Are SSDs always rubbish under winXP?

Hector is angry, Hector is angry. Get a life Hector. Mikek

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amdx
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Hector is AlwaysWrong.

Reply to
krw
[snip]

Audible noise, power consumption, shock resistance - at least those were the criteria that drove our decision to use them. This is for an embedded system though, not a desktop PC.

Have a look at Microsoft's Enhanced Write Filter. As far as I know it's only available as a component for the embedded versions of Windows - we have used it for XP and 7 so far. Our usage model is to partition the drive into two, then write-protect the C: drive using EWF and write all the application data to D:. All writes to C: are cached in RAM and get lost on power-off. This works fine for our usage pattern, the machine is not networked and the end user is not expected to, or allowed to make any changes to the OS.

Based on our experiences with SSDs I'd never use one for the primary storage for a desktop PC - and this was with industrial-grade single- level cell devices, not cheap commodity MLC stuff.

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<news

not

logs

I get very different results myself. If the writes are reasonable low proportion, no speed loss. Bulk file copy to SSD very fast, much better than rotating media.

If you can afford enough SSD i think they would make really great backup media. Hmmm. maybe they already do. Tapes be expensive, and duplicate HD are fragile.

?-)

Reply to
josephkk

There you go again John, blathering with the trolls just to make a post. What a ridiculous narcissist.

?-)

Reply to
josephkk

Isn't that what you just did?

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John Larkin, President       Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com   
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Reply to
John Larkin

This ought to be good.

Reply to
Corbomite Carrie

I'm sure this conversation is absolutely riveting to those involved, but would you mind keeping it in the sci.electronics.design playpen and not bothering the adults who live in comp.arch.embedded?

Thanks.

Reply to
David Brown

josephkk wrote

It's a matter of the ratios, of course...

It's a poor way to do backups because they are so expensive. $500 or so for 256GB, compared with say $40 for a DLT tape holding the same GB.

Micron are replacing this 256GB M4 SSD, but I wonder if there is any way I can actually use it for anything...

An Intel 256GB SSD lasted ~ 6 months in that PC.

Win7 is not an option, but in any case if the swapfile is what is killing these SSDs then what should one do?

It would be perverse to have extra RAM and have a RAM disk like one used to under DOS Also XP cannot see more than ~3.5GB which severely limits the swapfile options. It would also be perverse to have a HD just for the swapfile :)

I think it is this one - 6gbit/sec SATA.

formatting link

Reply to
Peter

better

backup

duplicate

Considering the number of writes that tape is capable of and the write speed of tape are you very sure? There is also a alternative capital = cost for DLT tapes that SSD disk does not have.

In no small part due to poor design of WinXP which writes crap each and every second, mostly to the registry.

In well designed OSs swap is a separate usage, that can be eliminated = with enough RAM available. Not possible in Win** without special, difficult, configuration.

Reply to
josephkk

Once

how

post.

Wow, John Larkin, i did not expect you to call yourself a troll! Thaat may actually be accurate though.

?-)

Reply to
josephkk

I keep seeing that particular criticism being levelled at Windows but honestly whenever I've looked into it it seems no better or worse than any other system. It seems to me that a lot of the time it's simply people not understanding the way the figures are accounted for. People see swap usage and accuse it of swapping out prematurely. Often it is quite the opposite - it is simply stuff that has never been swapped _in_.

--
Andrew Smallshaw
andrews@sdf.lonestar.org
Reply to
Andrew Smallshaw

Yer an idiot. Tape is a vulnerability. Writing to it several times is taking a chance. Period.

REAL IT folks know this. Joekk is an idiot, and knows NOTHING about it.

IF one is going to do backups using SSDs, then one needs just as many of those as one would need tapes.

REDUCTION of write operation count is the goal, and a single drive for backup is simply asking for a failure

Tape sucks, but a tape with a single write to it is pretty safe. An SSD can get bits shifted simply when some star somewhere decides to fart as it dies.

Reply to
WoolyBully

Wow, joekk, we DID expect you to make yet another STUPID post

Complete with joekk retarded punctuation and spelling.

And this utter stupidity.

Reply to
WoolyBully

You mean "expensive" rather than "difficult". The only requirement for running Windows without a pagefile is a lot of RAM. No special settings other than "no pagefile" are necessary.

All versions of Windows spend a great deal of effort to maintain performance counters in the registry. Disabling performance monitoring (if/when you don't need it) should put a stop to quite a bit of unnecessary disk access.

You can do it all at once with a registry tweak:

- Go to: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Perflib

- Add a new DWORD Value "DisablePerformanceCounters". Set the value of DisablePerformanceCounters value to 1 and reboot your computer.

Or use Microsoft's resource kit tool to enable/disable individual performance counters:

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George

Reply to
George Neuner

What Joseph means is that Windows always swaps even when the ram is not full. Running Windows without a swapfile makes it a lot faster even if you have more than enough ram. As usual MS didn't got the mechanism right.

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Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
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Reply to
Nico Coesel

Something went wrong. Second try:

What Joseph means is that Windows always swaps even when the ram is not full. Running Windows WITH a swapfile makes it a lot SLOWER even if you have more than enough ram. As usual MS didn't got the mechanism right.

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
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Reply to
Nico Coesel

with

difficult,

One piece of the issue is not so much swap usage, and windows always uses some, but being able to turn it off when you want. It can even be done dynamically in unix/linux, but can barely be done at all in MSwin. It takes fairly advanced direct registry edits in MSwin, and a reboot.

?-)

Reply to
josephkk

with

difficult,

I did indeed mean difficult, deleting the swap file in MSwin is often a hand edit to the registry.

That by itself will NOT stop swapping nor get rid of the swap file.

?-)

Reply to
josephkk

George Neuner wrote

That's interesting and it may prolong the life of an SSD, but I don't think there is any way to disable swapping in winXP onwards. IIRC, a lot of apps stops running if you do that.

Win the old win3.1 you could just do that, and all disk activity stopped totally. I ran a multizone heating controller on such a system, for about 10 years. When NT came along, that was no longer possible (on the retail version).

Reply to
Peter

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