Author Topic: SSD drives?  (Read 9791 times)

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Offline Fury

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Now, it'd be cool if windows supported partitioning of flash storage. It's stupid that they don't unless something changed recently.
Whut? Why do you think it doesn't? I haven't seen anything on the contrary.

 

Offline S-99

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Because it doesn't, and it's ghey that windows wouldn't detect other flash drive partitions (and when was the last time anybody needed to partition a thumb drive anyway...well i would like my 16gb flash drive to have 2 partitions dammit...the needs of the few). In xp i know it does this. It used to not be this way in win98 (which will detect other flash drive partitions). It happens in such a way in xp that you know they did it on purpose because somehow ms thought that flash storage should be considered specially different.

I believe in vista and 7 wont detect other partitions on flash storage. But, when i first found this out, i only had an xp machine sitting around to try it out on. Yes disk management console will always detect the other partitions on flash storage, and it'll make you think you can assign a drive letter too. Only to restart, and find that other partitions on that flash storage didn't get assigned a drive letter, let alone detected by my computer.

EDIT: seems newer than xp windows like vista and 7 can't either by default. There is one way though that i have found that will windows support partitions on flash drives after googling. It all matters if it's removable media or not. And i think it's totally bogus that you'd have to do this at all when other operating systems can support partitioned thumb drives without using that utility first in the link.
« Last Edit: October 27, 2011, 08:11:17 am by S-99 »
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Offline Fury

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Oh, you're talking about removable flash storage such as USB sticks. Well, SSD's are different and partitioning should work just fine on them. Googling at least reveals no limitations in partitioning of SSD's on Windows 7. Don't know about WinXP, but why would you use obsolete OS with SSD's anyway.

 

Offline jr2

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Caveat: The NTFS filesystem might get its panties in a bunch if it wasn't evar defragged... IMHO defrag an SSD once a year to keep your filesystem sane.

Bzzt, wrong. The natural state of an SSD is to be heavily fragmented, and if you have a defragmentation prog that attempts to defrag an SSD, you should delete it immediately. If you do it anyway, you will massively decrease your SSDs lifetime, as defragging involves A LOT of writes.

My program doesn't defrag SSDs unless told otherwise.  However, how much fragmentation can the NTFS filesystem take before it becomes slow / corrupt?  I mean, I imagine it would be years, but I don't know...  Isn't it true that for every file fragment, there must be a notation somewhere as to where it is (well, virtually for an SSD) located?  So if you have thousands of fragments... I've seen drives that have been in use for 2-3 years that have 10,000+ fragments, now if that was an SSD and you add another 2, 3, 4, or more years... what kind of a hellish mess are you going to be dealing with in the Master File Table?  Not to mention, fragmentation in the MFT itself, the system logs (although IIRC Windoze tries not to go so crazy on some of the logs it keeps with SSDs, or at least some manufacturers disable those options for SSD-equipped models), etc, etc... everything will be a stupendously huge spaghetti ball of mess.  Granted, with an SSD, it can read any sector with equal ease.. the issue isn't the drive, the issue is the filesystem.  Do I dare trust NTFS to keeps it's beans accounted for?  I'm thinking of what can happen to an Outlook .PST when it gets over-sized.  Apples and Oranges, I know.  Same farmer selling them though.

Thoughts?

 

Offline Klaustrophobia

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maybe it IS time to consider a SSD.  HDD prices just SKYROCKETED, right in time for my new build. <.<
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Offline Fury

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However, how much fragmentation can the NTFS filesystem take before it becomes slow / corrupt?  I mean, I imagine it would be years, but I don't know...  Isn't it true that for every file fragment, there must be a notation somewhere as to where it is (well, virtually for an SSD) located?  So if you have thousands of fragments... I've seen drives that have been in use for 2-3 years that have 10,000+ fragments, now if that was an SSD and you add another 2, 3, 4, or more years... what kind of a hellish mess are you going to be dealing with in the Master File Table?  Not to mention, fragmentation in the MFT itself, the system logs (although IIRC Windoze tries not to go so crazy on some of the logs it keeps with SSDs, or at least some manufacturers disable those options for SSD-equipped models), etc, etc... everything will be a stupendously huge spaghetti ball of mess.  Granted, with an SSD, it can read any sector with equal ease.. the issue isn't the drive, the issue is the filesystem.  Do I dare trust NTFS to keeps it's beans accounted for?  I'm thinking of what can happen to an Outlook .PST when it gets over-sized.  Apples and Oranges, I know.  Same farmer selling them though.

