Posts Tagged ‘Performance’
Microsoft have done a lot of work on win7 to tune it for SSDs, so much so that in terms of the OS itself, there’s little to no need to tweak anything. However if you’re considering a purchase, there are some things you ought to know, some things to consider, and some things you can and can’t do with SSDs, which is what we cover off in this article, along with providing some good advice on maintaining your solid state drives in peak performance.
In summary, as far as the OS is concerned, there is little to nothing that needs be done for a single SSD, but the same can’t be said for your applications or for SSDs configured in a RAID set. While the OS is optimised for SSDs, applications aren’t, and with very few exceptions, RAID controllers don’t support TRIM, which marks blocks that can be erased in the background by the SSD.
If you’re looking for step-by-step instructions, forget it. If you can’t understand the high-level advice in the article sufficiently to work out what steps you must take for yourself then you shouldn’t be reading this page at all.
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Scenario 1: You’re buying a new machine and you’ve spent the best part of a week or two investigating the absolute best bang you can get for your buck; your browser favourites list is full of references to benchmarking articles, reviews, and both performance and price comparisons. Finally you decide that you can buy an entire Black Edition 6 core AMD Phenom II processor-based system with 6GB of 1.6GHz RAM, two amazingly fast Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB HDD’s, a 24-inch 1080p high definition monitor and a factory over-clocked PowerColor HD 5850 PCS+ video card for less than the cost of Intel’s top-end i7 processor on its own. You bite the bullet, buy it, install Windows 7, and with much fanfare and expectation you run the Windows Experience Index (WEI) tool only to have your ego pitifully deflated by a horrible 5.9 rating for your hard disks, which are in RAID0 configuration and pumping more than 4x the bandwidth of a standard hard disk.
Scenario 2: You spent a small fortune on the best and fastest laptop you could find, which has Vista installed and gives a Windows Experience Index of 5; you upgrade to Windows 7 and your ego is pitifully deflated by a shocking score of 2.
In this article kadaitcha.cx will explain the discrepancies and advise you what to do about it. Read the rest of this entry »