Making XP Pro SSD Friendly

Making XP pro SSD friendly

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Thread: Making XP pro SSD friendl friendly y Thread Tools

Displa y

#1

09-22-2008 06:24 AM

Tony

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Making XP pro SSD friendly friendly

SSD TIGER

Before we get going, this thread will be read only, if you want to discuss tweaking XP etc please post post her e: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com /fo...812#post300812 /fo...812 #post300812

Join Date: Location: Posts: Blog Entries:

May 2003 Stockport UK 11,615 7

Mobo/Laptop: Mobo/Laptop: various as always testing BIOS: various as they never work correctly CPU: usually AM3, but sometimes AM2+ and i7 RAM: I test s o much its its hard to say Vid: 3870x2's...this is the one fixed variable PSU: PCPC 1200W/860W HDD: Vertex or Vertex EX OS: All M$ from XP forward

Also there is no benchmark that will show improvements, the ONLY way to tell is by using the drive and noting if issues have gone away. Any bench you run will just bench how windows access and uses the drive...so nothing will w ill look to have changed.

Background to tweaking XP to make it SSD friendly: Cheaper SSD drives like our Core V1 and Core V2 series have limitations with random writes filling up the write buffer on the drive and causing the SATA controller to pause while this is flushed. The reason for this is Nand MLC drives at present have to erase before they write...hence you get added latency. So every bit wri tten to the drive has to be preceded by a bit erased, the drive can not write over the top of pre written data. What we are trying to do here is limit how much XP writes to cache/database. cache/database. many apps within within XP do th is , apps you add also do this (such as outl ook) The tweaks you will see listed may help with thi s, SSD's do not take well to l ots of tiny random writes.

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Paying homage to helpful forum members: geosoft for getting the ball rolling D111 for being level headed and bringing sanity to a bad Monday morning for me As you contribute I will add info and homage in this thread, together we can work thru the limits and hopefully get to where many will enjoy the drives. If you can add help, post post in the th read listed above and PM me the li nk to the post...please post...please make sure to test all tweaks and only post what works

To start Nlite...http://www.nliteos.com/ Nlite...http://www.nliteos.com/ With thi s tool you can add service packs, packs, remove items from XP and tweak services etc. We will n ot be producing a guide but this tool will help you massively if you learn how to use it. I would suggest suggest to start you install the correct drivers for the chipset on the motherboard into the OS image using Nlite. Instructions for this are on the Nlite site and on many forums. If we find tweaks that are easy with Nlite I will add them here.

Next up what to do within the OS its self.

1 Disable winXP prefetcher prefetcher Applicable to AHCI mode and compatibility(IDE) mode. - manually edit registry keys Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet \Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters] "EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft \Dfrg\BootOpt imizeFunction] "Enable"="N" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft \Windows\Curr entVersion\OptimalLayout]









Reboot and use your computer.

How to re-enable WinXP prefetcher prefetcher - manually edit registry keys Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet \Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters] "EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet \Servic es\Schedule] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft \Dfrg\BootOpt imizeFunction] "Enable"="Y" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft \Windows\Curr entVersion\OptimalLayout] "EnableAutoLayout"=dword:00000001

- or download 'Enable WinXP Prefetcher(http://mampan.org/prefetch Prefetcher( http://mampan.org/prefetch /Enable_ /En able_Pref Prefetcher etcher .reg .reg)' )' and double click.

Reboot.

2 Office 2003 and Further XP Tweaks: Optimizing Windows XP and Office 2003 for Solid State Drives on “Netbooks” And All desktops. Problem: Slow access / program hang / freeze / stuttering / slow response time on Win dows XP, especially with Microsoft Outlook 2003. Solution: Windows Tweaks: - Upgrade DRAM memory to maxi mum allowed (2gb for Intel Atom based PCs) PCs) 4GB desktops (although 3GB i s seen by the OS) - Make sure that XP system files are either less than 50% of SS D disk capacity capacity (if your machine has more









