First SSD Install -- A Couple of Tech Questions
I just installed my first SSD and decided to do it on a 7-8 year old Toshiba Satellite laptop. After some initial problems I think all is well, but am hoping to get a little feedback to confirm things look OK.
If it seems things are in order, I'll follow-up with an additional post to review the problem I encountered and what I did to get around it, in the hope of getting some feedback/insight as to what might have been going on.
CURRENT SITUATION
I understand three of the important issues with SSDs are:
- Have partitions aligned on 4k boundaries
- Have "Trim" enabled
- Avoid Defrags
I have two partitions on the drive--one for the OS and one for my data. Here are a few screen shots that I hope show I've got these three issues covered.
1. Have partitions aligned on 4k boundaries.
I believe the partition "Starting Offsets" in this screen shot show this to be the case. I.e. Partition 0 is at offset 1,048,576 Bytes. Partition 1 is at offset 178,024,087,552 Bytes. Both of these are evenly divisible by 4096.
2. Have "Trim" Enabled.
Running the fsutil command returns a "0", which I understand shows trim to be enabled for the drive. I'm hoping it reflects the condition for the entire drive (all partitions).
3. Avoid Defrags. I turned off scheduled defragmentation.
Does it look like I'm covered?
Comments
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Everything looks OK to me. I believe TRIM is set per system, not even per physical disk.
A note for others who might stop by. The latest OSs should take care of all this for you. I think I'm right in saying that partition alignment has been taken care of since Windows Vista, and defrag and TRIM since Windows 7. So whilst it's not a bad idea to check everything is OK, it ought to be OK by default.
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Thank you, Mark. As noted, I have no prior experience with SSDs so can't speak to which OSs do what, but... the OS currently on this old laptop is Win7 and I had to turn off scheduled defragging. Also had to do that after first installing the SSD on this old laptop under Win10. However, as noted in my original post, I did have a problem I had to work around to get to this point and part of that work-around was rolling back to Win7 from Win10. I plan to review the problem here shortly in the hope someone might have an insight or suggestion that will enable me to use the SSD with Win10.
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SSD Problem Encountered under Windows 10.
The Laptop
The computer I chose to install the SSD on is a 7-8 year old Toshiba Satellite A215-S5837. The CPU is an AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-60, 2.0 Ghz dual-core CPU. It came with just 2 GB of PC5300 DDR2 SDRAM, a 160GB 5400 RPM HDD, and was running a 32 bit version of VISTA. A dinosaur by today's standards, that I had upgraded to 4 GB of RAM and a 320GB 7200 RPM HDD I had pulled out of my wife's Dell laptop when doing an HDD upgrade for her a couple of years back. At various times, I had a 32 bit dual-boot setup (Win8/VISTA), 64 bit standard boot Win7, 64 bit standard boot Win8.1, and finally 64 bit standard boot Win10. Apart from a couple of caveats that didn't bother me (loss of function keys and touch-pad under Win8, 8.1, and 10), the thing always ran without a hitch.Cloning the HDD to the SSD
I downloaded and installed a complimentary copy of Acronis True Image (ATI) that came with the Crucial SSD. I connected the SSD to the laptop via an external drive box and tried to run ATI to clone the HDD to the SSD, but ATI wouldn't run--at all. I contacted Crucial and was told they didn't have a complimentary version of ATI that would run on Win10--I'd have to find/use something else.I already had Macrium Reflect (Free) and Minitool Partition Wizard on the laptop so I figured I'd give those apps a try. Macrium Reflect recognized the new drive as an SSD, indicated it successfully enabled Trim for the drive, then began cloning the drive. When finished, it indicated a successful cloning of both partitions on the old drive (one for the OS and one for my data).
Problem with Logos?
After cloning, I shut the laptop down, installed the SSD, and fired-up the laptop. It booted fine, although not nearly as fast as I had hoped. I started Logos. It also opened fine, though not nearly as fast as I had hoped. Logos said there was an update (surprise!), so I gave it the go-ahead. The download went fine but Logos stopped responding during indexing. I gave it several minutes to recover, then opened Task Manager to kill it. It couldn't kill it, then Task Manager stopped responding. At that point, I couldn't get anything else to run and had to do a hard shut-down with the power button. I hoped it was just a glitch.The machine rebooted fine, I started Logos again, and got through the indexing. I went to the Logos Home page, then tried to go back to the active layout. Logos locked up again, then Task Manager locked up again while trying to kill Logos. Hard shut-down and reboot again. At this point, I thought it was a Logos problem, so I tried a few other apps like MS Word. Things would work fine for a while, but then the app(s) would lock up and every time, I'd have to do a hard shut-down. I then tried running a few OS programs (like Control Panel), and before getting very far the system would lock up. Now I knew it wasn't a glitch and it wasn't Logos.
Problem with the SSD or the Cloning Process or a Combination of Win10 and an SSD on this old Machine?
I removed the SSD and reinstalled the old HDD. I then used Win10 to delete the partitions from the SSD and Macrium Reflect to clone the drive again, but this time I did it one partition at a time--first the OS, then the data. Again Macrium Reflect indicated all went well. I reinstalled the SSD. Same problem as before. [:(]At this point I decided to try doing a restore of a System Image made before upgrading the laptop to Win10. I selected an image of Win7 that had been made with Macrium Reflect. I left the SSD in the laptop and booted from a Macrium Reflect recovery disk. I then did a restore of the Win7 System Image partition to the SSD. Macrium Reflect indicated the restore went fine. I rebooted from the SSD that was still in the laptop. It booted fine (and faster) and I still had both partitions (OS & Data) on the SSD. Since then, everything has worked fine.
So... if it wasn't a hardware problem with the SSD, what was it?
- The cloning process (versus restoring from a system image)?
