If I have a 128GB SSD, is there any reason to keep My Doc's and My Music on an SD card rather than the SSD?

I know the 128GB will have plenty of space for me but I have seen people online talking about keeping My Doc's and My Music on a different drive.

I think they are usually talking about that when their SSD is much smaller though.

If 128GB should be plenty for me, is there any reason to keep My Doc's and My Music on an SD card?

(I have an SD card slot in my computer and would use that rather than an entire second HDD in the ultra bay)

 

SSD drives tend to slow down a bit once they fill up past 75-80% capacity. But otherwise, there is no reason to keep your files off your drive.

People that have large media collections do tend to have another spinning drive to handle the bulk of their data though, just because of cost.

 

If you documents and music fit on an SD card then I do not see how they would take up too much space on a 128Gb SSD.

My documents and music are probably 100Gb in size and continually growing so for me it makes sense to use a second 'data' hard drive.

 

I. Would personally put them on a separate drive just in case the ssd may fail someday.

 

SD cards have a much higher rate of failure than SSDs typically do. But, sound advice to always backup your important media.

 

Aye but i hardly ever use a SD card. I put them in good old mechanical drive . Anw, rep'd.

 

I plan on backing up the SSD regularly because this computer is for school and of course if my school work was lost it would create a huge problem.

I have a 500GB external drive that I use for my videos and the bulk of my music and pictures but I only load what I actually listed to onto my computer.

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What do I need to turn on/off before or during the install of my SSD?
I have heard of people turning off hibernation, page file or something like that. Anything else?

 

I think of an SD card as an intermediate transfer medium. Not a permanent one.

 

If you perform a clean install of win 7:

For more information see: The SSD Optimization Guide - The SSD Review

 

SandForce are horribly affected by this. My Vostro 1500 with a 60GB Agility 2 that is 91% full has terrible performance. I don't think Intel's are affected by filling up, at least the G1's. Perhaps Commander Wolf can shed some light on this area.

 

I can imagine. getting below 5gb on even a mechanical drive gives windows fits it seems. Might be time for an upgrade!

 

We had one person a while ago complaining about slow performance when rendering in Maya with a 95% full Intel 320. Then again, if you write heavily to an almost full consumer SSD, it will slow down no matter what.

 

SandForce drives are known to have this problem. If you fill the drive up and wipe it clean again you still suffer from poor performance. It's a permanent degradation but it's also a corner case that (hopefully) impacts only a small set of users. All SandForce drives, including the new Intel 520, suffer this issue.

AnandTech has a good bit of information about this here.

 

Doesn't it have to be all incompressible data as well? In any case, it's something to be aware of, especially on small capacity drives.

 

I think so, but without having a drive of my own to thrash, I can't test that myself.

 

I see what you mean, i don't have a cheap low capacity SF drive to trash either, only a chronos deluxe 240GB and no way i'll try to back it into a corner.

 

Wow.. I didn't even realize it was quite that bad.

 

Hmm, this is interesting information I had not fully considered. Does the manufacturers disclose any of this or is it something you need to dig for in order to compare one brand to another?

Would you know if its 100% until a certain limit or is the decline linear as the capacity grows? This is one of the reason I've been holding off buying an SSD (price being the other ). As good as they are, there seems to be some new limitation cropping up everyday.

 

It's actually quite simple. If the drive is 95% full (for instance), the controller has to deal with only having 5% of the NAND cells that it can write to. Chances are those cells are not going to be distributed evenly across all the NAND channels, which means performance suffers. It's something that has always been around.

HDDs have the same problem. When you only have 5% of the disk to work with either it is (1) not distributed evenly across platters or (2) more importantly if that 5% is fragmented the latencies of accessing bits all over the drive will kill you.

A small Windows install (programs only, not data) is 30-40GB for basic tasks, 40-60GB if you're into editing/programming/content development, and 60GB+ when you start talking about a great many number of programs or even a handful of games. Keeping the OS on the SSD while leaving your data (including game installs) on spinners is the best mix. Personally, I've got 60GB tied up in OS programs that are not in my Steam directory and I'm considering buying a 120GB SSD soon. 50% utilization is a good place to start -- it'll take a really long time for you to double your own program storage requirements (I would think).

 

Here's a nice article on performance degradation in SSDs: AnandTech - The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ. Note that this article was written before TRIM was made available, but the basics remain the same.

A small summary:

NAND memory in SSDs is organized in pages and blocks, blocks being composed of multiple pages. You can write to a single page, but you cannot erase a page alone, you have to erase the entire block. If you come across a scenario where you have to write data to multiple pages in a block and some of those pages still contain data that was previously deleted, you will have to cache the whole block in order not to loose the data that wasn't deleted on it, erase it and write to it again which takes more time than simply writing to empty NAND. If your drive is almost full, there is a good chance that garbage collection might not have time to do it's work and you'll fall into this scenario. Now imagine an almost full drive where you start using something write intensive, garbage collection will definitely not have time to do it's work and you'll end up with the scenario described above.

Now with TRIM and considering you are doing normal computing, you cna obviously fill the drive more than you would if you have a scratch disk for photoshop on it for example. The performance decrease will also vary between the drives, due to different controllers, garbage collection algorithms and over provisioning.