- Turn off hibernation to save space space and the drive constantly updating the hibernation file. http://www.tech-recipes.com/windows_tips1386.html - Turn off Sy stem Restore: Restore: http://support.microsoft.com /kb/310 405 - Turn off Windows Disk Caching and manually delete the cache files Windows XP Start at the desktop. desktop. Right-click on My Computer, then left-click on Properties. Click on th e Hardware tab at the top. Click on the Device Manager button. Click on the + next to Disk Drives to expand it. Right click on the hard drive on which to turn write caching off, then left click Properti es. Click on the Policies tab. Click on Enable write caching on the disk to remove the tick. It must not be ticked. Click OK. http://www.accucadd.com/TechNotes /Ca...eh indCach indCache.htm e.htm How to Disable the 8.3 Name Creation on NTFS Partitions: Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP To disable the 8.3 name creation on all NTFS partitions, type fsutil.exe behavior set disable8dot3 1 at a command comm and prompt, and then press ENT http://support.microsof http://sup port.microsoft.com t.com/kb/121007 /kb/121007 Disable timestamp for last access to a file to speed up Windows Another frequently seen recommendation is to disable the setting that keeps track of the last time a file . was accessed. accessed. Removing the necessity for th e system to keep reading and writing this information may speed up Windows Explorer. The command is: fsutil behavi or set disablelastaccess disablelastaccess 1 Note that some backup programs may may need th is information . If you wish to restore the timestamp, the command comm and is: fsutil behav ior set disablelastaccess disablelastaccess 0

Turn off Indexing on All Drives









fsutil usn deletejournal /d

See this for additional info:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr … 88042.aspx

and

http://commandwindows.com/fsutil.htm

This may prove the most mo st valuable tweak yet: http://www.thin-world.com/microsoft/324446.html dskcache.exe, dskcache.exe, seems M$ have made thi s file h ard to get now, upon searching i did find it. from the article i noticed this: * When a user types in a document, document, characters do not appear on the screen until this pause has ended. * Keyboard input and mouse input are queued, but they are n ot processed until this pause pause has en ded. * Live performance monitoring (Perfmon) graphs have missing data points during this pause. * All ru nning programs appear to stop responding, responding, or "hang," during th is pause. * When Spooler is under a load from a large number of users, a high CPU usage is displayed for it. now this is everything we see with SSD on un tweaked systems, systems, could M$ already i ssued a fix?? M$ data: http://s http://support.micros upport.microsoft.com oft.com/kb/Q811392 /kb/Q811392

Edit:..if you fin d the file place it dir ect on C..open command prompt and type.

c:\dskcache +p c: job done... http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com /fo...ad.php?t=4519 2 has a link to download the file

Anti-Virus / Phishing / Spyware Programs









(smart list on Avira), and only check it on READ, not read and write.

Speeding up specific applications: Fir efox, IE, etc. See next post

New

#2

09-22-2008 06:31 AM

Tony

Internet Internet Exolorer / Firefox cache tweaks tw eaks and ram ra m drives

SSD TIGER

Grab the publi c beta version of dataram ramdisk https://www.cenatek.com/downloads /Da...V3.5_ TEST3.msi This will allow ram disks to 4GB and image save/reload which is what we are looking for Join Date: Location: Posts: Blog Entries:



If you have 4GB of ram within XP best you will see is 3.3GB withi n the OS , do not worry as XP is not so much of a memory hog. Follow the onscreen instructions for the ramdisk install but do NOT for mat the disk just yet. If you have 4G B of ram a 1.5GB ramdisk should be ok. If you have 2GB of ram a 512MB ramdisk will be ok. Overall you do need to be looking at getting 4GB in your system for all the tweaks in thi s thread to work best...so best...so if memory is cheap why not treat yourself ;-) Once you h ave created your ramdisk the app make spew spew out an er ror sayin g unable to load image...this is because because the disk i s still u nformatted...so... nformatted...so...go go to administrative tools>computer tools>computer management> disk manager moun t the drive, format it NTFS and make a note of its drive letter. now exit al l programs and reboot. Initial boot may n ow be slower, this is because ramdisk will have saved an image at shutdown and will now remount the image at boot.











folder and point IE to the fol der you made on the ramdrive. Job done IE will now cache all files to the ramdrive, when you power off these files will be saved in an image on the harddrive and remounted for IE to use on next boot. I would consider setting IE to save temp files for 5 days only so you do not fill up the available space to quickly. Firefox3 For Firefox3: Go to my computer, click on the ramdriv e so you are on the root of the disk. Create a folder called FF_Cache 1. Open a new tab in F F and type "about:config" in the address bar and hit En ter. 2. Right click anywher e on page and from context menu select "New" and "String". 3. For string name, type in "browser.cache.disk.p "browser.cache.disk.parent_dire arent_dire ctory" (withou t the quotes). 4. For string value, type in the path to where you want to move your cache directory. IE D:\FF _cache _cache if D i s the ram drive and you created a folder called FF_cache. 5. Restart Firefox. Jod done