- Windows 10 related?
- One or both of the above, in combination with the hardware on this old laptop?
If you made it all the way through this post without your eyes glazing over, I'd love to know if you have any thoughts on what was causing the problem.
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Hello Rick
After reading your complete post, I believe something was not right when you did the cloning process to begin with. And that after you did the system restore you corrected the error.
It was good that you had the system restore on hand.
Hope you enjoy the upgrade and Logos.
I would still keep an eye on Logos but it sounds like you have the problem taken care of and that it was more the OS than Logos.
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2021 MacBook Pro M1 Pro 14" 16GB 512GB SSD, running MacOS Monterey iPad Mini 6, iPhone 11.0 -
FWIW:
For anyone not aware of it, the old Defragment utility has become Defragment and Optimize in Windows 10 (possibly Windows 8/8.1, too, but I can't remember). It will automatically recognize SSDs in distinction from HDDs and either Optimize (TRIM) or Defragment as appropriate.
Instead of Artificial Intelligence, I prefer to continue to rely on Divine Intelligence instructing my Natural Dullness (Ps 32:8, John 16:13a)
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Lee said:
After reading your complete post, I believe something was not right when you did the cloning process to begin with. And that after you did the system restore you corrected the error.
I would agree with that.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Very informative thread.
Thanks to you all.
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I'm surprised the cloning was faulty when using the same tool successfully to restore an image. Was it the latest version 6 of Macrium? It isn't Windows 10 as I've successfully recovered it to SSD from an image using ATI.
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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Because of several recent threads I decided to add anSSD. I am having an IT guy install it for me. I want to put my Windows 10 OS and Logos on it. The hard drive my OS is on now is a one terribyte drive so we cannot mirror it onto the 512 SSD. My IT guy tells me that if I simply load the OS onto the SSD card I will have to reload all my programs or they will not work. True? Has anyone advice for us?
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Donn Arms said:
Because of several recent threads I decided to add anSSD. I am having an IT guy install it for me. I want to put my Windows 10 OS and Logos on it. The hard drive my OS is on now is a one terribyte drive so we cannot mirror it onto the 512 SSD. My IT guy tells me that if I simply load the OS onto the SSD card I will have to reload all my programs or they will not work. True? Has anyone advice for us?
1) I believe that it true that to image a HDD to a new drive (in this case an SSD), the new drive must be the same size (or larger) than the original drive. At least that has been my experience. However, if there is some cloning software out there that can chop the image file to fit a smaller drive, I sure would like to know about it.
2) Installing a fresh copy of the operating system is not necessarily a bad thing. A fresh installation can be surprisingly fast because of the speed of the new SSD (your cpu, amount of memory, and bus speed will be limiting factors). And, you will have a brand new, shiny, fresh installation w/o any hidden problems like corrupted files or registry errors, etc. Upgrades from older OS's can have those sort of gotchas lying in wait (which may have been what lay behind the OP's problem, above).
The only caveat to doing a clean install of Windows 10 (and I could be wrong about this) is that I believe Microsoft is only offering a free copy of Win10 to those who upgrade, i.e., not a clean install - but your IT guy will know if that is true or is able to work around it.
3) Yes. If you do a clean install of Windows 10, you will have to reinstall all of your programs and manually reload all of your data files. But again, the reinstalled programs will be as clean and fresh as possible with no hidden gotchas and the whole process will go much faster with an SSD.
Instead of Artificial Intelligence, I prefer to continue to rely on Divine Intelligence instructing my Natural Dullness (Ps 32:8, John 16:13a)
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Donn Arms said:
The hard drive my OS is on now is a one terribyte drive so we cannot mirror it onto the 512 SSD. My IT guy tells me that if I simply load the OS onto the SSD card I will have to reload all my programs or they will not work. True? Has anyone advice for us?
He's correct.
The workaround is to remove stuff from your existing hard drive to bring it down to around 450Gb or less. Defrag the old drive and resize the partition down to as small as you can. Then mirror the partition onto the SSD, and expand it back up to fill the space. Mirroring partitions is more complex than mirroring whole drives, but your IT guy should be able to handle that.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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I'm assuming this is not the case with Win7 as unlike your screen shot (for Win10?) which shows an Optimize button, my Win7 installation just shows defrag. I currently have scheduled defragging turned off. If that's not as it should be for Win7 I hope someone will let me know.JRS said:FWIW:
For anyone not aware of it, the old Defragment utility has become Defragment and Optimize in Windows 10 (possibly Windows 8/8.1, too, but I can't remember). It will automatically recognize SSDs in distinction from HDDs and either Optimize (TRIM) or Defragment as appropriate.
Regarding the TRIM feature, I didn't realize that had anything to do with defragging or optimizing. I was under the impression it was something that was accomplished by the SSDs controller on the fly as data was written and/or erased. But... I'm just looking into SSDs for the first time, so I've likely got it all wrong. [:S]
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I don't understand it either, Dave. Yes, I was using the latest version 6 of Macrium and as already noted, it said everything worked fined, so I don't know what to think. If the cloning was messed up, I'm surprised that the system would even boot, let alone start apps and run them OK for a while before locking up. Oh well! [*-)]Dave Hooton said:I'm surprised the cloning was faulty when using the same tool successfully to restore an image. Was it the latest version 6 of Macrium? It isn't Windows 10 as I've successfully recovered it to SSD from an image using ATI.
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Does anyone know of a good free SSD performance testing app and a safe place from which to download it?
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Rick Ausdahl said:
I'm assuming this is not the case with Win7 as unlike your screen shot (for Win10?) which shows an Optimize button, my Win7 installation just shows defrag. I currently have scheduled defragging turned off. If that's not as it should be for Win7 I hope someone will let me know.
