Solid State Drives - Part 2

On my previous post I tried to convince you that it makes sense to buy an overpriced storage device called SSD if you use computers for a living. Now, to conclude my discussion on SSDs I will go into more low-level details such as:

1. Why I bought specifically Intel's I-25M?
2. How I installed it, and why I cloned my old drive instead of starting it "fresh"?
3. What are the tweaks one needs to apply on a XP machine with SSD?
4. Good comparison of SSDs x HDDs

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1. Why I bought specifically Intel's I-25M?

- Quick answer: because it currently has the best value if you weight compatibility, performance and price among the top SSDs.

- Verbose answer:
If you are joining the SSD bandwagon you should try to pair it up with a modern operating system, such as Windows 7. Also, plan on doing a clean install of the OS instead of imaging your current hard drive into the SSD. That will simplify things a lot, since older operating systems were not designed with SSDs in mind and may cause issues ranging from sub-optimal performance to even significantly decrease the life of SSDs.

Sadly I could not follow this advice myself - I wanted to install my SSD on my work laptop, since this is what I use 99% of the time for "money-making" tasks. Ya know, unless we rob a bank or do some other illegal stuff we need to do something they call work to get money to buy cool stuff like electronics. My company currently doesn't allow me to use Windows 7 yet, and I didn't want to mess with my VPN. Not having the option to switch my work computer to Windows 7 I had to figure out a way to make it work with XP.

Some SSDs do not support XP well. More specifically, many of them only support something called TRIM in Windows 7. You can look for TRIM and SSD on Google or Wikipedia, but it's enough to say that you NEED the ability to run TRIM at least every week or month, otherwise your SSD's performance and life will sink fast. Intel's SSD works pretty well with XP - in fact, their SSDs are one of the simpler devices to use, requiring the least amount of tweaks to work in top shape with XP. Sure it also helps I got a decent deal from Newegg the last Black Friday! :D


2. How I installed it, and why I cloned my old drive instead of starting it "fresh"?

I had to find a way to clone my original HDD into the SSD so I would not have to reinstall everything, including apps, network settings and more importantly the VPN. Then, after digging through zillions of forums I found that the most important thing you need to pay attention to when cloning XP drives into an SSD is something called partition alignment. You can look it up, but basically it has to do where the XP partition starts in the disk, and for you to get the best performance it must start on a sector that is a multiple of your SSD's page size. Since XP wasn't built with SSDs in mind it always start its partitions on a position that doesn't match the start of a page in your SSD. What this means is that when XP needs to read or write something to the SSD, the SSD needs to do double the work to access two pages instead of one. Some SSDs handle it better than others, but it is a performance constraint nevertheless. If you partition your SSD using Vista or Windows 7 you should be safe, these operating systems always start a partition on sector 2048, which is compatible with most SDDs out there.

Note that partition alignment can give a good performance boost even for regular HDDs, as described by Microsoft here (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/prork/pree_exa_oori.mspx?mfr=true). For (much) more detailed information on benefits of partition alignment for SSDs see here (http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?48309-Partition-alignment-importance-under-Windows-XP-%2832-bit-and-64-bit%29-why-it-helps-with-stuttering-and-increases-drive-working-life).

- SSD partitioning:
To ensure proper partition alignment I used the Disk Management tool from my Windows 7 computer to remove the old and re-create a new partition on the SSD. This tool comes bundled with Windows 7 and Vista, just go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management. There I removed all partitions from the SSD (it was a new drive, so I had no data to lose), created a new partition and formatted it with NTFS.

- Disk cloning:
I first used a free tool called Macrium Reflect (http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp) to backup my original HDD. This tool is great for disk image backups, you can even mount the image as a virtual drive in Windows Explorer if you need to retrieve files without imaging a disk. Unfortunately, I found that every time I imported the original HDD image into the SSD Macrium was also bringing the bad alignment from the original disk. I could not find a workaround for it, but at least I was happy to backup the original disk in case something bad happened.

Looking for a (free) solution I found on some forums people recommending a trial version of a tool called Drive Snapshot. It didn't work for me for some reason, like Macrium this tool was reverting my SSD to the original bad alignment.