New








Posts: 11,615 Blog Entries: 7 Mobo/Laptop: Mobo/Laptop: various as always testing BIOS: various as they never work correctly CPU: usually AM3, but sometimes AM2+ and i7 RAM: I test s o much its its hard to say Vid: 3870x2's...this is the one fixed variable PSU: PCPC 1200W/860W HDD: Vertex or Vertex EX OS: All M$ from XP forward


Tweak #4 is what you need to look at h ere, its quite involved and requires reg hacks but it does look straight forward to do. Alternatively I just usually do the following: start>my computer>right computer>right click on nothing an d go to properties Now you ar e at system properties, goto advanced> advanced> hit the settings button under per formance> now goto advanced> In In the vi rtual memory box h it "change" This brings you to where we set the page file: For C: you need to disable page file altogether. So highlight C hit the button for no paging file and hit SET, now: if your ram drive is E highlight this, then put a dot in Custom size and set the following: 1 if you have 4GB system ram and have set a 1.5GB ramdisk allocate both initial and max to 1024MB 2 if you have 2GB system ram and have set a 512MB ramdisk allocate both initia l and max to 384mb (the remainder can be used for bowser cache etc) Now....adding Now....adding system system ram is the best tweak tweak of al l if you have only 2GB installed, for ultimate speed you ideally need at least 1024MB for the page file. An alternative here is to point the page file at a secondary disk, so if you have an additional hard drive what you can do is create a partition on this drive (10GB is good) and point point the page file to this. The rest of the disk can be used for storage as normal. If you follow the kadaitcha tweaks you force the wi ndows kernel to load into system ram and run from within this ram, this is very fast but would use up more ram than just poin ting th e page fi le at the ramdisk. I would say if you have only 2GB system ram and









#4

11-05-2008 08:33 AM

Tony SSD TIGER

Found a few more that may be worth trying, not sure how much they help so experiment at your yo ur own risk for now. Original source: source: http://www.netbooks-p http://www .netbooks-ph.net/forums/vi....p h.net/forums/vi....php?f=17&t=77 hp?f=17&t=77 Join Date: Location: Posts: Blog Entries:



Easy W ay to Adjust LargeSystemCache LargeSystemCache Note: This tweak may cause problems problems with AT I cards *this is documented documented by A TI(tweak forum Admin). Many have complained of file corruptions or instability. If you don't have ATI cards in your system, a significant performance improvement will result. ***Normally, the tweak I've seen asks you to go into HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management and change the value to either O or 1 to the adjustment the LargeSystemCache.**** However, in Windows XP, all you have to do is: 1. Right click My Computer 2. Select Properties 3. Click Advanced 4. Choose Performance 5. Click Advanced again 6. Select either Programs or System Cache under Memory Usage. Programs = 0 for the registry tweak equivalent System Cache = 1 for the registry tweak equivalent









improves system system performance a lot.*** *** same tweak, just 2 ways of doing the same thi ng

New

#5

11-22-2008 03:28 AM

wonko the sane

SSD and Linux

OCZ User

Hi, Join Date: Posts:

Nov 2008 5

i got a SSD Core 64GB recently for my Laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad X61s). The migration was pretty straight forward as i used an externa l usb enclosure for the ssd first in or der to copy the relevant partitions partitions over. Subjective Subjective impression Subjectively the performance increase is quite impressive compared to the original drive (WD1600BEVS-08RS). E.g. acroread starts within about 5s compared to 25s, firefox an d other apps like pidgin and sylpheed-claws i use often instantly start. Eclipse, OpenOffice etc. are also a lot faster now. Real measurements Some thing which botherd me a little bit though were the somehow strange strange re sults i got from e.g. runn ing "hdparm -t ..." on that drive; the results are around ~96MB/s which of course is a lot faster then the original drive









DATA_SIZE=10000000 #read size of disk in sectors DISK_SIZE=`fdisk -lu $1 | grep ".*sectors$" | #get sector size SECTOR_SIZE=`fdisk -lu $1 | grep "^Units" | aw echo "Size of $1 in sectors: $DISK_SIZE - With echo "Size of $1 in bytes: $(($DISK_SIZE * $SE echo "Size of data being read: $DATA_SIZE" for j in 1 2 4; do BLOCK_SIZE=$(($SECTOR_SIZE * $j)) BLOCK_COUNT=$(($DATA_SIZE / $BLOCK_SIZ echo -e "\n\nPerforming reads with blo for ((i=0; i < $TEST_RUNS ; i++)); do OFFSET=$(($DISK_SIZE / $TEST_R echo -e "\nReading from offset #sync first. Chan ed th th is as as su su

e sted b

You must be root in order to run thi s script. script. The device you want to do the test run s on must be be given as parameter e.g.: "./benchmark_hd_script "./benchmark_hd_script /dev/sda". Pleas note tha t the script emptys the cache before each test run and this might resul t in l oss of data. data. Though "sync" is calle calle d to try to prevent actual data loss it still may n ot be safe this way. So be sure to safe and close any important work before running this! In order to get the min an d max values this script produces it can be run in the following way: Code: ./benchmark_hd_script /dev/sda 2> result awk 'BEGIN {max=0; min=1000; avg=0; n=0;} {val rm result

