OS on SSD question

[devnulllore]

Hi,

 

I got a free 120G Samsung 830 Pro SSD with my Sabertooth Z77 MB. I have my OS on it and have been reading many things about data management on it. My question is, I have a WD Black storage Drive, also on a SATA3 port,  and was wondering if it is recommended I install / Reinstall my programs i.e.. Office, Photoshop etc.. to the storage drive keeping programs and data off the SSD. I was wondering why, understanding the wear issue of SSDs, and what you may suggest.

 

Thanks,

 

[Max Norris]

Wear isn't anywhere as big an issue as it used to be, plus that's related to writing data.. ProgramFiles is just going to be read, once it's installed that's it.  Space obviously is a concern (120GB goes fast) so you may need to pick what goes on the SSD and what goes elsewhere, but personally you'd be missing out by not installing your most used programs on the SSD.

[philcruicks]

Most of the more modern SSD like yours are OK at managing ware, providing your running new Windows's OS 7 or 8/8.1 that support TRIM that will also help.

 

But obviously the SSD has much better performance but limited space, so use it wisley and if you don't need the performance out of your programs then move them off.

[Jason S. Global Moderator]

i agree with the other 2. Keep all your prominent programs on the SSD and keep all stored data on the hard drive.

 

btw, if space becomes a concern you can always move your page file to the hd. that'll reduce used space as well as many reads and writes.

 

but, in the end, as the others said above, wear and tear isnt as much of a concern anymore.

[Roger H. Veteran]

I've had my Kingston 64GB SSD in my laptop for about 3yrs now and still not a peep from it regarding wear. This is the older types also so the newer ones are even better. I've also filled that SSD about 10x now because of downloading and running out of space :p.

WHen i get a newer laptop, i'll get a bigger SSD and not ever worry about it then either.

[+BudMan MVC]

Im not sure how many programs you have, but I have 120GB ssd and all my software is installed on it - and have lots of space to work with still. Unless your running lots and lots of games that take up boat loads of GB each, I don't see why you should have an issue?

Even when you allocate 10% to over provisioning 11.9GB I still show

[Chicane-UK Veteran]

Put everything on the SSD that you can. Wear doesn't seem to be a major issue on good quality SSD's... take a look at this capture from SSDLife on my work PC which I've had running non-stop for the last couple of years...

 

I run everything off the SSD - all my core applications, even VM's sometimes, ISO image building, etc... it gets well used!

 

[snaphat (Myles Landwehr) Member]

I've had an Intel 120GB x25-m SSD in my laptop for the last 4 years. Its media wearout indicator is at 96% after all these years. It goes down by 1% per year from what I gather. I'd say it is far more likely to have a controller failure than a wearout failure.

 

EDIT: I'd list the wearout indicator in my desktop SSDs, but Intel broke the readout in the firmware for the 520 series and never fixed it. Either that or they realized they couldn't fix it...

[Lingwo]

Like the above, i wouldn't worry too much about it.

I've had a vertiex 2e since 2011 and it reckons mine will die in August 2019.

 

Mine is the main OS drive with all my programs on it. Never once given me problems.

[neoraptor]

pretty much the same - vertex 2, running for 2 years

[devnulllore]

OK, so that leads, very poorly, into my next question. I don't overclock, never had, but I've been reading that even if you don't it may be a good idea to disable C-States and Speedstep in the bios to slightly increase responsiveness in all the drives / cores etc.. So of course I came here for the REAL answer. I had tried something similar on my last PC but did not have the flexibility I do with this bios. On that PC with one C-State off and Speedstep forced off via software things did seem just a bit more responsive i.e.. no delay opening drives or dumping the recycle bin etc.. but when playing games my fans increased far more and I kind of got spooked. I turned everything back on and just forgot about it.

 

That said I do not intend to do any overclocking with this system either via bios or Asus Suite (which BTW I did NOT install this time) but of course I want to do anything otherwise I can to jostle out as much performance as I can. Quite frankly that's why I paid.. well... a LOT for this PC as I am disabled and this is one of my only windows to the world. Of course I realize now that the corners I did cut are coming back to haunt me. Any PC specs you need I will gladly post.

 

Thanks,

[+LogicalApex MVC]

OK, so that leads, very poorly, into my next question. I don't overclock, never had, but I've been reading that even if you don't it may be a good idea to disable C-States and Speedstep in the bios to slightly increase responsiveness in all the drives / cores etc.. So of course I came here for the REAL answer. I had tried something similar on my last PC but did not have the flexibility I do with this bios. On that PC with one C-State off and Speedstep forced off via software things did seem just a bit more responsive i.e.. no delay opening drives or dumping the recycle bin etc.. but when playing games my fans increased far more and I kind of got spooked. I turned everything back on and just forgot about it.