Note that SSDs meant for servers and such have massive amounts of over provisioning to prevent just that. Some drives like the Crucial M4 have no over provisioning at all, while other like the Sandforce drives (might not be the case for newer drives) and Intel drives do feature some level of over provisioning.

 

That optimization guide is the best one I have seen yet. So hypothetically I could do a clean install of Windows 7 and not worry about maintenance on the SSD?

What are your opinions of Drive indexing, System Restore, Turn off Pagefile, and Turning off Hibernation on an SSD?

I should not be too worried about space on my SSD but I would rather do these fixes after a clean install then after I have been using the SSD for a while.

 

I have Perfect Disk 12 for my HDD because I don't want to bother with the constant maintenance. Its has an SSD mode but I'm not sure what it anything it does?

Anyway, when I finally do install an SSD I don't want to be constantly worried about maintenance and counting cells.

 

Unless you keep your drive close to full, there is no need to give it special treatment. Just use the computer like you would any computer with a HDD. I personally haven't changed my usage patterns with SSDs aside from having my libraries and data on a HDD since i had two drive bays in my laptop. The only thing i manage is having programs installed on two drives, but then again that is something i'd have to deal with two HDDs as well.

When i installed the SSD i tweaked what i wanted to tweak, shrunk the page file and disabled hibernation since i never use it and that's it. Don't let all those doomsday scenarios we mentioned scare you, they really are worse case scenarios.

 

I wonder, will keeping a small, 5-10gb Partition, Unallocated, act as a buffer for SSD performance for those that don't keep tabs on usage and run close to full?

 

ssd controller shouldn't care how how free your nand is, simple free space, another partition or overprovisioned space, as long as it's free.
Controller moves data around to free new blocks of memory whenever it can simply so it has to do lesser write cycles when some new data arrives.

Anand wrote a very nice artical explaining why this is happening 3 years a go, take a look (also check next page). So if we use his example of block, ssd writing a file 5 pages long will write it to 5 different memory blocks at first if it has enough channels, and later it will collect them in a single block so other 4 might be left completely blank. When you fill ssd to 90% there is much less space for maneuvering and it gets slower as it has to do lots more delete cycles to write some data.

 

Ah, very good with an exception. It also reveals why designers/engineers should never write copy.

 

Quick question. I have installed the Crucial M4 and everything is running smoothly. It is not quite as fast as I would have expected so are there any tips on checking performance and then improving it?

Also, my computer has frozen twice for 30+ seconds and then recovered since the install. This did happen a couple times on the old hard drive. Any way to test what might be happening?

 

Are you running the SSD in AHCI mode, how full is your SSD?

The facts that you had stutters with your HDD leads me to think that there are other issues at hand.

 

I am definitely in AHCI mode. Are there any other factors that may be affecting performance?

I agree that the stuttering may not be the hard drive. Any way to test what it may be?

 

What firmware is the drive at? The early firmware levels had issues with LPM, FW 0309 is the one you need to be at honestly. Best performance from the 0009 version plus the 5184-hour power-on fix. http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx

EDIT: How to check FW version:

 

I checked it and I am running the right firmware. Maybe I just expected more of a performance increase or I have not used it to its full extent yet.

More importantly, my computer froze on me for 20-30 seconds again. Any way to check what this may be? It has done it once a day for a couple days now.

 

If you are seeing system pauses, it is likey a background process in Windoze. Do you have any AntiVirus software running? Have you checked for Malware with Spybot or similar? Do you have backup software or anythign else running in the background that periodically runs?

A Fresh install of the OS might help you out.. (If you havent already, a fresh install is also optimized for SSDs in Win 7)

 

I literally did a fresh install 3 days ago because this is a brand new drive. I have reasonably new RAM in the computer but other than that everything is the same.

 

I have mentioned this problem before and have so far seen it twice(used for about 6 months).

For those said i need fresh install, I used a X25M 80G(thus less free space) for nine month without any issue(which was also a direct image transfer from HDD).

I am 90% sure this is a M4 issue but not annoying enough for me to dump it.

 

The short freezes were happening to me when I had my Scorpio Black 320GB too so I am not convinced it is an M4 problem. Is there a possibility it could be my RAM? Would RAM even cause something like that?

 

I can't tell about your situation, mine is quite obvious that is related to the SSD, the light stays on almost solid during that time and when it is off, everything is back to normal.

I am talking about a machine that has been in used for 5+ years with no change of hardware/software/usage pattern except changing from HDD to x25m to M4 and only during the time I use M4 I have seen it twice. It may be related to TRIM.

 

It just happened to me again. The Hard Drive light was actually blank. This time was different though. I got an error from adobe flash player. The computer rebooted on its own after freezing for 10 seconds or so.

I use Google Chrome and have been watching video on an extended monitor if that information helps.

 

Ah! Can you tell us if you have any message in the event viewer, both system and application logs?

next time it freezes or reboots, check it for those time indexes.

 

ImageShack Album - 3 images

That is a link to the pictures of event viewer right after my computer rebooted with no warning what so ever...