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Subject:
From:
John Sproule <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Personal Computer Hardware discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sat, 9 Jan 2010 10:20:23 -0500
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First of all, let me apologize for responding more to the general discussion 
about SSD drives than the original poster's question.  Like most folks here, 
I'm still in the reading about it phase, instead of being an experienced 
user when it comes to these drives.

For people who are interested in researching more about these new drives and 
learning about their benefits, handicaps, and differences in the types of 
drives out there (largely based on the controller they use), I highly 
recommend reading what Anand Shimpi has written on them.  He's been an early 
adopter of these drives and is very excited about them, because they address 
one of the biggest performance bottlenecks in modern computers, the 
mechanical hard drive.  His review of the Intel X25-M, back in September, 
2008 introduced what makes these drives so exciting. 
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3403  This was followed up 
by his "SSD Anthology" (March, 2009), which looked into some of the 
performance issues with these drives (particularly, degradation of 
performance after the drive had been used for a length of time) and compared 
performance between Intel's product and some of its competitors, focusing on 
the controllers being used. 
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1  This overview has 
been updated with his "SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD" 
(August, 2009) http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631.  Some 
of his most recent articles address TRIM (November, 2009) 
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667 and a promising new 
drive controller, which is being debuted in OCZ's Vertex 2 Pro SSD 
(December, 2009) http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3702. 
Anandtech has other articles on the subject, as well, usually focusing more 
specifically on various SSDs released by different manufacturers.  You can 
scan through the list of articles in their Storage section to get an idea of 
what else is available.  http://www.anandtech.com/storage/

As for using these drives with Windows XP, they will work, but some of the 
tools available for addressing the degradation of performance over time may 
not (this appears to be true for TRIM, anyway).  It may depend which drive 
you buy and what controller it is using, when it comes to being able to 
address this.  My very basic understanding of what is at work here is that 
how these drives keep track of the data written to them can eventually lead 
to a performance hit, because they don't erase data or their record of where 
the data on the drive is, until they run out of empty space on the drive. 
Once this point is reached, writing more data starts to take longer because 
of the need to add an extra step.  Processes like TRIM address this by 
freeing up space related to deleted files on the fly; so, it isn't left to 
do as part of the write operation.  Pre-dating TRIM (and as an alternative), 
other tools can be manually run, periodically, to free up space that is no 
longer actively being used.(This is off the top of my head without rereading 
Anand's articles; so, it is probably not quite accurate but hopefully in the 
ballpark.)

Anyway, I'm certainly keeping an eye on the development of these drives.  I 
think that we'll all want one eventually, but they remain very pricey 
compared to mechanical drives, and there appears to be a teething process 
underway when it comes to designing and implementing a fully mature 
controller for them.

John Sproule

----------- Some of the Original Thread ---------
Date:    Fri, 8 Jan 2010 09:07:35 -0500
From:    Richard Glazier <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: SSD Drives with XP SP2

That was second article was from last May.
That is an eternity in cutting edge technology.
The Intel site is full of problems right up to November of 2009.

That is what the new generation of the Trim kit is all about.

BTW: (I don't have one.) grin.

Rick Glazier

From: <vandervoort>
Apparently, according to Fred Langa, the OS does make a difference:
clipped
This article has a great deal more info:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9132668/Analysis_SSD_performance_is_a_slowdown_inevitable_
"One thing you can be sure of is that the shiny new SSD you just bought
isn't likely to continue performing at the same level it did when you
first pulled it out of the box."

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