Then I found something that finally worked, a free tool called XXClone (http://www.xxclone.com/). I thought it wouldn't work, it seems the latest version of this tool was released in 2007. I was surprised to find that the SSD was able to boot after XXClone, and better yet, the partition was still properly aligned!


3. What are the tweaks one needs to apply on a XP machine with SSD?

Ok, so after cloning was completed I got the disk to boot on my laptop. Now it was time to tweak XP so it would work with the best performance and wouldn't decrease the life of my SSD.

Below are the changes I made to the XP registry for it to work better with the SSD. If you want you can just copy/paste this block into a new file called "SSD.reg" and double-click it to apply the changes. While it worked fine for me I WON'T BE LIABLE IF IT BREAKS YOUR COMPUTER, SO USE IT ON YOUR OWN RISK.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]
"EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction]
"Enable"="N"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OptimalLayout]
"EnableAutoLayout"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"LargeSystemcache"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"ClearPageFileAtShutdown"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem]
"NtfsDisable8dot3nameCreation"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem]
"NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer]
"AlwaysUnloadDLL"=dword:00000001

4. Good comparison of SSDs x HDDs

On my previous post I presented some synthetic benchmarks taken with CrystalMark. That really doesn't mean much in terms of real life experience. To get a glimpse of how SSDs perform when compared to regular HDDs take a look at videos like these on YouTube:
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Jz7IMwBt4&feature=related
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&feature=related

Solid State Drives - Part 1

I have been reading a lot about Solid State Drives (SSDs) for quite some time. SSDs are storage devices we can use to replace standard Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), but offer less space and cost much much more.

HDDs are based on mature (i.e. old) technology, basically consistinting of multiple spinning magnetic disks read and written by moving heads. Suppose you want to read a part of a certain file: the reading head must move to a specific track / cylinder and wait until the data in the spinning disk passes just under the reading head. This procedure of one physical move operation and then wait for the data is called seek time. And as much it sounds complex, it is actually amazingly fast in modern HDDs - both the heads and the disks are freaking fast. It still, however, takes some time, and by relying on moving parts this whole mechanism is quite sensitive to impacts. When my external Maxtor 500GB USB harddrive fell on the table (yes, it didn't drop on the floor or anything, it just fell from vertical to horizontal position on the table!) I could only imagine its disks spinning at 7200 RPM with the writing heads scratching on everything just like an old vinyl LP! Poor HD, it is now on the HD heavens, you will be remembered!

SSDs currently offer less space than HDDs, but since it has no moving parts (it is based on the same memory we use on digital cameras, small USB drives etc) it would still be "alive", one point to SSDs here. But also, without heads and spinning disks etc SSDs run cooler, use less energy (great for laptops) and can get the data without any delay - the seek times are ridiculously fast! Or so the manufacturers say...

It took me some time to find courage (i.e. $$$) to try it myself, but I finally got one on last year's Black Friday. Then I had to read even more to set it up properly. After 4 months using it every day in one of my work laptops I am certain that SSDs are to become mainstream in the next couple years, with falling prices and improved performance. Though they may not replace HDDs anytime soon, it makes a lot of sense to setup a mixed system, with SSDs to store the operating system and programs, and HDDs to store music, photos, movies, backups etc.

Now, if you are interested in more comprehensive reviews and bechmark comparisons, I am not dreaming of competing with sites like AnandTech (http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3747&p=1), ARS Technica (http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/03/anand-investigates-ssd-performance-shenanigans.ars) or Tom's Hardware (http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/03/anand-investigates-ssd-performance-shenanigans.ars) - but, given how complex and expensive SSDs currently are, I wanted to share my own perspective as a Java developer.

# SSDs benefits:
- read and write speeds are much better than HDDs
- more resistant to shocks due to no moving parts
- when its lifetime is over you can still read your data and transfer it to other storage devices - something that is not easily accomplished with HDDs in most cases

# SSD drawbacks:
- still costly, but prices are going down as new and better products are being offered
- less storage space - unless you have lots of money to burn you may have to get used to work with less space in your laptop than what you have now
- many operating systems, especially older ones (XP, this is you!), were not designed to use SSDs efficiently, causing sub-optimal performance and increased wear
- limited lifetime - due to technical limitations in flash memory, over time it will stop being able to write new data. No one knows exactly how long each of these SSDs last. All manufactures provide some bogus unrealistic metrics, but if I had to guess it would not be much longer than 3 to 5 years

I said I would not make benchmarks but just to give you a glimpse of how faster SSDs are I posted these two images below. In the left we have a 160GB Western Digital HDD, and in the right we have a 80GB Intel X-25M - both tests executed on a Dell Latitude D630 laptop.