Thoughts?
The only relevant MS Knowledgebase article I could find is this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967351

I also found random bits about there having been an issue in Windows XP pre-SP2 where too fragmented MFT broke and prevented OS from booting. This was supposedly fixed in a hotfix and Service Pack 2. Google didn't find me a KB article on this though.

If there was actually an issue in regards to fragmentation and SSD's, even with MFT, it would be known issue already. This is not the case, so there should be zero need to defragment anything on SSD's.

 

Offline Nuke

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flash is random access. it doesnt care if its a convoluted mess. there is no head to move and no platter to rotate, just a few logic gates that need to be twiddled to change address. the master file table entry for any given files does not contain any file data, if anything merely the file header, file size, etc. as well as a pointer to the first allocation unit that the file is stored in. the allocation unit has a pointer to the next unit (perhaps also pointers to the previous unit and the file table entry) and so on.

fragmentation is bad because of the mechanical motions the drive must go through if you got bits of file everywhere, it has to stop reading to find the next allocation unit. its a lot of stop and go. when this happens on the flash drive its all done with transistor-transistor logic, which aside from a tiny propagation delay (were talking nanoseconds here) is instantaneous. read (or write) command goes something like this. address is written to the address bus by the controller, then the read (or write) enable pin goes active and for read i/o pins produce the value stored at the address, or for write, the i/o pins accept the new value and store it at the address.

i believe the flash chips used support block operations, where once an address is set and a read operation begins, it will read/write a byte sequentially each clock until the read/write enable pin changes logic level, without needing to key in new addresses each cycle. since the file system uses allocation units, and data stored in those units is guaranteed to be sequential, you could block read an entire allocation unit without needing to change the address. same if all your allocation units are in a row. youd need to change address if your allocation units are non-sequebntial, but this operation is several orders of magnitude faster than on a mechanical hard drive and the performance loss would be negligible.
« Last Edit: October 29, 2011, 02:01:54 am by Nuke »
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Offline The E

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My program doesn't defrag SSDs unless told otherwise.  However, how much fragmentation can the NTFS filesystem take before it becomes slow / corrupt?  I mean, I imagine it would be years, but I don't know...  Isn't it true that for every file fragment, there must be a notation somewhere as to where it is (well, virtually for an SSD) located?  So if you have thousands of fragments... I've seen drives that have been in use for 2-3 years that have 10,000+ fragments, now if that was an SSD and you add another 2, 3, 4, or more years... what kind of a hellish mess are you going to be dealing with in the Master File Table?  Not to mention, fragmentation in the MFT itself, the system logs (although IIRC Windoze tries not to go so crazy on some of the logs it keeps with SSDs, or at least some manufacturers disable those options for SSD-equipped models), etc, etc... everything will be a stupendously huge spaghetti ball of mess.  Granted, with an SSD, it can read any sector with equal ease.. the issue isn't the drive, the issue is the filesystem.  Do I dare trust NTFS to keeps it's beans accounted for?  I'm thinking of what can happen to an Outlook .PST when it gets over-sized.  Apples and Oranges, I know.  Same farmer selling them though.

Thoughts?