Regarding the TRIM feature, I didn't realize that had anything to do with defragging or optimizing. I was under the impression it was something that was accomplished by the SSDs controller on the fly as data was written and/or erased. But... I'm just looking into SSDs for the first time, so I've likely got it all wrong.
Rick, I am not sure I remember exactly when TRIM was included with Windows. I believe it came in during the reign of Win7 and just did it's thing in the background. As I recall, you had to take it on faith that it was doing its job and then finally MS let the world know about using fsutil. At some point, they rolled it into the defrag utility. TRIM is not the same as defrag - not even close. Defrag basically organizes all of the bits and pieces of a file on a hard disk (unknown to many users is that a file on a hdd is typically written in many spots all over the hard disk and defrag works to gather them together). TRIM works on an SSD to notify the ssd controller that a previously erased portion is now okay to write to again. This is a very basic explanation of defrag and trim - Google can get you as technical an explanation as you care to read.
If you continue to use Win7, then, yes, you should turn defrag off.
Google ATTO or AS SSD if you are looking for a good ssd performance utility. I like ATTO because of its graphical results.
Now ... back to George Gently Series 7.
Instead of Artificial Intelligence, I prefer to continue to rely on Divine Intelligence instructing my Natural Dullness (Ps 32:8, John 16:13a)
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OK, now I'm worried. Can someone help me with more specific instructions? Do I name the SSD drive C? Partition it into a C and D drive and put the OS on C and Logos on D? Do I then reload all my other programs onto a hard drive? What about data files such as documents? I am fearful of losing important files in this process. I do have two 1 Terr drives installed. One of them is my C drive and the other I use to store video files I need to edit. If I delete everything on that drive can I use it to reinstall my programs (Office, Firefox, Adobe Premiere, etc) and leave the current C drive intact until I have things newly created installed on the other?
I am so thankful for all your help!
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Donn Arms said:
Can someone help me with more specific instructions?
Following on from the excellent advice given by JRS & Mark, personally I would not create two partitions on the SSD, I would aim to have my operating system and all my programs on the SSD. Conventionally the operating system is always on C drive so you are correct, the SSD would be the new C drive.
If you are doing a new install, list all your programs AND make sure that you have all your program keys. If you have mislaid keys from microsoft programs there are utilties that will obtain them from your program for you. Some programs encourage you to de-register them from while still live in the old system before you install on the new one, others are happy with just un-installling them. Try not to get discouraged with all that work before installing on the SSD, Logos will be so happy with a much faster home with lots of room to play in!!
Whether you decide to move/copy your operating system from your current C drive onto your SSD or install a fresh version onto it, has to be your decision. For the future I would suggest that you consider moving towards keeping your data on a separate partition or drive from where your operating system & programs are. I find that it makes life so much easier when you need to carry out maintenance with your operating system as well as back them up. Also, if the drive with your data on suddenly begins making odd noises it is much easier for you or someone else to use the short time before your disk dies to backup the data to another drive or media.
I am sure that others will have better & more detailed advice than this.
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JRS said:
The only caveat to doing a clean install of Windows 10 (and I could be wrong about this) is that I believe Microsoft is only offering a free copy of Win10 to those who upgrade, i.e., not a clean install - but your IT guy will know if that is true or is able to work around it.
My current understanding here is that you MUST initially do an upgrade to satisfy the requirements for a free version of Win 10. Microsoft will then automatically allocate a key based on you having Win 7/8 on the machine AND the parameters of the machine. You can then do a clean install OVER the upgrade and you should automatically find that you clean install has been authenticated by Microsoft identifying your valid system from the machine parameters now already on their database from your upgrade. I am aware of several people on a Dell forum who successfully did this. The one guy who's system was not automatically authenticated, had to spend quite a while on the phone to Microsoft to get it done but he was very impressed how helpful the MS guys were even to the extent of ringing him back.
I would very strongly suggest that anyone doing this obtains the copy of their Microsoft windows key either from their documentation or by using a suitable utility. I have found Belarc useful here. It produces piles of system information but if you comb through it does identify keys for Windows and some other MS programs. There are other free programs but in those cases "beware strangers bearing gifts/viruses". When you have done your upgrade, click on the search icon on the bottom left of the screen and type activation, then click on "See if Windows is activated", If not, try activating it before doing the clean install of Windows 10, otherwise you may have to spend a lot of time on the phone calling support. If it is activated prior to the clean install it should reactivate whenever you do a clean reinstall of Windows after connecting to the internet. Thanks to the "mobile" Dell forum guys for much of my education here.
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JRS said:
The only caveat to doing a clean install of Windows 10 (and I could be wrong about this) is that I believe Microsoft is only offering a free copy of Win10 to those who upgrade, i.e., not a clean install - but your IT guy will know if that is true or is able to work around it.
My current understanding here is that you MUST initially do an upgrade to satisfy the requirements for a free version of Win 10. Microsoft will then automatically allocate a key based on you having Win 7/8 on the machine AND the parameters of the machine. You can then do a clean install OVER the upgrade and you should automatically find that you clean install has been authenticated by Microsoft identifying your valid system from the machine parameters now already on their database from your upgrade. I am aware of several people on a Dell forum who successfully did this. The one guy who's system was not automatically authenticated, had to spend quite a while on the phone to Microsoft to get it done but he was very impressed how helpful the MS guys were even to the extent of ringing him back.
I would very strongly suggest that anyone doing this obtains the copy of their Microsoft windows key either from their documentation or by using a suitable utility. I have found Belarc useful here. It produces piles of system information but if you comb through it does identify keys for Windows and some other MS programs. There are other free programs but in those cases "beware strangers bearing gifts/viruses". When you have done your upgrade, click on the search icon on the bottom left of the screen and type activation, then click on "See if Windows is activated", If not, try activating it before doing the clean install of Windows 10, otherwise you may have to spend a lot of time on the phone calling support. If it is activated prior to the clean install it should reactivate whenever you do a clean reinstall of Windows after connecting to the internet. Thanks to the "mobile" Dell forum guys for much of my education here.
