Crunching on SSDs: What you need to know

[jcool]

..Back-up by Bob!
I _will_ draw a backup of this myself as soon as it's finished.. but who knows, that may be too late

@Johnmark: 31k offset looks like you are running Windows XP (OR, you crated this partition using WIndows XP Setup), am I correct?
That offset is indeed rather bad for an SSD. How bad is determined by the "class" of SSD you are running, as we have established earlier.
If class 1 (old Jmicron), such an offset will cause stuttering and shorten drive life considerably. For class 2, it will affect performance and maybe drive life a little, but nothing too dramatical. For class 3, it shouldn't affect drive life, and performance losses will be minimal.

Now, from your screenshot, it looks like you're running a Kingston SSDNow V-Series G2 with 128GB, that's a JMF618 based drive, so it should be doing fine.

If you do want to change your offset while keeping your current install, you'll need to draw an image of your OS install ujsing drive snapshot and create a new partition manually. What you need to do is written down here - I have never worked with Drive snapshot myself though (it's free I think).

Otherwise just save your Data, kill the partition and set up a fresh Windows 7 - you won't regret it if coming from XP
Don't forget you have to delete the old partitions and let Win7 setup create new ones!

@kjeldoran: In order for GC to work, the GC Tool needs to "see" the drives as individual drives, which is NOT the case while running a RAID array. Same issue as with TRIM here, the ATA pass through command is not forwarded through the raid controller to the disks.

By the way, in case anyone was still wondering WHY you'd run Raid 0 despite the disadvantages for SSDs.. here's why