I dunno if this whole approach approach gives real consistent results at least it produces some some number to work wi th. Maybe someone can comment comment if thi s approach approach reall y makes sense.











options set run on ext3 Code: Version 1.93c ------Sequential Output--Concurrency 1 -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrit Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec % eddie 4000M 345 99 25291 12 22912 Latency 45699us 23854ms 7994ms Version 1.93c ------Sequential Create--eddie -Create-- --Read--- -Delet files /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec % 16 1530 3 +++++ +++ 14197 Latency 1502us 1214us 779us 1.93c,1.93c,eddie,1,1227132913,4000M,,345,99,2

bonnie++ with 2GB RAM and filesize 4GB, no other options set run on ext2 Code: Version 1.94 ------Sequential Output--Concurrency 1 -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrit Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec % eddie 4000M 820 98 31142 7 21215 Latency 21218us 3608ms 3623ms Version 1.94 ------Sequential Create--eddie -Create-- --Read--- -Delet files /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec % 16 912 30 +++++ +++ +++++ Latency 918us 104us 55us 1.93c,1.94,eddi

Configuration Quite a few people suggest suggest to use ext2 or at least mount ext3 as ext2 so the journ al is not used because this i supposed supposed to reduce write cycles on the disk thu s increasing life time of the disk. After doing some more testing, including a bonnie ++ benchmark testrun, ext2 even appears to be a little bit









ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 irq_stat 0x00400040, c ata2: DUMMY ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xf8426000 Clocksource tsc unstable (delta = -99233080 ns) ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SCont ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/02:00:00:00:00:a0 succeed ata1.00: ACPI cmd f5/00:00:00:00:00:a0 filtere ata1.00: ATA-8: OCZ CORE_SSD, 02.10104, max UD ata1.00: 125206528 sectors, multi 0: LBA ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/02:00:00:00:00:a0 succeed ata1.00: ACPI cmd f5/00:00:00:00:00:a0 filtere ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100 ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100 ata1: EH complete ata3: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA OCZ C sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 125206528 512-byte hardware s sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read c sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 125206528 512-byte hardware s

Output from "h dparm -iv /dev/sda": Code: /dev/sda: IO_support readonly readahead geometry

= 0 (default) = 0 (off) = 256 (on) = 7793/255/63, sectors = 125206

Model=OCZ CORE_SSD Config={ Fixed } RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, EC BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=0kB, MaxMultSect=1, CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDM PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4 DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *ud AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled Drive conforms to: unknown: ATA/ATAPI-1,2,3,4 * signifies the current active mode









Overall i am very happy with this nice drive. I hope this information is usefull. Edit: Added average to calculation of script results. Edit2: Increasing TEST_RUNS in the above script leads to "more" normally distributed results (quite obvious as we increase the sample size). With a value of 50 i got the following results: Max: 116 - Min: 98 - Average: 110.207 Edit3: Switched to ext2; added bonnie++ bonnie++ re sults for ext2 Best regards wonko

Last edited by wonko the sane; 11-29-2008 at 11:40 AM. Reason: Added test results

11-27-2008 11:32 PM

#6

highlandsun OCZ User

Join Date: Posts:

Aug 2008 27

A standard bit of Uni x knowledge: the "sync" system system call is asynchronous. It issues a request to the fi lesystem to perform a sync but it doesn't wait for i t to occur. But, if you issue a second sync call, call, it h as to wait until all outstanding disk activity completes before it can start. So, any U nix sysadmin knows to issue "sync; sync" whenever doing this type of operation. It's only guaranteed that the cache is fully sync'd when the 2nd









Thanks for your answer highlandsun, as what the linu x man page says the the sync call actually does wait until the write has finished; even though the standard specification specification says it exactly like y ou explai ned. So i don't know how other *nixes handle this but for linux a single call should be safe. Anyways as this doesnt make much of a difference to the actual results of the above script, i'll add the second call like you explained just for making sure even "more standard compliant" compliant" *nixes don't get messed up.

Best regards wonko

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