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JRS said:
If you continue to use Win7, then, yes, you should turn defrag off.
Google ATTO or AS SSD if you are looking for a good ssd performance utility. I like ATTO because of its graphical results.
Thanks, JRS! I'll leave the defrag schedule off then if I keep Win7 on the laptop. But... if I reinstall Win10 on it, and if I understand you correctly, leaving the scheduled defrag option turned on shouldn't cause a problem, because Win10 won't attempt to defrag an SSD even if the schedule is turned on. Considering that this is a laptop and only has one drive in it (at this point the SSD), I assume Win10 will simply ignore the defrag schedule entirely.
My priority right now is to get ATTO and run some benchmarks on the SSD, because in doing things like pulling up pictures to view, the response time is no better when viewing them directly from the installed SSD, then it is when viewing them from a standard HDD connected to the laptop with a USB 2.0 cable. That just doesn't seem right! [:|][:(][:|] I sure hope the CPU, FSB, & RAM on this old laptop aren't so slow that they are in fact the bottleneck and there's no benefit to be had from installing an SSD.
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I used ATTO Disk Benchmark to run a couple of tests on the SSD. The screen shots below show what AnandTech got in their tests and what I got on mine. In short, I'm not getting even half the speed they did.
Granted, there are a couple of differences in the testing--e.g. the computers the drives were in when tested and the fact that my test parameters are different than AnandTech's, but I didn't see a way to duplicate their parameters with the current version of the software although I was in a time crunch so didn't get to really "explore" the apps options.
In any case, it seems my copy of the SSD is not up to snuff, or the CPU, FSB, and RAM in this old laptop are the bottleneck. I'd appreciate knowing what kind of speed others get with their SSDs if they've tested them.
AnandTech's Test
My First Test (Total Length 256 MB)
My Second Test (Total Length 2 GB)
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Rick didn't you say that this is a eight year old laptop? If it is can you confirm that it has Sata i, ii, or iii interface this makes all the difference. It looks to me like you may face a Sata 1 or 2 system.
If that is correct your transfer rate is probably correct between 198107 ~ 202975.
I had a three year old Asus notebook with i3 and a Sata III interface the SSD ran between 530000 ~ 555000.
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Lee said:
Rick didn't you say that this is a eight year old laptop? If it is can you confirm that it has Sata i, ii, or iii interface this makes all the difference. It looks to me like you may face a Sata 1 or 2 system.
If that is correct your transfer rate is probably correct between 198107 ~ 202975.
I had a three year old Asus notebook with i3 and a Sata III interface the SSD ran between 530000 ~ 555000.
Yes, it is SATA, but based on the laptop's age (7-8 years old) and the fact that the specs simply say "Serial ATA" (versus SATA I, II, or III), I expect it is in affect what we now call SATA 1. With that in mind, it's probably not the CPU, FSB, or RAM that's the bottleneck, but the fact that it's a SATA 1 interface, in which case I guess I can't expect anything more out of it. It did definitely boost the boot up time though, which leaves me a little puzzled.
Thanks for bringing up the SATA differences. I was aware of them but had been so focused on the differences between an HDD and an SSD, that I hadn't yet considered how much slower the original SATA speeds were. [:$]
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Rick Ausdahl said:
... if I reinstall Win10 on it, and if I understand you correctly, leaving the scheduled defrag option turned on shouldn't cause a problem, because Win10 won't attempt to defrag an SSD even if the schedule is turned on. Considering that this is a laptop and only has one drive in it (at this point the SSD), I assume Win10 will simply ignore the defrag schedule entirely.
First of all, if you have the option of running Win10 instead of Win7, I would certainly do it. As good as Win7 is/was, Win10 is even better for many reasons which I won't go into here (after all, this is a Logos forum).
Secondly, in re-reading my past posts in this thread I hope I haven't muzzied the waters.
The old Defragmenter was intended solely for defragmenting HDDs and TRIM ran separately, in the background, and out of sight.
The new Win10 utility is intended for both HDDs and SSDs - it will Defrag any HDDs and it will "Optimize" any SSDs. Now, when they say it will "Optimize" SSDs, they mean it will run the TRIM command. Note that MS uses the term "Optimize" sometimes as a synonym for TRIM and sometimes as a catchall term that includes both Defragging and running TRIM. Hence, there may be some confusion.
Thirdly, in Win10 you have some options as to when Defrag and Trim are run. You can shut off the scheduler and run them manually at any time you please and on any or all of your drives. You can also set the scheduler to automatically run on any schedule you prefer. I believe it comes preset to run once per week at a specified time for all drives.
Rick Ausdahl said:My priority right now is to get ATTO and run some benchmarks on the SSD, because in doing things like pulling up pictures to view, the response time is no better when viewing them directly from the installed SSD, then it is when viewing them from a standard HDD connected to the laptop with a USB 2.0 cable. That just doesn't seem right!
I sure hope the CPU, FSB, & RAM on this old laptop aren't so slow that they are in fact the bottleneck and there's no benefit to be had from installing an SSD.If one accesses a single file and compares the speed of an HDD to an SSD, it is not surprising that no perceptible speed difference exists. Where the SSD shines is in continuous accesses such as reading or writing to a large database, or handling very large files, &etc. There are many variables that go into what makes an SSD fast including such things as whether one is accessing one large, contiguous chunk of data, or many small ones, the type of controller interface (the older AHCI which actually was developed to speak HDD - not SSD vs. the newer NVME which speaks SSD exclusively), how tightly compacted the data is, &etc. Again, Google is your friend if you want to delve into a much more technical discussion.