The Seq row represents scenarios similar to when we are reading / writing big files (i.e. a DVD movie) to the disk. The 4K row is, however, far more significative for the overall disk performance - it represents reading / writing of small chunks of data to the disk, an activity that is far more common on a workstation throughout the day.

Without getting into further details, I think it is pretty evident that SSDs are significantly faster than common HDDs. Should you buy one? Well it depends... but you can be sure it made sense for me to buy it! To explain why I believe in that, these two are the biggest concerns people have with SSDs, and also the main reasons why I bought it:

1. "SSDs are too costly" - I work with computers 8 to 10 hours per day. Every day. And when I am not working for my employer I am likely to be testing something for myself to learn new tricks. I always need to keep few resource hog applications up all the time (e.g. Oracle, Eclipse, virtual machines etc), which causes a lot of disk I/O. When I build a complex project with Ant or Maven it can take around 5 minutes - yeah, it seems fine, but sometimes I need to do that many many many times during the day, and you can guess it adds up fast.

Now, let us assume the SSD costs $200 and that my employer pays me $40 / hour. If the SSD's improved performance saves me 15 minutes per day in project builds, application startups etc, it would take me only 1 month to "recover" my investment. And after that, it is just profit - boom baby! Also, because I can now provide consistent faster results, especially on tasks associated with high disk I/O (e.g. build virtual machines, install Oracle etc), perhaps my boss will have good news on my next performance review and give me a raise! Yeah, I know I am dreaming now...

2. "SSDs will die after 5 or so years" - Ok, I wish you could see my face of "not caring". Seriously, in 5 years I want to be able to buy a few petabytes of quantum-based storage for the same $200. By then I will just not care if a 80GB or 160GB SSD is not able to write anymore. Even its speed, which is great for todays standard, is going to be dog slow!

Ok, now that we agree it makes sense in some cases (e.g. mine) to replace HDDs with SSDs, which one we should buy? Man, I wish things were simple... even though we have a gazillion companies selling these things, it is still something I would never ask my father to buy and install one by himself, and he plays with computers since I was 6 years old.

First, you need to pick the right SSD - and like I said, there are too many companies selling them. And I can tell you, you REALLY do not want to pick one of the bad SSDs - many of them are worse than regular HDDs, and they get even worse over time! Since this is not a super consumer-friendly (i.e. plug-and-play-and-forget) kind of device, your best bet is to stick with the top 2 vendors - the ones with most modern technology and the biggest number of fellow "SSD-ers" to help you on forums if you ever need help. Currently I consider Intel and OCZ as the two top contenders in the SSD market, with Intel having the upper hand in value. OCZ's top model (Vertex LE) is somewhat faster than Intel's I-25M G2 but it is way more expensive - the 100GB costs around twice as much of what I paid for Intel's 80GB SSD! Sure, there are others (e.g. GSkill, SuperTalent etc), but at this time I think it is just safer to stick with one of these two. Kingston entered the market re-branding Intel drives, so apart from the niceties in the Kingston bundle they count as Intel hardware.

• Intel has two interesting models, the I-25M with 80GB or 160GB. Both use Intel's own controller.

• OCZ has just too many different models and capacities, but the most popular ones seem to be the Vertex (Indilix controller) and Sumit series (Samsung controller).

If you really want to jump in the SSD bandwagon I recommend you keep an eye for deals on sites like Amazon, Newegg, SlickDeals, DealDump etc (see my previous post about the Black Friday for a more deals sites) for either one of these 3 models (Intel, Vertex and Summit) with the storage size your wallet can afford. These short-lived deals can make a good difference for your wallet, or even allow you to get a bigger drive for the same $$$.

Ok, this post ended up quite longer than I expected. I will leave for my next post to describe how I installed, setup, cloned and tweaked the SSD on my laptop, and why I picked Intel over other alternatives.