Intel X-25m tweaks needed in Vista?

[btdvox]

Hey guys So ive been reading up on some of the OCZ reg tweaks for SSD's in vista. And Im not sure which ones are really needed and which ones arent, more specfically I heard that some of the tweaks were to minimalize the stuttering that was occuring on the older SSD's with the Jmicron Controller (non apex or g skill titans) but was wondering if most of these were still needed for the Intel X-25m?

Also with this I know some things like Prefetching and a couple other tweaks should be used as vista does Random IO alot and SSD's dont need these, is there any guidelines or sites I should be reading?

thanks in advance!

I couldnt beleive the size and weight of the SSD...I am a SSD newb haha

[m^2]

Needed? No. Recommended? Usually.

Just don't turn on write caching if you don't have UPS. And don't install beta software, it's not worth the risk.

[karateo]

turn off the defragmenting and the superfetcher if your apps are all on the SSD

nothing more really.

[suffocatio]

Try this http://members.westnet.com.au/elpamy...SSDTweaker.zip

[karateo]

Try this http://members.westnet.com.au/elpamy...SSDTweaker.zip

wouldn't recommend it
this is for the crappy OCZ and other's jmicron inventions!

the intel ssd has 3 years warranty plus enough technology to work on the current OSes as they are

[ewitte]

They all benefit as these tweaks just prevent/reduce the OS using the drive like it does a normal hard drive which slows things down on SSD instead of speeding them up.

[Tony]

wouldn't recommend it
this is for the crappy OCZ and other's jmicron inventions!

the intel ssd has 3 years warranty plus enough technology to work on the current OSes as they are

you obviously do not know much of SSD technology.

[ewitte]

I'd like to see what MFT in hardware does on these things

[karateo]

They all benefit as these tweaks just prevent/reduce the OS using the drive like it does a normal hard drive which slows things down on SSD instead of speeding them up.

disable pagefile? what if he get a bsod? what if he runs programs that need pagefile?
disable superfetcher? is he going to have frequently used stuff ONLY on the ssd?

intel ssds don't need tweaks to work. you only HAVE TO disable defragmenting on the specific drive to reduce wearing.

you obviously do not know much of SSD technology.

at least i know about it!
I see a whole company (OCZ) trying to figure how they work why should i know?

any useful post on the topic now?

[btdvox]

Needed? No. Recommended? Usually.

Just don't turn on write caching if you don't have UPS. And don't install beta software, it's not worth the risk.

Yeah read about write caching I dont know if im going to enable that- dont see much benefit from it.- Plus I overclock my PC so random crashes can and happen from time to time, dont want to risk the whole drive to crapout. I also dont know how useful a UPS would be on a system that draws over 950 Watts from the wall on a 1200 Watt PSU lol.

turn off the defragmenting and the superfetcher if your apps are all on the SSD

nothing more really.

Yeah ill turn off defrag on the SSD for sure.

On the SSD I will have the OS and main apps like browsers and office, and 1 or 2 games, the rest of my stuff will be on my Velociraptor.

What exactly is the SSD Tweaker executble for?

I read Tony's reg tweaks for SSD's. guess ill try some of em out.

So Superfetching, Prefetch, indexing, but leave pagefiling on? Now under L2 cache what if we have i7? will there be an L3 cache instead?
thanks

[rge]

Disable write cache on intel SSD??? pic one is enabled, pic 2 is disabled...I will keep write cache enabled on mine. Maybe works on OCZ, not intels, at least not mine...unless there is some other write cache. Windows 7 on mine, superfetch is on manual after install, never runs.

I am using my intel SSD no different than a normal hard drive. In one or two years my write speeds, and probably reads, as well as capacity will be obsolete and I will be upgrading anyways.

[ewitte]

disable pagefile? what if he get a bsod? what if he runs programs that need pagefile?
disable superfetcher? is he going to have frequently used stuff ONLY on the ssd?

intel ssds don't need tweaks to work. you only HAVE TO disable defragmenting on the specific drive to reduce wearing.