Bottom line: Don't worry, your SSD purchase was the smart thing to do. You will notice snappier performance because even the slowest SSD will outshine the snappiest HHD when it comes to reading or writing data, plus you no longer have to worry about mechanical parts eventually wearing out and crashing your computer. It is a very good way, imo, to reinvigorate legacy or poor performing computers.
[EDIT: Just looked at your ATTO results ... I didn't realize that we were talkin bout that old of a SATA interface. Lee is correct. It's about like trying to win at Daytona with a flat tire.]
Instead of Artificial Intelligence, I prefer to continue to rely on Divine Intelligence instructing my Natural Dullness (Ps 32:8, John 16:13a)
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I agree. We have four machines including the laptop we've been discussing and I upgraded all four to Win10 last month. Only rolled the old laptop back because of the cloning problem I encountered for the SSD under Win10.JRS said:First of all, if you have the option of running Win10 instead of Win7, I would certainly do it. As good as Win7 is/was, Win10 is even better for many reasons which I won't go into here (after all, this is a Logos forum).
[;)]JRS said:[EDIT: Just looked at your ATTO results ... I didn't realize that we were talkin bout that old of a SATA interface. Lee is correct. It's about like trying to win at Daytona with a flat tire.]
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Rick the speed of most HDD is between 80 - 130, but with the SSD you are using the most the Sata can give you which should be close to 200mb/s. This is the best upgrade you could have given for the notebook.
If you get a newer laptop in the future, you move it to that system.
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JRS said:Donn Arms said:
Because of several recent threads I decided to add anSSD. I am having an IT guy install it for me. I want to put my Windows 10 OS and Logos on it. The hard drive my OS is on now is a one terribyte drive so we cannot mirror it onto the 512 SSD. My IT guy tells me that if I simply load the OS onto the SSD card I will have to reload all my programs or they will not work. True? Has anyone advice for us?
1) I believe that it true that to image a HDD to a new drive (in this case an SSD), the new drive must be the same size (or larger) than the original drive. At least that has been my experience. However, if there is some cloning software out there that can chop the image file to fit a smaller drive, I sure would like to know about it.
Acronis True Image can do this. They have some free versions (OEM versions) that cater to specific brands of hard disks. You might qualify for these.
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Lee said:
Rick the speed of most HDD is between 80 - 130, but with the SSD you are using the most the Sata can give you which should be close to 200mb/s. This is the best upgrade you could have given for the notebook.
If you get a newer laptop in the future, you move it to that system.
Well... I'm completely baffled now.
I put the old 320 GB, 7200 RPM HDD back in the laptop and ran ATTO on it. As expected, it was showing a speed of 90-100 vs. the 200 plus with the SSD. However, in actual use, response time when viewing pictures on the four year old HDD is much faster than it is on the SSD! I even deleted the pictures folder from the SSD and copied it back from the old HDD. It didn't help.
When using the mouse (or arrow keys) to sequentially move through the pictures, each new picture comes up instantly when the old HDD is in the laptop--no lag whatsoever--none. When the SSD is in the laptop, there's a good 1 second lag before each new picture comes up.
So ATTO tests show the SSD to be a little over twice as fast as the old HDD, but in actual use, the SSD is a dog in comparison. All this, despite the fact that the laptop boots almost 3 times as fast with the SSD as with the old HDD.
I don't know what it is, but something ain't right. [:S]
Since I'm now running under Win7 on the laptop, I guess my next move will be to wipe the SSD once again, and try imaging the drive with the complimentary version of Acronis True Image that wouldn't work under Win10, which is what the laptop was on when I started this whole process.
Any and all encouraging words will be received with gratitude. [:)]
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Rick Ausdahl said:
I guess my next move will be to wipe the SSD once again
You shouldn't have to do that. Writing once over is normally unnecessary, and shortens the life of the SSD.
Rick Ausdahl said:I don't know what it is, but something ain't right.
I'd wager that the problem is not in the cloning. The cloning process might have gone just fine but the different disk IDs could have thrown the Windows indexing service out of joint in the cloned disk (=SSD). Hence your HDDs appear faster (Windows indexing service actually working).
For the long term it would be prudent to do a "clean install" of Windows on the SSD. Along the way you could just delete existing partitions. You'll need google to fill you in on details. Set aside a day or two for this.
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Hello Rick
Do you have Logos loaded on both the old HDD & SSD. What is the time to:
1. turn on the computer and load windows.
2. Then to Load Logos.
try this with both the HDD as installed as the C; drive and then the SSD as the C: drive.
You should find the difference in running a program, not in just opening a picture.
Btw what is the size of you Logos directory? how many resources do you have?
Edited: In the next post I added a screenshot of my SSD speed using black magic. One of the things i did was check the time for Logos to run a full index which was much faster than my old notebook, than it is on the new MacBook Pro.
You should see better performance on your notebook using the SSD.
L4 BS, L5 RB & Gold, L6 S & R Platinum, L7 Platinum, L8 Baptist Platinum, L9 Baptist Platinum, L10 Baptist Silver
2021 MacBook Pro M1 Pro 14" 16GB 512GB SSD, running MacOS Monterey iPad Mini 6, iPhone 11.0 -
L4 BS, L5 RB & Gold, L6 S & R Platinum, L7 Platinum, L8 Baptist Platinum, L9 Baptist Platinum, L10 Baptist Silver
2021 MacBook Pro M1 Pro 14" 16GB 512GB SSD, running MacOS Monterey iPad Mini 6, iPhone 11.0 -
Yes, Logos is loaded on both. I have 1807 resources and the Resource Manager folder is 13.9 GB.Lee said:Hello Rick
Do you have Logos loaded on both the old HDD & SSD. What is the time to:
1. turn on the computer and load windows.
2. Then to Load Logos.
try this with both the HDD as installed as the C; drive and then the SSD as the C: drive.
You should find the difference in running a program, not in just opening a picture.
Btw what is the size of you Logos directory? how many resources do you have?
Edited: In the next post I added a screenshot of my SSD speed using black magic. One of the things i did was check the time for Logos to run a full index which was much faster than my old notebook, than it is on the new MacBook Pro.
You should see better performance on your notebook using the SSD.
With the HDD installed, the laptop takes 95-105 seconds for a cold boot into Windows. With the SSD it's 35-40 seconds.
With the HDD installed, it takes 60-70 seconds to load Logos. With the SSD it 35-40 seconds.However, once I'm in Logos, it's a different story. E.g. within a panel, when changing from one open resource to another via the resource tabs, the switch feels slow--slower on the SSD than on the HDD although I haven't timed those types of events for comparison purposes.
This lack of consistency in performance is my major frustration right now. I use Logos a fair amount, but it's not the only thing I do with this laptop and to have any functions actually run slower with the SSD than the HDD is not acceptable. I deal a lot with JPEGs, and if I'm going to lose one second with the SSD every time I need to access a JPEG, any/all time saved in Windows boot and Logos load times will be more than offset in the time lost doing other things. Sigh... [:(]
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Lee said:Rick Ausdahl said:
I guess my next move will be to wipe the SSD once again
You shouldn't have to do that. Writing once over is normally unnecessary, and shortens the life of the SSD.
Rick Ausdahl said:I don't know what it is, but something ain't right.
I'd wager that the problem is not in the cloning. The cloning process might have gone just fine but the different disk IDs could have thrown the Windows indexing service out of joint in the cloned disk (=SSD). Hence your HDDs appear faster (Windows indexing service actually working).
For the long term it would be prudent to do a "clean install" of Windows on the SSD. Along the way you could just delete existing partitions. You'll need google to fill you in on details. Set aside a day or two for this.
Hi, Lee! Thanks for participating. I know each "write" reduces the life span of the drive, but I'm not sure how to get around it. Even if I do a clean install of Win7 on the drive at this point, that would in affect "wipe the drive" (at least what I meant by that, which is simply to delete the partitions and start over), so everything currently on the drive (OS, apps, and data) would have to be re-written to the drive, unless I'm not tracking with you regarding the clean install.
I'm also a little foggy (make that very foggy) as to how the Windows indexing service could be out of joint if the cloning process is working correctly. If you could clarify that for me, I'd be grateful.
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Hello Rick
Before you go and do a clean install of Windows, first take a look at this site they talk about rebuilding the Windows index file. http://www.tekrevue.com/tip/how-to-solve-windows-search-issues-index-rebuild/ This would be faster and could take care of the problem.
I would try this before reinstalling all my program data and using more writes to the SSD.
But from the reviews i have read online about SSD's the life span is between 3 ~ 5 years on most drives. But they are also saying now that the new models maybe between 5 ~ 10 years.
Regardless I do keep a good back-up just in case. But i really hope for at least 5 years of life on my 256GB SSD. I try to keep most of my data files on a portable SSD that i have, and I backup to a 1TB HDD.
L4 BS, L5 RB & Gold, L6 S & R Platinum, L7 Platinum, L8 Baptist Platinum, L9 Baptist Platinum, L10 Baptist Silver
2021 MacBook Pro M1 Pro 14" 16GB 512GB SSD, running MacOS Monterey iPad Mini 6, iPhone 11.0 -
Lee said:
Before you go and do a clean install of Windows, first take a look at this site they talk about rebuilding the Windows index file. http://www.tekrevue.com/tip/how-to-solve-windows-search-issues-index-rebuild/ This would be faster and could take care of the problem.
Windows Search really applies to finding files and/or content in the C:\Users folder e.g. Outlook, Contacts, Documents. You can further restrict it in Control Panel >> Indexing Options or turn it off altogether in Services >> Windows Search. Either way it does not affect SSD performance when accessing files in Logos or other apps.
Lee said:But from the reviews i have read online about SSD's the life span is between 3 ~ 5 years on most drives. But they are also saying now that the new models maybe between 5 ~ 10 years.
The technology has been refined & improved over the last 3-5 years and most manufacturers provide a Toolbox which can turn off HDD features that no longer apply due to the speed of SSD's, and/or also involve a lot of writing e.g. Hibernation. SSD's have their own cache to delay writing to NAND and reserve a certain amount of NAND to spread the write load e.g. a 240 GB disk may have an extra 16 GB for this. You can further improve life (and maintain performance) by ensuring you always have at least 20% free space. Alternatively, you can re-partition the drive to use no more than 80% of its capacity.
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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Dave Hooton said:
Windows Search really applies to finding files and/or content in the C:\Users folder e.g. Outlook, Contacts, Documents. You can further restrict it in Control Panel >> Indexing Options or turn it off altogether in Services >> Windows Search. Either way it does not affect SSD performance when accessing files in Logos or other apps.
Dave,
If I'm tracking with you, the indexing referred to in Lee's link deals only with "finding" files via the Windows search function--not with accessing files that have already been located. Hence, indexing will return search results faster and in some cases may result in "finding" files that would not have otherwise been located. My previous understanding of this sort of indexing was that it only affected "searches", but then started to wonder if I was mistaken about that.
In any case, I sure am befuddled at the moment. Guess I'll reload Win7 on the old HDD and try using the complimentary copy of ATI from Acronis that would not run under Win10, to see if cloning the HDD to the SSD with ATI fixes the response time issue when opening JPEGs..
