dexvx wrote:The Serpent Rider wrote:ASUS for smooth sailing "from the box", DFI if you want to do a lot of tweaking with a lot of cursing. But! You can cheat and pick ATI chipset with GeForce 7950GX2/Quadro FX4500x2/GeForce 7900GTX DUO for SLI.
Asus it is!
You guys using SSD's, are you using Windows 7? Don't SSD write performance slowly degrade without TRIM (which I thought Windows XP does not support)?
I have 3 systems (including an A8N-SLI) running SSDs on XP64. I use the ADATA SSD Toolbox on them, and I'm pretty sure that XP32 is also supported. It will let you manually run TRIM and doesn't actually care what brand of SSD you have. Mine are Micron and it doesn't complain.
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It works for me on 2 of the 3 systems. On the 3rd I get an error where it says it can't detect any SATA drives. That's on an AMD790X/SB750 based motherboard, whose Windows AHCI drivers have always sucked as far as I can tell, and I can't get it to switch to IDE mode without blue screening (opposite the problem people usually have). I don't know if it would work if I had installed in IDE mode.
The 2 that work are an nForce4 A8N-SLI (IDE mode I think) and an Intel Q35 DQ35JOE (not sure what mode it's in). I would expect it to work on most (all?) systems that have good chipset drivers.
I haven't actually tried the one-click "OS Optimization" thing at the bottom, I decided to research some appropriate registry tweaks and applied them manually. I guess that button automates the popular ones.
Minor quirks - 1) Program takes a long time to open. 2) When you run TRIM, it gives a progress bar and "finished" prompt for the first partition, but then appears unresponsive while it does any subsequent partitions. After each subsequent partition you get another "finished" prompt but no indication of what it's doing in the meantime.
The utility is described and linked further down the page in this article:
http://wp.xin.at/archives/829
When I downloaded it, I scanned it at virustotal and it was clean, but you should still do the same.
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Before installing XP, you should use gparted or some equivalent utility to set up properly aligned partition(s), since XP install will do it wrong. In gparted just select the "align to 1MB boundary" option. If you don't see that option then you need a newer version.
If you forget this step then I think it can also move the partitions after install, but this means overwriting the whole partition, so then you really want to be able to run TRIM afterward.
If you acquire a used drive, then it would be a good idea to 1) check for firmware updates - SSDs had a lot of growing pains (like my Microns which were famous for bricking themselves at ~3000hrs)
2) TRIM the whole drive before any other setup, since there might be allocated data outside the partition that you'll be creating for XP, and thus outside the address range that would be affected by XP's TRIM operation.
There are various ways of TRIMming an entire drive. The way I did it involved an existing linux system and some steps that were posted on superuser or one of it's countless sister sites. If nothing else, you can use "secure erase" even though that needlessly overwrites everything.
Even if you can't get XP to TRIM, you can mitigate the concern to an extent by first TRIMming everything (by whatever means), then partitioning only part of the drive for XP. Leaving say 25% of the drive's logical addresses as TRIMmed and never subsequently accessible by the OS means that there will always be at least 25% free space from the drive's point of view. This makes it easier for the drive to find "empty" (not containing valid data) flash cells whenever it needs to juggle data. This significantly reduces the write amplification issue that occurs with fully allocated/untrimmed drives. It's write amplification that brings SSDs to a crawl and can potentially kill them.
One of the differences from consumer and server-oriented SSDs is that the latter have more unused Flash held in reserve, for this very reason (sometimes those systems aren't able to run TRIM). You can emulate the same effect by just manually ensuring that part of the drive's accessible address range stays permanently TRIMmed and never actually accessed.
Some early SSD articles (maybe before TRIM was widely adopted) explored how much write amplification will occur with different degrees of "over-provisioning". As I recall 25% reserve was a pretty good compromise, but if you don't need that much space, then by all means allocate less.