Tag Archives: hdd

Windows 7 – Moving to SSD

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Want to move your current disk image onto a SSD drive?

Quick, easy and free. Also aligns disk sectors :)

  1. Tidy up your current HDD – delete / move any unneeded items to an archive disk
  2. Shrink the C volume to under the size of the SSD (you do not need to shrink as small as possible, just shrink just under SSD size)
  3. Run Windows Backup (win7 backup is very good, i.e. image backup) onto external USB Drive
  4. Remove your current HDD and install SSD
  5. Restore via Windows Backup — Boot install DVD, and choose Repair your computer, then select recover from windows backup image (use the image you backed up onto your USB drive).
  6. Reboot, then expand the C volume to consume the full space of the SSD

Done.

Quick way to check that TRIM has also been enabled;

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

If the result is ‘0’ TRIM is enabled.

HDD short stroking – is it worth it?

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I’ve got some old 250Gb drives that are starting to show their age. I’ve currently got them setup in a 3x RAID 0 config which presents about 750Gb of space.

I’ve got everything on a single partition (meh, i’m lazy). I’ve done various speed tests in the current setup (with all space allocated), but i thought i’d re-image onto a short stroke partition.

I only use about 150Gb of space on my main machine (most of my data is on another box), so i’m going to try creating a 200Gb partition to test if this provides any kind of performance boost.

So reducing my raid 0 from 750Gb to 214Gb, and here are the results…

Before with all 750Gb presented…

Same disks but short stroked to 214Gb….

Conclusion : Yip, seems like its worth it if you have the spare space. Average throughput is up by 10MB/s and seek has improved by almost a third loosing 4ms.

You will get even more of an improvement if you can use a smaller % of capacity per drive and / or more drives for your stripe.

Updated : 07/02/2010

btw – the above was without write-back cache enabled…. if i turned that on i got the following…