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I want to thank everyone who has offered their help. Hearing what others have to say sure makes it easier to think outside of my otherwise very little box of ideas.
THANK YOU!!! [:)]
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Rick Ausdahl said:Lee said:Rick Ausdahl said:
I guess my next move will be to wipe the SSD once again
You shouldn't have to do that. Writing once over is normally unnecessary, and shortens the life of the SSD.
Rick Ausdahl said:I don't know what it is, but something ain't right.
I'd wager that the problem is not in the cloning. The cloning process might have gone just fine but the different disk IDs could have thrown the Windows indexing service out of joint in the cloned disk (=SSD). Hence your HDDs appear faster (Windows indexing service actually working).
For the long term it would be prudent to do a "clean install" of Windows on the SSD. Along the way you could just delete existing partitions. You'll need google to fill you in on details. Set aside a day or two for this.
I know each "write" reduces the life span of the drive, but I'm not sure how to get around it. Even if I do a clean install of Win7 on the drive at this point, that would in affect "wipe the drive" (at least what I meant by that, which is simply to delete the partitions and start over), so everything currently on the drive (OS, apps, and data) would have to be re-written to the drive, unless I'm not tracking with you regarding the clean install.
If you want to clean install go ahead and do it by deleting the existing partitions (you can do that during the installation). By just deleting partitions you are clearing the "bookends" of the partition and ignoring everything in between. You'd still be writing over the SSD, but minimally. Doing a full wipe during installation incurs more writes. (Here I interpret "wipe" as first writing zeros or random data over the contents of the SSDs, before writing program data. This would be its technical meaning.)
Rick Ausdahl said:I'm also a little foggy (make that very foggy) as to how the Windows indexing service could be out of joint if the cloning process is working correctly.
Make that the two of us. I don't know why that should be happening, but users have reported it occasionally with drives that have been cloned perfectly. This is my take on why your HDD seems to be responding quicker than your SSD when browsing pictures. By the way, the Windows indexing service indexes all files on disk. It has nothing to do directly with Logos' own indexing.
I apologize but I won't be able to help you more with this. All the best on migrating to SSD! I hope others will chime in as appropriate.
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Lee said:
By the way, the Windows indexing service indexes all files on disk. It has nothing to do directly with Logos' own indexing.
It doesn't index "all files on disk". As I stated earlier Windows indexing is restricted to the C:\Users folder (except for AppData) if you look at Indexing Options in Control Panel. If the disk is partitioned it does not select the new partitions but allows you to do that. It also indexes the Start Menu, Outlook emails & contacts and Internet Explorer History by default.
Yes, it has nothing to do with Logos' indexing.
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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Dave Hooton said:Lee said:
By the way, the Windows indexing service indexes all files on disk. It has nothing to do directly with Logos' own indexing.
It doesn't index "all files on disk".
Yes, Dave. You're right technically. Also in Windows 7 the offending service would likely be Windows Search instead of the older "Indexing" service. Anyway, a fresh install on the SSD followed by transferring just the Logos installation would be well advised.
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It's been a long haul, but I'm cautiously optimistic that this thing is finally sorted out, although I plan to do an exchange on the SSD for reasons I'll explain below. Here are the steps taken to reach this point. NOTE: At the start of this process, the SSD was in the laptop and running Win10.
- I used Macrium Reflect (Free Edition) to restore to a Win7 system image taken in August, before upgrading to Win10.
I did this, because the complimentary version of Acronis True Image (ATI) provided with the Crucial SSD would not run on Win10 and the folks at ATI said "Sorry, you'll have to roll back to Win7 or find another way to clone the drive." - I downloaded and installed the complimentary (but limited) version of ATI that came with the Crucial SSD.
- Using ATI, I set up a custom clone process to clone my old two-partition 320 GB HDD that had Win10 on it. I used the "custom" clone option so I could specify the two partition sizes I wanted on the SSD--one for the OS & Apps, the other for data.
- I started the clone process, set it up to shut down the laptop when finished, and left for work, hoping that when I returned, all would be well.
When I got home, I fired up the laptop. It booted, but not as fast as I'd hoped. After booting, I noticed a lot of disk activity, so I tried to open Task Manager to see what was running. The machine locked up--no blue-screen and no messages. The mouse still worked/moved, but Task Manager never started, no icons would highlight when hovered over with the mouse, and no apps would open. I waited a few minutes, then tried a CTRL-ALT-DEL with the keyboard. Nothing. I waited a little longer, then did a hard shut-down with the power button.
I waited a minute then fired the laptop up again. Again, it booted fine but slower than I'd hoped and again there seemed to be a lot of prolonged disk activity. I walked away and came back 5 minutes later. Still disk activity. I clicked on File Explorer, wondering if the system would lock up again. It didn't, but all icons were the generic style of a sheet of paper with a folded corner. Hmmmm. I drilled down to the picture folders and opened one. It opened with the same generic sheet of paper icon for each picture. Hmmmm. I clicked on one. To my surprise, it not only opened, but I could sequentially go through the pictures in Windows Photo Viewer without any of the lag I'd had before. I exited back out to the folder level, and saw that folders and files were starting to be displayed with the proper icons--i.e. some had the right icons, some didn't. Hmmmmm.
With a flurry of disk activity still going on, I exited File Explorer and opened Control Panel to check a few things. The system locked up and all disk activity stopped. Hmmmm. Sigh. What is going on?
I did a hard shut-down, rebooted, and once again saw on-going disk activity. I walked away for 20 minutes. When I came back, the screen was off (Power settings) but there was continued disk activity. I moved the mouse, the screen came back, disk activity continued. I walked away for another 20 minutes. When I came back, the screen was off, but still disk activity. I moved the mouse, the screen came back, and disk activity stopped. The machine was locked up again. Sigh. Sigh. Sigh.