Yes. None of the issues you speak of have been reported as actual real-life problems with actual, real-life SSDs. So it sounds more like you're afraid of things that aren't an issue because developers at MS and the companies making SSDs have been thinking about them and come up with solutions before the first SSDs hit the open market.
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Offline Nuke

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i will not be using ntfs on any ssds i may get in the near future. it sounds like its not suited at all for the technology. granted i trust ntfs to hell and back on my mechanical drives, have never lost an ntfs partition, ever. but unless its is revised with ssd features in mind, its just not suited to the task.
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Offline The E

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But what other options are there when using Windows?
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Offline Nuke

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isn't exfat supported?

of course i figure by the time i have the cashflow to start using ssds, either an extension to ntfs will support more ssd friendly features, or a new file system will be developed. next rig i build will use mechanical drives, from then on, depends on price. could always get it as an upgrade too if they become affordable in the near future. the price is projected to drop 50% every 2 years so i figure in 5 years ssd will be the superior option for me.
« Last Edit: October 29, 2011, 08:12:50 am by Nuke »
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Offline Fury

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Windows 8 has new file system, code name "Protogon". Not much is known about it so far.

 

Offline Nuke

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after doing some reading on wikipedia it seems that the controllers on an ssd handle a majority of the requirements that ssds would have, so the proper file system to use would be one that reduces unnecessary disk writing. ssd drives also seem to have an internal file system to handle the flash specific details, so your file system can be rather arbitrary.
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Offline S-99

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Oh, you're talking about removable flash storage such as USB sticks.
Yes i was. I didn't quite make the distinction in my post. I still think it's retarded that windows doesn't support partitioning of usb sticks. In reality, the only difference i can find is that one goes in a usb slot, and the other goes inside your computer (it's all flash storage anyway, regardless of high or low quality). This is why by default i don't make the distinction. It is cool however that windows 7 automatically adapts to ssd's when detected that it's installed on one (as nuke mentioned).
isn't exfat supported?
Yes there's exfat. Exfat is not a journaling file system. Sounds great for limited reads and writes compared to a journaling file system without the 4gb file size limitation.

I would also like to note, there's plenty of other file systems out there. Many designed specifically for flash storage. Microsoft however, conveniently doesn't include compatibility in windows for other file systems than it's own.
Windows 8 has new file system, code name "Protogon". Not much is known about it so far.
Did some reading. Sounds it's intended to be the default file system for the drive windows is installed on (i could be wrong).
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Offline Bobboau

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designed specifically for flash storage.

could you name a few?
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Offline S-99

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Ubifs, logfs, and yaffs2. There is jffs2. But, the first 3 i mentioned replace jffs2. These are linux specific file systems. It'd be great if they weren't so linux specific which is what i am getting after.

Fat32 was nice, but i do come around with the 4gb file size limitation more often than not. Then there's ntfs, which is great, but has journaling. You can disable journaling with ntfs at least.

The main hurdle i see with exfat currently, is device support since it's new. I'm talking about stuff like routers that let you plug in external storage, hd tv's with sd card readers, car audio dash mounts with usb slots, etc. Exfat support in this area will take some time.
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SMBFD

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Offline Bobboau

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yeah, I'm on Linux, using an SSD, so it perked my interest.
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Offline jr2

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You can disable journaling with ntfs at least.

You linked to a guide on how to enable USN journalling on XP, which does not have it enabled by default, unlike Vista (and probably 7).

enable:

Code: [Select]
fsutil usn createjournal m=1000 a=100 C:
check status:

Code: [Select]
fsutil usn queryjournal C:
EDIT:
disable:
Code: [Select]
fsutil usn deletejournal /d C:
« Last Edit: October 31, 2011, 09:01:16 pm by jr2 »

 

Offline S-99

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Thank you. Quite frankly i didn't know you could disable journaling in ntfs until i googled it while making that part of the post (where it said how do i enable, i thought it said disable in a quick glance of the article i linked). It's still cool to know, i thought it was one of the many thing's you couldn't do with windows.

While those are great flash file systems bobbau. When i did have an ssd. I routinely just used ext4 with the noatime and nodiratime fstab options for that drive to disable any kind of journaling and lessen reads and writes. But, definitely look for any fstab options for the flash file systems i listed if you're still interested in them.
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SMBFD

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Offline jr2

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To disable (just Googled it): run the following with Admin privileges:

Code: [Select]
fsutil usn deletejournal /d C: