Samsung SSD software

s|b wrote:
On Wed, 09 Apr 2014 19:40:59 +0100, Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:

I don't have a Samsung, but I do have an Intel SSD. It comes with a
program called Intel SSD Toolbox. It contains an optimizer and it is
advised to use this once a week. You can do a quick or full diagnostic
scan, secure erase, firmware update, ...

Once a week? To do what?

Optimise. -)

I don't really care /what/ it exactly happens, but Intel advises to do
this once a week. So far, my SSD hasn't blown up, so...

IMO it can't hurt to install (and run) the software.

*wince* Disagree hugely - it certainly can. Using at least one version
of the WD USB drive software makes the drive unbootable, for example.

I'd recommend running *without* any additional software whenever
possible.

You probably don't install the latest firmware either. Doesn't mean
everybody should do the same... Not so long ago, I upgraded the firmware
of my SSD and guess what? No explosions either! ;-)


The optimizer might be a replacement for TRIM.

SSDs can be designed without TRIM, and then an optimizer could help.

SSDs with TRIM, used on an OS with TRIM support, likely
do not need optimization, as TRIM provides so much
free space for maintaining the performance levels.

If the SSD was run on a WinXP system (without TRIM), then
I could see an optimizer being of some use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM

*******

There's probably a tool around, that can report TRIM capabilities.
I prefer third-party tools, because things like fsutil frequently
leave out details an enthusiast could take advantage of.

http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=84677

How to check if TRIM is active

To check if the TRIM command is active on your PC, start a
Command Prompt window (type "CMD" in the Search bar from
the Windows Start Menu) and enter the following command:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

If the result is 0 then the TRIM command is enabled, and
if the result is 1 then the TRIM command is disabled.

Use the following command [or something along these lines...]
to enable TRIM:

fsutil behavior query|set DisableDeleteNotify = 0

The DisableDeleteNotify command only indicates that the operating
system is passing the TRIM command on to the storage drivers. It
does not indicate whether or not the storage drivers are passing
the command on to the storage controller IC in the SSD, or whether
the storage controller IC supports TRIM. As such, a result of 0
is not a guarantee that TRIM is functioning correctly.

To determine whether TRIM is functioning correctly, you can
periodically measure the performance of your SSD using tools
such as ATTO and CrystalDiskMark. If the performance of your
drive is generally at the level specified on the Corsair
website for your specific drive then you can be confident
that TRIM is functioning.

There's gotta be a better way than that, to do it...
That's just the first example I could find.

Paul

On 09/04/2014 in message
Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:

Meh. If the firmware on Intel SSDs were so **** it needed a hand from
an external program, they wouldn't be some of the best on the market.

Intel's SSD toolbox runs diagnostic tools, checks the system is optimised
for an SSD, updates the firmware if necessary (rare but I think I have had
one update) and runs an 'optimiser' - presumably 'trim'. Mines runs weekly
on a schedule. Not sure why you would feels so negative about such a tool.

--
Jeff Gaines Wiltshire UK
I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day.
Tomorrow, isn't looking good either.

On 10 Apr 2014 07:33:45 GMT, "Jeff Gaines"
wrote:

On 09/04/2014 in message
Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:

Meh. If the firmware on Intel SSDs were so **** it needed a hand from
an external program, they wouldn't be some of the best on the market.

Intel's SSD toolbox runs diagnostic tools, checks the system is optimised
for an SSD, updates the firmware if necessary (rare but I think I have had
one update) and runs an 'optimiser' - presumably 'trim'. Mines runs weekly
on a schedule. Not sure why you would feels so negative about such a tool.

Because a drive *shouldn't need* to be optimised every week. That's
just insane. What if I'm using it with an OS that can't run the tool?
As a cache in a NAS? In a Playstation4?

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"Every Little Thing She Does Is Sufficiently Advanced Technology"

On Wed, 09 Apr 2014 15:53:18 -0400, Paul wrote:

The optimizer might be a replacement for TRIM.

SSDs can be designed without TRIM, and then an optimizer could help.

The Intel SSD I have is capable of TRIM. Intel provides a list of SSDs
that can be used with Intel® Solid-State Drive Toolbox.

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?lang=eng&changeLang=true&DwnldId= 18455

--
s|b

On Wed, 09 Apr 2014 15:53:18 -0400, Paul wrote:

s|b wrote:
On Wed, 09 Apr 2014 19:40:59 +0100, Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:

I don't have a Samsung, but I do have an Intel SSD. It comes with a
program called Intel SSD Toolbox. It contains an optimizer and it is
advised to use this once a week. You can do a quick or full diagnostic
scan, secure erase, firmware update, ...

Once a week? To do what?

Optimise. -)

I don't really care /what/ it exactly happens, but Intel advises to do
this once a week. So far, my SSD hasn't blown up, so...

IMO it can't hurt to install (and run) the software.

*wince* Disagree hugely - it certainly can. Using at least one version
of the WD USB drive software makes the drive unbootable, for example.

I'd recommend running *without* any additional software whenever
possible.

You probably don't install the latest firmware either. Doesn't mean
everybody should do the same... Not so long ago, I upgraded the firmware
of my SSD and guess what? No explosions either! ;-)


The optimizer might be a replacement for TRIM.

SSDs can be designed without TRIM, and then an optimizer could help.
It is my understanding that TRIM tell the device the space is not in
use and can therefore be used for wear leveling without having to
preserve the current contents.

Beyond TRIM, however, defragmenting can be done which speeds up
performance just as with spinning disks. Whether it pays to
do defragmenting depends on the number of erases possible and how
fast the SSD is. (Some SSDs seem to lack compute power and slowdown
by an even greater ratio than spinning disks - it is just that
you might not notice because the numbers are 100's of microseconds
compared to a few microseconds, rather than 17 milliseconds compared
to 1 microsecond.)


SSDs with TRIM, used on an OS with TRIM support, likely
do not need optimization, as TRIM provides so much
free space for maintaining the performance levels.

If the SSD was run on a WinXP system (without TRIM), then
I could see an optimizer being of some use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM

*******

There's probably a tool around, that can report TRIM capabilities.
I prefer third-party tools, because things like fsutil frequently
leave out details an enthusiast could take advantage of.

http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=84677

How to check if TRIM is active

To check if the TRIM command is active on your PC, start a
Command Prompt window (type "CMD" in the Search bar from
the Windows Start Menu) and enter the following command:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

If the result is 0 then the TRIM command is enabled, and
if the result is 1 then the TRIM command is disabled.

Use the following command [or something along these lines...]
to enable TRIM:

fsutil behavior query|set DisableDeleteNotify = 0

The DisableDeleteNotify command only indicates that the operating
system is passing the TRIM command on to the storage drivers. It
does not indicate whether or not the storage drivers are passing
the command on to the storage controller IC in the SSD, or whether
the storage controller IC supports TRIM. As such, a result of 0
is not a guarantee that TRIM is functioning correctly.

To determine whether TRIM is functioning correctly, you can
periodically measure the performance of your SSD using tools
such as ATTO and CrystalDiskMark. If the performance of your
drive is generally at the level specified on the Corsair
website for your specific drive then you can be confident
that TRIM is functioning.

There's gotta be a better way than that, to do it...
That's just the first example I could find.

Paul

On 10/04/2014 5:41 PM, Mark F wrote:
Beyond TRIM, however, defragmenting can be done which speeds up
performance just as with spinning disks. Whether it pays to
do defragmenting depends on the number of erases possible and how
fast the SSD is. (Some SSDs seem to lack compute power and slowdown
by an even greater ratio than spinning disks - it is just that
you might not notice because the numbers are 100's of microseconds
compared to a few microseconds, rather than 17 milliseconds compared
to 1 microsecond.)

Defragmenting should have absolutely no effect on an SSD. That's because
there are no spinning disks here.

Yousuf Khan

On Thu, 10 Apr 2014 20:15:01 -0400, Yousuf Khan
wrote:

On 10/04/2014 5:41 PM, Mark F wrote:
Beyond TRIM, however, defragmenting can be done which speeds up
performance just as with spinning disks. Whether it pays to
do defragmenting depends on the number of erases possible and how
fast the SSD is. (Some SSDs seem to lack compute power and slowdown
by an even greater ratio than spinning disks - it is just that
you might not notice because the numbers are 100's of microseconds
compared to a few microseconds, rather than 17 milliseconds compared
to 1 microsecond.)

Defragmenting should have absolutely no effect on an SSD. That's because
there are no spinning disks here.


Actually, it will have a bad effect effect - extra, totally
pointless, wear on the nand flash media itself.

If you install win7 or win8 onto an SSD, the automatic defrag feature
is disabled by default (as well as the partition alignment being set
to exactly 2048 sectors for both the 4K sectors size and the erase
block sizes that will fit exactly into 1024 512e sized sectors).

If you're upgrading from an HDD to SSD by cloning the installed OS,
it's most important to not only align the partition(s) but also to
make sure that the automatic defrag feature is turned off in these
OSen.
--
Regards, J B Good

On Fri, 11 Apr 2014 12:42:23 +0100, Johny B Good
wrote:

On Thu, 10 Apr 2014 20:15:01 -0400, Yousuf Khan
wrote:

On 10/04/2014 5:41 PM, Mark F wrote:
Beyond TRIM, however, defragmenting can be done which speeds up
performance just as with spinning disks. Whether it pays to
do defragmenting depends on the number of erases possible and how
fast the SSD is. (Some SSDs seem to lack compute power and slowdown
by an even greater ratio than spinning disks - it is just that
you might not notice because the numbers are 100's of microseconds
compared to a few microseconds, rather than 17 milliseconds compared
to 1 microsecond.)

Defragmenting should have absolutely no effect on an SSD. That's because
there are no spinning disks here.


Actually, it will have a bad effect effect - extra,
(line breaks added by me, MarkF)
totally pointless,
wear on the nand flash media itself.
Yes, there is extra wear and tear, but some times it is worth it,
although the actual useful cases have decrease as the erase limits
have gone down from the peak of more than 1 million to only a
few thousand for many cells in current MLC chips. Also, the
extra overhead in the on-device controllers due to fragmenting
in the device view doesn't matter as much because the controllers
are faster. On the other hand, using PCI instead of SATA makes
the overhead more significant.

If you install win7 or win8 onto an SSD, the automatic defrag feature
is disabled by default (as well as the partition alignment being set
to exactly 2048 sectors for both the 4K sectors size and the erase
block sizes that will fit exactly into 1024 512e sized sectors).

If you're upgrading from an HDD to SSD by cloning the installed OS,
it's most important to not only align the partition(s) but also to
make sure that the automatic defrag feature is turned off in these
OSen.
Yes, turn off defragmenting in the operating system since most
operating system software doesn't communicate to the SSD what
it is trying to accomplish.

NOTE:
The software manufacturer's literature for at least on
defragmenting program says the program has special support
for SSDs.

However I couldn't find anyone from the company that could
name any specific flash memory devices that they were using
any device specific features to make the defragmentation work
better.

Also, the software manufacturer's representatives didn't
convince me that they had any algorithm that got things
defragmented better in a device independent manner. One
person from the company said that the "support" for SSD
was to automatically not defragment SSDs and other flash
memory devices.

Note: I think that you could probably right something that
triggers only a small multiple of extra writing to the
flash memory if you use TRIM to inform the device about
free logical blocks long enough ahead of time for the
device to do the wear leveling and data moving.

On Fri, 11 Apr 2014 11:40:59 -0400, Mark F
wrote:

One
person from the company said that the "support" for SSD
was to automatically not defragment SSDs and other flash
memory devices.

This is exactly what I'd expect.

As JBG said there are only negative repercussions if you do 'normal'
HDD-appropriate defragging - go look up "write amplification" and
consider how horrible rearranging all the contents of a HDD would be
to an SSD.

And it's totally unnecessary. Reading from 'fragmented' files on an
SSD is of no difference whatsoever from reading contiguous files. Each
file is read from a series of addressed blocks. In one case they're
scattered addresses, in the other they're sequential - but that
doesn't matter at all to the electronics, there's no read head that
needs to be moved.

And that's not even getting into the extra levels of virtualisation
that SSDs enjoy. The OS has its idea of where each file might be,
using the filesystem table of file:[location_array] data, but every
request for "the content of 512byte block 23124" to the SSD needs to
be translated by the SSD controller firmware to "block 1287, start at
byte 16385, read 512 bytes" using its own lookup table. And next time
"block 23124" is requested it might be on block 76273, due to the
firmware moving data around for wear leveling or to fill up another
256KB block after the rest of block 1287 has been TRIMmed or
garbage-collected.

And then some faster and larger SSDs have multiple controllers, with
the data spread across multiple pools of NAND chips, RAID0 style.

SSDs are totally different beasts to HDDs, and need multiple levels of
abstraction to be treated as one. Fortunately that's all handled by
the OS and firmware, so there's not a lot that you need to care about
this - the sole exception being *do not defrag them*.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
There's no place like 127.0.0.1

On Thu, 10 Apr 2014 17:41:17 -0400, Mark F wrote:

Beyond TRIM, however, defragmenting can be done which speeds up
performance just as with spinning disks.

Defragmenting a SSD is a big no-no. Intel SSD Toolbox is very clear
about this: 'Do not run or schedule Disk Defragmenter on Intel SSDs.'

--
s|b