Thread: OCZ Vertex SSDs- Initial Results

LOL, funny thing is, when we had the same 8800 card YOU were the one who got me into beta drivers in the first place. Don't make me find that post grandpa! Also don't give me that "do as I say, not as I do" bit either, I gave that one to my kid tonight before bed.

Busted.

Originally Posted by clocker

Cleaning the drives was a giant PITA.
The app I was trying to use is called Sanitary_Erase but I couldn't make it work.

Supposedly, you can run it from a thumb drive while booted to a Win7 install disk but my grasp of DOS is feeble and shaky and I got nowhere.
Took the drives- including the flash drive- to a friend's house and he magic-fingered his way to the app and wiped the drives.
I have no idea what he did...

A tip for next time, maybe, in case you ever need another secure erase:

Get gparted.

Burn iso to a cd.

(If there's a raid array on the disks, you may want to make sure that's deleted.)

Boot from the cd, and keep pressing enter until you're on the desktop.

Doubleclick the terminal icon.

Then follow these instructions.

Found it through here. I did not need to put my ssds in a usb enclosure, though, and after the terminal is up, you want to follow what the second link in this post says, not the one in this paragraph.

Easy as pie.

Now, since calling up a command prompt (shift+F10) from the windows installer ( I think I've fully explored that route, after four subsequent install attempts kept defaulting C: to 4k, even though I did have the system reserved 100MB partition set up properly first on the disk and all), and formatting through diskpart won't stick, I'll just need to find a tool that lets me actually set the cluster size to 64 or 32k on my windows partition, and I'll be all set.

Well I'm finally back after a long winters nap

Average read looks right but the burst is low.
Why?

Nope.
Did you turn off write cache buffer flushing in Device Manager?

Just bought and installed this. (It was $189 + $20 rebate = $169 when I bought it.)

Installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64 from a USB drive. I had to repartition two other drives during the install and the entire thing still took just eleven minutes. Boot times are faster but nothing worth writing home about. All the pre-Windows 'stuff' takes around 25 seconds to load, then from the "Windows Starting" screen to finished desktop is about another 40 seconds. All in all about 70 seconds to usable desktop on first reboot.

Just went through and did the following:

Disabled indexing.
Disabled defragmentation.
Disabled write caching. Just realized there is a 64MB onboard cache.
Disabled system restore.
Disabled hibernate.
Using memory cache for Firefox instead of disk cache. I believe Snee was doing this as well. I set it at 128MB. I think the default is 50MB but it shouldn't really make a difference should it, seeing as I have 8GB of RAM?

EDIT: After tweaks, I am at a fully loaded system and usable desktop at 50 seconds. That's pretty quick.