 

That said I do not intend to do any overclocking with this system either via bios or Asus Suite (which BTW I did NOT install this time) but of course I want to do anything otherwise I can to jostle out as much performance as I can. Quite frankly that's why I paid.. well... a LOT for this PC as I am disabled and this is one of my only windows to the world. Of course I realize now that the corners I did cut are coming back to haunt me. Any PC specs you need I will gladly post.

 

Thanks,

I would imagine Aggressive Link Power Management is more important to getting responsiveness than disabling processor sleep states. Link Power Management turns off the SATA port when the drive is not in use so it slows down drive access as the port has to power up before I/O can take place.

[snaphat (Myles Landwehr) Member]

I really doubt disabling speedstep and c-states did anything other than placebo effect. None of those things you mentioned that were improved were processor-intensive, they'd be I/O intensive if anything. All of the supposed large improvements people mention on forums and such were most likely the result of faulty speedstep implementations in the past. The detection of high CPU utilization and subsequent increase in clock rate is going to be be something in the nano-second range so it wouldn't be noticeable by humans.

 

but, of course disabling these things caused heating issues when your system was under load because suddenly everything is running under max freq if any sort of load happens...

 

A funny and bit related story: I once saw a guy claim on a Mac forum that forcing a processor to always operate at the max Turbo boost frequency if any load happened improved everything. He called it turbobiasing... I found it amusing because the whole idea of turbo boost is to clock up some cores past a "safe" frequency when you haven't yet hit the TDP (and some other current/voltage limits). The idea is that you won't cause overheating in this case. It wasn't something you are suppose to force without consideration TDP/voltages/currents/etc. In any case, at the end of the day, it was very similar OCing but from what I gathered it was clocked low until until system load happened then suddenly it was in TB freq ranges. I was never really sure what the point was.

[snaphat (Myles Landwehr) Member]

As a secondary thought, these types of things aren't even typically done in the high performance computing field where performance has historically reigned as king (until the past 2-3 years or so, but I digress). Believe you me that if researchers could get measurable free performance out of a machine by doing such things they would have done so in a heart beat (simply for publications saying how great their implementation of some algorithm performs). Under normal circumstances though, such technologies are left to be managed elsewhere and you work under the assumption that you are operating at peak frequency (and use peak frequency in calculations and such). If it was an issue based in reality, you would be unlikely to see results anywhere near peak performance but people do because processors tend to do a good job of scaling and then staying at maximum freq. when pegged.

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

 

The general rule of thumb is to do a clean install of the operating system.  Both Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Windows 8.x recognize SSDs during installation and tune the Windows installation for them out of the box.  Intel, Samsung and perhaps other SSD manufacturers include tuning options in their SSD management tools which claim to offer various enhancements for durability, responsiveness, etc., but I really have not played around with these.  The best purpose for these, as far as I can tell, is to run them against the SSD if it was cloned from an HDD, in order to perform the same tweaks that Windows' setup natively does when installing to a SSD.

 

As everyone has pretty much noted, today's SSDs are pretty tolerant of read and write operations and will last for quite some time under patterns of typical usage.  My general rule-of-thumb is to install the operating system and apps onto the SSD, and put data and what few games I might play onto the HDD (I'm not a gamer, your decision may vary).

 

I would recommend you avoid running any kind of system/registry/performance tweaking utilities, as Windows has been largely auto-tuning since the Windows Vista era, the exception being the aforementioned SSD vendor management tools.  Also, you do not need to defragment your SSD:  Unlike HDDs, where the read/write heads have to be positioned over the correct location over the rotating media, data on a SSD is accessed at the same speed wherever it is located in the RAM chips.  Defragging would just reduce the life of the drive. 

 

One thing you will want to do is get the latest version of Samsung Data Magician software installed on your PC and use that to check the settings to make sure the operating system is properly configured to use the SSD.  Also, you can use it to install the latest firmware (if any) for your 120GB Samsung 830PRO SSD.  The firmware is the software embedded in the SSD which manages its operation, and having the latest version installed makes sure the SSD is performing at its full potential.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

[AJerman]

Yeah, I do the same. OS and software installations on the SSD, bulk data on the HDDs. With my main Linux setup I go a little further to push /tmp to tmpfs (RAM) to reduce writes to the SSD and increase performance. Of course, I wouldn't suggest doing that until you have a LOT of RAM. I have 16 GB so I can handle the tmp folder and still have plenty of RAM left. On Windows I'd probably turn off virtual memory on the SSD, but I wouldn't bother doing too much more than that. That will reduce the bulk of the writes. You should be fine.

 

Disabling C-states and forcing speedstep or any other CPU throttling off will make VERY little difference in actual performance. It's not like a CPU takes 5 seconds to spin up to full speed after resting at a lower clock speed. It happens instantly. All you're doing instead is wasting more power. If you're using software on SSD and data on HDD, you could disable HDD spindown on the hard drive and possibly see some lag reduced, but only when the HDD had gone to sleep. If you get a 5 second lag while you hear the HDD spin up, you'll know.