since my benchmark show this is not the case, it's a G2 SSD and supposed to be among the fastest SSD's available in this category of SSD's. In that case what kind of SSD would be required for Windows to find it good enough.

Also the automatic defrag of boot files will still be enabled even if you disable the schedule in windows defrag. It has to be disabled in registry. You should be able to find in windows event viewer that boot optimizer keep running even if it's not that often. A defrag of boot files when using a SSD i find pretty useless.

I'm not saying it's the right thing to do and follow the advice to disable all of these services/features since i don't know that for a fact, but many of these features sounds pretty useless to me while using a SSD and read several recommendations to turn them off. I disabled the defrag schedule, boot files defrag and readyboost though. Since i don't want any defrag and readyboost basically move files from one flash drive to another so cannot see how that would be useful. The rest i left alone so far.