I have my pagefile on another drive manually set to 512MB and the paging executive is set to disabled along with the largesystemcache setting set. Also I left superfetch on but turned off PREFETCH. And besides defrag you also want to turn indexing off. Intel has its place but its obviously WAY overpriced and there is only one thing its faster than going against the other brands when properly configured in RAID with a good controller (and still cheaper).

[ewitte]

Response to the intel screen shot Make sure at least defrag and indexing are off.

[dctokyo]

Needed? It depends on how you use your PC........ Recommended? again it depends on how you use your PC, but most of the tweaks would speed up your system.

[ewitte]

Needed? It depends on how you use your PC........ Recommended? again it depends on how you use your PC, but most of the tweaks would speed up your system.

Or extend the life. A lot of those tweaks are not even SSD specific. Some of us used a lot of the settings on normal hard drives to speed the system up. Intel or not windows (even 7) is still not configured to properly use SSD out of the box to its most potential.

Lol don't fight guys the whole technology isn't anywhere near perfected yet. In less than 2 years everything out now will look like crap.

[btdvox]

Response to the intel screen shot Make sure at least defrag and indexing are off.

Is that a single Intel Drive or a different RAID?

Well If I enable Write Cache and get a computer crash or a random PSU shut down, is there a much higher risk rate?

Also for LargeSystemCache, will there be a option for L3 cache for i7 CPUS?

[rge]

Not a single drive, and given his comment of intel being overpriced, probably raid of OCZ?...but I missed whatever point he was trying to show about write caching if he was responding to me...so have to ask him. Personally I prefer single drives, raid gets corrupted to easy benching cpu, and I dont see benefits of raid with my use as I do with single SSD vs hard drive.

I dont think disabling write cache is going to be an option with intel drive, kills the performance as my post shows...but you will be able to test yourself soon enough.

As for risk of crashing, between running prime, linpack for 24/7 testing and benching for hours and hours over last months, I have had ?100 bsod's and random shut off's and reboots, all with my intel SSD write cache enabled, havent corrupted a thing yet. Usually I will corrupt an OS at some point on hard drive, and I am sure at some point on this SSD, but does not seem to be any more prone than hard drive that I can tell...and when it does, reinstall from image is 5 mins.

Not to mention like i said this drive will be so outdated in a year or 2, I wouldnt care if it worked or not by then...and i doubt the wear level boogey man is going to get me before then.

[btdvox]

sounds good! ill try prob most of the Tony's tweaks except for the ram drive stuff, most of it seems good, i never noticed that write caching was on automatically anyways haha. I just got the drive yesterday but have been backing up stuff - gonna connect it tomorrow, really excited.

And yeah I prefer single drives too, I went RAID b4 and never saw much of an increase, that being said I said i would never go SLI and no i have three GPUs haha

[ewitte]

I was just saying you need to leave it on especially with a drive that has no internal cache. Even the intels have no cache just a better controller. I'd actually prefer something like vertex over Intel for a single drive with no hardware controller. I'd only spend that kind of money if it were being used on a webserver which is where they would really shine. But then again Kingson is starting to rebrand them at a discount price so even that may be unecessary soon.

Technically you should only lose the changes getting written to the disk at the time of the BSOD. If its a benchmark you don't really care about whats getting written to disk.

[ChronoReverse]

Prefetching should be turned off. Prefetch places the bootup items (copy) in a different spot so that it could be loaded quicker sequentially. But that's not necessary with SSDs and adds writes.


Defrag should be turned off. Defrag isn't strictly unnecessary, but the built-in defrag doesn't do it right for SSDs and adds writes.


Superfetch should be left on. Data is read from the disk so that's safe for the SSD. Fast as SSD's are, RAM is still faster.


Page file should be left on unless you can put it on a different drive.


Write cache should be left on unless your system is prone to crashing in the middle of disk activity. If it's your primary workstation, this should not be happening; find and fix the problem. If this is your extreme workstation, then a little disk corruption shouldn't matter.