I rebooted and disk activity resumed. I waited for 30 minutes and when I came back, disk activity had stopped. All icons now seemed to be displaying correctly, I could walk through JPEGs with no delay, and I've used the system for a few hours without any more lock-ups. However, in the process of doing a couple of reboots to check boot time, I encountered something that leaves me concerned about the SSD. In one of the boots, after the display of the Toshiba splash screen and before the display of the Windows icon, text popped up saying there was a problem with the drive that needed repairing and a repair process was started. After that, the machine restarted, going through the process again of displaying the Toshiba splash screen, but this time continuing through the boot process as normal.
After this boot, I noticed the Win10 message icon on the task bar indicating there were messages. I clicked the icon and saw a message that there was a problem with the drive and that I needed to reboot to fix it. I rebooted without incident and have since rebooted 5-6 times without a problem, but I'm concerned about the SSD and plan to exchange it.
Windows boot times with the SSD are now taking about 40-45 seconds vs. 95-105 seconds with the HDD. Of that, a full 15 seconds are used just getting through the BIOS process and the display of the Toshiba splash screen before the Windows icon and actual Windows boot process begins. Logos load times with the SSD are running 30-35 seconds vs the 60-70 with the HDD.
One final note to share regarding the slow JPEG viewing process noted earlier in this thread. Before going through the process noted in this particular post, I had downloaded a couple of JPEG viewing apps just out of curiosity, wondering if there was an issue with the Windows Photo Viewer on this old laptop when run on an SSD. One of the apps was IrfanView--it did cycle through the JPEGs a little faster, but still not what I've always experienced on my old HDDs--even going back as far as WinXP. The other app was FastStone Image Viewer and when cycling through the JPEGs with that app, there was absolutely no lag or delay. Yet another "Hmmmm".
Hopefully, all will go well with the replacement drive I'll be ordering.
0 - I used Macrium Reflect (Free Edition) to restore to a Win7 system image taken in August, before upgrading to Win10.
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Keep us posted please on how it goes the next time.
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I ordered a replacement drive--probably a good thing, as despite the couple of trouble-free hours that gave me hope with the current drive, it's back to it's old tricks, locking up my system. At one point when I saw the initial signs of a pending total lockup, I was able to get Task Manager open in time to see something interesting. It was showing total disk usage pegged at 100%, yet every individual app in Task Manager was showing zero disk usage and the disk light on the laptop was not showing any disk activity at all. Hmmmm.
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Rick which brand SSD is it? what model?
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2021 MacBook Pro M1 Pro 14" 16GB 512GB SSD, running MacOS Monterey iPad Mini 6, iPhone 11.0 -
It's a Crucial MX200. Actual model number is CT500MX200SSD1.Lee said:Rick which brand SSD is it? what model?
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This has been such an interesting trip--one where you never know where the road will take you next. [;)]
I went out to Crucial's web site and downloaded their Storage Executive Client--an app used for managing drive options and monitoring drive health. One management option is "Sanitize Drive". I was curious as to what it was so I selected it and was informed it wasn't an option for me because the drive is not using an AHCI controller. That is true -- this old laptop is using an IDE controller, doesn't have a BIOS option for AHCI, and so far, I haven't found an option to change it in the Windows Registry.
Another management option is "Momentum Cache". It was disabled, but after a quick read through a description, I enabled it to see what would happen. I noticed that Logos loaded in about 25 seconds versus the 30-35 seconds it was taking previously on the SSD and 60-70 seconds on the old HDD. So I decided to run ATTO's Disk Benchmark again. Prior to enabling the Momentum Cache, ATTO reported read/write speeds in the 200-225 MB per second range. After enabling the cache, it reporting apx. 600-800 MB per second on writes, and up to 900 MB per second on reads. I can't imagine that can be accurate on this old laptop which probably only has a SATA 1 interface.
And yes... I did have my glasses on when reading the ATTO report. [8-|]
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I also have a crucial SSD but had not discovered that toy! The only proviso I have found is that if you suddenly lose power or get a dreaded BSOD (which I do occasionally) there is a greater chance of losing data that was being held in volatile memory and had not been written. Otherwise it looks good.
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Rick congrats it looks much better. Hope that you don't have more problems with the shutting down and rebooting any more.
L4 BS, L5 RB & Gold, L6 S & R Platinum, L7 Platinum, L8 Baptist Platinum, L9 Baptist Platinum, L10 Baptist Silver
2021 MacBook Pro M1 Pro 14" 16GB 512GB SSD, running MacOS Monterey iPad Mini 6, iPhone 11.0 -
Rick Ausdahl said:
After enabling the cache, it reporting apx. 600-800 MB per second on writes, and up to 900 MB per second on reads. I can't imagine that can be accurate on this old laptop which probably only has a SATA 1 interface.
If SATA 2 then 300 MB/s is feasible, SATA 1 has a maximum of 150 MB/s. Clearly the results are reflecting use of the drive cache. See what happens if you tick "Force Write Access" and again if you untick "Direct I/O" (which maximises transfer rate).
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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Yeah... that is definitely a consideration. In fact, I think in case of things like a power loss (without battery backup) or BSOD, you almost certainly will lose data if writes were in the process at the time. I'm not too worried about those two scenarios though, as since my first home PC in 1988, I've never yet (knock on wood) had a power loss and only once had a BSOD. However, if I can't beat this sudden freeze/lockup issue, I expect I would lose data if writes are in the works when a lockup occurs.JohnB said:I also have a crucial SSD but had not discovered that toy! The only proviso I have found is that if you suddenly lose power or get a dreaded BSOD (which I do occasionally) there is a greater chance of losing data that was being held in volatile memory and had not been written. Otherwise it looks good.
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