Another T60 SSD upgrade

[jayk]

I just upgraded to an SSD in my T60. I went with an Intel X25-M 160GB drive. I'm still running XP, and I don't have the need/time to switch to Win7 right now, so I'll just live with running Intel's SSD Optimizer once/week. Overall a fantastic upgrade - machine now boots in around 15s (vs. 1 min before), apps launch much faster, things generally feel more responsive, etc. I also put in a new keyboard, and my 4-year-old T60 feels like a new machine now.

I did the upgrade by imaging my old drive to a network server using True Image Home 10 and then using the True Image bootable CD to copy the image to the new drive. I chose not to copy over the Rescue and Recovery partition when I did the upgrade because I never use it and I didn't want to sacrifice the extra 5+ GB. I can always pop my old HDD back in if I really need it.

The one problem I've run into is with partition alignment. There's a lot written about how important partition alignment is to getting the best performance out of your drive, but my experience so far has been disappointing. Immediately after imaging my Windows partition to the new drive I ran this benchmark tool: http://www.alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/downloads.php?cat_id=4 and got the following results:

iaStor
31K - BAD (it's complaining about my sub-optimal alignment)
149.05GB
Read: Write:
Seq 134MB/s 86MB/s
4K 16MB/s 22MB/s
4K-64Thrd 94MB/s 59MB/s
Acc.time 0.227ms 0.208ms

Then I followed the procedure here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardwar ... -data.html. This all seemed to go fine, and after a couple of reboots I was back up and running.

Now when I run AS SSD I get this:

iaStor
64K - OK (seems to like my alignment now)
149.05GB
Read: Write:
Seq 134MB/s 86MB/s
4K 13MB/s 17MB/s
4K-64Thrd 94MB/s 43MB/s
Acc.time 0.269ms 0.214ms

WTF? I spent four hours for this? I'm actually considering wiping the drive and going back to my original 'sub-optimal' partition alignment.

I checked my BIOS and it's set to AHCI and I'm using the latest Lenovo/Intel storage drivers.

Has anyone else dealt with this on an SSD? Any idea what's going on?

- Jay

[RealBlackStuff]

Check this out, it may help:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardwar ... s-mlc.html

[jayk]

I just re-ran and got the same benchmark results as the pre-aligned drive... I think I had Firefox or something running during the last few runs (duh), which was enough to push my scores down quite a bit. It looks like the alignment procedure I followed neither helped nor hurt (which means I shouldn't have bothered).

- Jay

[Norway Pad]

This is of some interest, as I am planning to get a SSD for my T60. Probably the same Intel X25 160GB drive like described above. The long term goal is to run W7 from this SSD, but I will probably end up running XP from the SSD for a while first, just like jayk. I take it from the articles that operations like putting an image onto it and resizing partitions will work the same way with a SSD like with an old mechanical HDD? My preferred imaging tool is Clonezilla.

So what exactly is the purpose of the partition alignment done in the guide above? A 32Kb partition is created in unallocated space in front of a shrunk down existing partition, then the existing partition is extended back to fill the unallocated space and the 32Kb partition is deleted? If it didn't improve the performance of your drive, it might not be any point in spending time doing this, but curious anyway.

And in lack of TRIM support, is Intel's SSD Optimizer the tool you run to keep it "fresh"?

Thanks!

[jayk]

Bjorn,

I'm just not sure yet. Certainly following the procedure I linked didn't help at all, but there seem to be plenty of folks out there getting significantly better 4K write results than I am (almost 2x better - have a look at http://www.overclock.net/ssd/754763-ssd ... hread.html). The purpose of creating and then deleting the partition in that procedure is to get the main partition aligned on a particular boundary on the drive - apparently the graphical 'slider' interface of GParted can't do this by itself, so you end up having to move the whole thing twice (which is slow if you have a lot of data).

I were to do it over I'd align to 1M (1048576), which I think is what Win7 does by default when installing on an SSD, but I don't have a solid reason for this and it could be completely irrelevant once it gets translated through Intel's controller. Could be my performance is worse for a completely different reason.

Really I doubt it matters much in practice - the drive is so much faster than a HDD already I don't think I'd really notice that extra bump in the 4K random write performance.

If you find something that really explains this, please post it. Most of what's written is just speculation and guesses.

Yes Intel's SSD Optimizer includes the trim utility - you can schedule it to run periodically or run it manually.

- Jay

PS: Here are a couple of links showing no and some benefit after alignment:
http://communities.intel.com/message/95573#95573
http://communities.intel.com/message/68938#68938 (this looks like some kind of RAID setup)

[Norway Pad]

Ok, I can see now what they are trying to achieve here. Thanks for the explanation. You move the main partition the "size" of the dummy partition away from the beginning of the disk. But the actual dummy partition size (= distance from beginning of disk) is in question here. I will look more into this, and post any articles I might find that contain proven facts about this.

For my own part, the use of a SSD even with no alignment will provide way better performance than the old HDD. Particularly when I read that boot time is reduced from 1 minute to 15 seconds. And running XP from it will only be a temporary solution for me anyway. So this is interesting to look into from a technical point of view. But maybe not something I will spend lots of time and resources doing with my own SSD since gains so far are questionable.

[Marie-Anne]

Here a thread at ABXZone, describing tweaks to get the maximum performance out of SSD:

http://www.abxzone.com/forums/f154/inte ... 14979.html