Indexing is a tossup. Even a SSD is not fast enough to null the need for indexing. Indexing does put a very modest number of writes when it creates and updates the index (in the overall view of things, it's trivial). Reading the index obviously has no penalties and as usual RAM is far faster than even a SSD. Remember, you're not supposed to index everything, only things you want instant-search on.

[ewitte]

sounds good! ill try prob most of the Tony's tweaks except for the ram drive stuff, most of it seems good, i never noticed that write caching was on automatically anyways haha. I just got the drive yesterday but have been backing up stuff - gonna connect it tomorrow, really excited.

And yeah I prefer single drives too, I went RAID b4 and never saw much of an increase, that being said I said i would never go SLI and no i have three GPUs haha

I tried the ramdrive section in Vista and it just made things less stable.

RAID performance actually dropped on ICH10 but went WAY up on the 2405 (for actual usage). So if you don't have an SSD with cache or a good controller I wouldn't mess with it.

[btdvox]

I was just saying you need to leave it on especially with a drive that has no internal cache. Even the intels have no cache just a better controller. I'd actually prefer something like vertex over Intel for a single drive with no hardware controller. I'd only spend that kind of money if it were being used on a webserver which is where they would really shine. But then again Kingson is starting to rebrand them at a discount price so even that may be unecessary soon.

Technically you should only lose the changes getting written to the disk at the time of the BSOD. If its a benchmark you don't really care about whats getting written to disk.

Thanks, I looked into the Vertexes but after seeing some numbers and goign on the OCZ forum , they dont seem to sure about some things and makes me kind of anxious.
Plus every review and bench Ive seen the intel SSD blew the others out of the water. It was the main reason I looked into SSD's actually.

Your points about having cache and not having cache vs a good controller is kind of moot as it seems for any reviewer and many users having the Intel drive as a primary OS drive is the only good SSD for that particualr job, It seems every other SSD other than Mtron ones had much worse performances and the APEX/Gskill titan RAID 0 controller seems like a rehash to fix something that was broken. and the Intel drive put those drives to shame too.

Thanks for the advice tho!\

Ok so other than that It seems most people are saying put the page file on my VR drive and keep superfetch on (both the regedit and under services.msc).

Sounds good.

[ewitte]

Intel rules iops but that doesn't mean the other drives are bad. I mean 3500 versus less than 100 on a 7200rpm drives is already very noticeable Less noticeable than going from 3500 to the 16000 or so on the intels. You can't go completely off of reviews. Even the cheap stuff can easily be insanely faster than a platter based drive given you tweak things right.

If Intel were the only option for me I would have just waited. I mean Kingston just started selling drives with the same technology and I have the feeling lots of the other companys may license the controller so in less than a year you can probably get the exact same tech for less than $200. Paying $400-500 for an 80GB mlc drive is crazy. If thats the case I may easily talk myself into replacing my array with 3 of them. IDK I never did try an intel drive but its kind of the case of instant versus instant. Everything I click already comes up near instant.

[btdvox]

no I get where your coming from, To be honest I was going to go for 2 X 30 GB vertexes, but when the Intel SSD went down to 475 here, It wouldve been the same price as the 2 X 30 GB vertexes so I jumped on it, Id rather have a single drive rather than worry about RAID0 and plus its the Intel SSD and it has 20 GB more for the same price almost.

Intel ssd was 475.00
30 GB OCZ Vertex was about 199.00 X 2

[karateo]

I am at the same position.
I was looking for the cheapest ssds on a hardware controller with cache. But what would i do with them in the future? too restrictive
Then, I decided to go with lot's of mtrons SLC ssds. But again, future proof I will always have to use them in raid mode.
Then, the vertexes, but 1) intel lowered prices and 2) the 60gb size is small for a laptop but the 80gb is Ok.
So from 200 pounds of the vertex i decided to wait 1-2 months and buy the intel mlc which will always be a fast drive and independent of controllers and raid modes.

Don't even mention it's under Intel's known reliability on products.