Image for Windows/DOS - Transfer to SSD

TK, the old mainboard uses a nVidia chipset, which according to all known infobahn lore will not support TRIM. This will limit your usefullness of the SSD.

The other main issue to watch is this (and it affects the add-in board you're considering for the older machine)... if your SATA sub-system is connected to a PCI-e v1.X (whether internally or through your add-in card), you will never get more than about 210-220 mBs out of your SSD, no matter what its rating is.

My guess is your old system only has a PCI-e v1 sub-system... most of that vintage do. If so, your add-in card, even with ACHI support and a MS driver running it, will only do about half of a high-speed SATA III rated SSD. If that's acceptable than the add-in should work well at the lower speed of 200+mBs.

Don't know if your newer system uses a non-nVidia chipset or has a PCI-e v2 subsystem... both of which will affect performance.

 

North Bridge Chipset: NVIDIA GeForce 8300
PCI Express x1

 

Page 47 of the BIBM Manual: Do you have to "De-select" the "Use Global Settings" in order to be able to change the other options?

I booted BIBM on one of my PC's and noticed that most everything was "grayed out" and the "Use Global Settings" and "Save as Default" were "Selected".

 

The answer to both questions is "yes". I select Align on 2048 Sectors in Settings. You can deselect Global Settings for HD1, HD2 if you want to (if they are cylinder aligned) although I don't bother. HD0 with the OS is the one that's important.

 

I am considering three options:

1. Leaving things the way they are (~25% speed boost over my old hard drive).

2. Purchasing and installing a Rocket RAID 640 PCI-E X4 SATA Controller Card (~$100) (My PC's Motherboard has one PCI-E X4 slot available.).

3. Upgrading my Motherboard, CPU and RAM (~$400 to ~$500).

Option "1" is the most appropriate for me with my typical PC use.

I will give Options "2" and "3" some consideration.

I joined Crucial's Forum to get more opinions on my SSD's speed:

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-S...rmance-Improvement-Recommendations/td-p/88456

 

TK, unless your trying to RAID a coupla hard drives on that system, there is a much cheaper solution to #2 above if trying to integrate an SSD to that system...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/320782582243

I purchased one of these to use with an older Gateway that had a nVidia mainboard and a PCI-e v1 subsystem. It worked very well (using both its own driver or M$'s MSACHI driver) interfacing up to SATA III SSD devices (for future use) and at least allowing me to run them at PCI-e v1 speeds of appx. 215mBs (instead of the rated 510mBs)... which are way faster than any rotating device out there.

 

Thanks.

I will consider ordering one.

I just ran some hard drive benchmarks on of couple of other PC's (Year 2006 & 2008 hardware, both SATA II). The Read/Writes varied but the Max. Read was around 115-125 MB/sec. Of course, the Writes were a somewhat less.

I will run benchmarks on the SSD drive tonight.

 

I am currently at a PC which blocks access to eBay. Can someone tell me if the above PCI-E X1 card is Low Profile or Standard Height or both?

Thanks.

 

"HighPoint Rocket 620-OEM PCI-Express 2.0 x1 Low Profile"

Hope that helped!

 

What "Driver(s)" are recommended for a HighPoint Rocket 620 PCI-E 2.0 X1? I have been reading the reviews at NewEgg and Amazon and a lot of people seem to be complaining about getting the correct "Drivers".

One person (Amazon Product Reviews) said that a Driver for a different manufacturer's product worked best with the HighPoint Rocket 620:

http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Pr...lID=1097&DetailName=Feature&MenuID=11&LanID=0

Any Comments/Suggestions?

 

TheKid7,

Have you checked that the partition on the SSD is 2048 sector aligned?

 

Thanks.

I will check tonight.

I also plan to do a Benchmark of the SSD tonight and compare it with the Benchmark of a Western Digital Black SATA II 7200 RPM hard drive on the same PC.

 

I ran Hard Drive Benchmarks on the PC with the SSD. Attached are the results.

 

Another hard drive on the same PC.

 

The following Drive Settings boxes are "Ticked":

Validate MBR Geometry
Align at 2048
Align MBR Ending HS
Align MBR Ending HS when Truncated
Use Global Settings
Save as Default

C = 0
H = 0
O = 0

 

TK, those numbers look just fine for a PCI-e v1 subsystem... you're not gonna get any more out of an add-in SATA III card, especially against a CAVIAR BLACK drive which has the biggest cache (64mB) of most of the drives out there.

If the systems feel the same as far as response is concerned, there are other factors at play other than the disk retrieval rates.

PS- ...and don't keep running benchmarks on that poor SSD... you're shortening its life

 

To assess alignment, using BIBM go to Partition Work, View MBR. What is the LBA for the WinXP partition. It should be a number divisible by 2048.

 

MBR0 = Active

Starting:
C = 0
H = 32
S = 33

FS = 7h

Ending:

C = 1023
H = 254
S = 63

LBA = 2048

Sectors = 131074272

Note: I Partitioned the Crucial M4 128 GB SSD into two Parititons.
According to Windows Drive Properties:

C: Capacity = 67.1 GB
D: Capacity = 60.9 GB

 

LBA of 2048 is good. What is the LBA of the second partition?

 

D: Partition LBA = 131076320

 

I have an earlier model of the Caviar Black. My drive only has 32 MB cache.

 

131076320/2048 is not an integer so that partition isn't correctly aligned.

Make sure Align on 2048 Sectors is selected in BIBM.
In Partition Work select the second partition, Slide, Make the Free Space Before 1 MB, OK, etc.
In Partition Work select the second partition, Resize, OK, on Resize click OK (no changes made), Continue, etc.
Check the LBA again to see if it is divisible by 2048.

Edit... I forgot you will need a little free space following the second partition before you start. So resize the second partition 3 MB smaller and then do the above.

 

Thank you.

Could this alignment have been caused by using the Windows XP Pro Disk Management to create and format the D: Partition?

Since I have no files on the D: Partition, would deleting the Partition with BIBM and making a new D: Partition fix the problem?

Also, what problem(s) could result if I would leave the alignment the way it is now?

 

As I mentioned earlier... I found a Rocket driver for Vista x86 which worked just fine under W7. The native Microsoft driver also worked well with this device (detected no difference in speed when using it on a PCI-e v1 subsystem). The Rocket device uses a Marvel chipset which is very common to other SATA III add-in PCI-e devices so it isn't unusual that another driver would work (The one I found was 4-versions older than the one you reference). But for sure, the native W7 device driver for this device works fine and uses the Microsoft MSACHI.SYS ACHI driver for the advanced functions, including TRIM and parallel queueing. There shouldn't be a problem regardless of what you see/hear on the net.

There may be some slight throughput differences between the Marvel driver and the Microsoft driver when this device is connected to a PCI-e v2 subsystem but I haven't tried that yet... and if there are any, you'll never be able to notice them in real life computing.

 

I have Windows XP Pro 32 bit. Are there any good Drivers for Windows XP Pro?