SSD - is it ok to use in XP laptop

A friend has a Dell M1210 laptop running XP - works great.
He wants to expand his disk space,
and bought a SSD to replace the normal spinning disk.
Both are SATA.

However, in browsing around,
he has read several articles about probs with XP and SSD.

What kind of problems might there be ?

What about Win7 and using the same SSD (SATA) device ?

--
/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/
No Good Deed -
Goes Unpunished

ps56k wrote:
A friend has a Dell M1210 laptop running XP - works great.
He wants to expand his disk space,
and bought a SSD to replace the normal spinning disk.
Both are SATA.

However, in browsing around,
he has read several articles about probs with XP and SSD.

What kind of problems might there be ?

What about Win7 and using the same SSD (SATA) device ?


You can use an SSD, no matter what. It won't complain.
You won't hear whining.

The SSD has a preferred alignment. Flash is divided internally,
into structures which are larger than the cluster size of
your file system.

On WinXP, the partition alignment is based on fake
CHS dimensions, causing lots of stuff done by the
WinXP Disk Management, to be divisible by 63 sectors.
This doesn't align very well with the binary power_of_two
sizes involved in flash internal memory blocks.

On Vista/Win7/Win8, you might find things aligned on
one megabyte boundaries. A little more wasteful. But for many
file system operations, only one flash structure gets
updated instead of two. That means you "wear out" the
SSD, slightly slower.

If you use a less than optimal alignment, it just
means a few more write cycles to the SSD drive. And
since many SSD drives fail before they actually
wear out from too many writes, it's unclear that this
really matters.

There's an example here, of a company offering tools
to WinXP users.

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Det...&DwnldID=20849

AcronisAlignTool_2_0.exe

Tools like that are "brand aware". Intel pays Acronis a fee.
Acronis makes the tool do a check that an Intel SSD is being
aligned. You check your SSD manufacturer site, to see if
they bought a utility like that for you. I don't know if
any of those tools, are completely free of a "brand check".

On WinXP, you would place a single partition, then have it
aligned to a preferred power_of_two boundary. Doing so will
cause some ancient tools (like Partition Magic) to complain.
But the SSD will receive fewer (fractional) writes that way.

On Windows 7, all of this is taken care of, for you.
Many of the backup/restore tools, have some awareness of
the new alignment, and can even make changes during restoration,
to align things. Some tools will take a "63 sector" backup,
and re-align it to 1MB for you.

*******

It's a shame that OCZTechnology has folded, because they had
some fine tutorials on the care and feeding of SSD drives.
And I suppose when their web site shuts down, we'll lose those.
(They'll be harder to search for.) The thing is, SSDs have
their own mythology, and there are all sorts of little
polishing things you can do (like turn off the "file accessed"
feature of the file system). Note that not all the ideas you
see in articles like this, are a good idea. You have to use
a bit of common sense when reading this.

http://www.thessdreview.com/ssd-guid...ion-guide-2/1/

They didn't even do the "disable time stamps" one. This is
an excerpt from the OCZ page.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...o-SSD-friendly

"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.
Removing the necessity for the system to keep reading and writing
this information may speed up Windows Explorer.

The command is:

fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1

Note that some backup programs may need this information.
If you wish to restore the timestamp, the command is:
fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 0
"

Now, a question would be, what OSes still do that. AFAIK, it's an NTFS
feature, so all of them should do it. But it's always possible
some OS could have a policy of turning it off for SSDs.

Part of the fun of buying an SSD, is doing all that research :-)

Paul

On 10-December-2013 2:17 PM, ps56k wrote:
A friend has a Dell M1210 laptop running XP - works great.

Can't help you, I threw my laptop in the sea.

It was just a dell, rollin in the deep.

"ps56k" wrote in news:l864k2$h5l$1
@dont-email.me:

in browsing around,
he has read several articles about probs with XP and SSD.

What kind of problems might there be ?


The "problems" between XP and SSDs center around two different issues.

One issue is partition alignment, on which Paul's post gives you a good
deal of background. Win7 systems should already come optimally aligned.
By default, XP systems are typically not optimally aligned for SSDs, but
there are tools around to realign the partition(s) on a XP system to make
them so.

The second issue concerns TRIM, a SSD feature that keeps SSD cells
functioning efficiently. Without TRIM, SSDs will gradually "slow down"
over time. Win7 is already TRIM-aware, so no problem there. XP is not
TRIM-aware, but some SSD manufacturers have a utility that can be
installed in XP to handle that. If you plan to use XP with a SSD, make
sure you get a SSD from a manufacturer who provides such a TRIM utility.
(Samsung calls theirs "Samsung Magician").

You should have no trouble with Win7 on a SSD. If you take the time to
realign your partitions and install the manufacturer's TRIM utility, you
should similarly have no trouble with XP on a SSD, either.

On 10 Dec 2013, Paul wrote:

AcronisAlignTool_2_0.exe

Tools like that are "brand aware". Intel pays Acronis a fee.
Acronis makes the tool do a check that an Intel SSD is being
aligned. You check your SSD manufacturer site, to see if
they bought a utility like that for you. I don't know if
any of those tools, are completely free of a "brand check".

I think the Linux "Parted" program can do that without being
locked to any HDD maker. I guess the GUI version, GParted,
would probably do it too. What ever the software, it's best to
do it on a fresh install (or with a new backup), so nothing is
lost if things go wrong.

You could burn a Linux CD like SystemRescueCD or Knoppix to
run (G)Parted from.

--
__ __
#_ |\| | _#

One question is finding one which will fit. I have an ancient 2006
Dell Inspiron 1420 with WIN7 Pro. I decided to get a SSD drive from
Kingston, fortunately with a guarantee to work. It arrived, and did
not have compatible connectors. I simply could not get their tech
support to understand that tab A did not fit into slot B until I sent
them some pictures. They were good enough to call back, apologize,
say they would update their compatibility list, and I returned it for
a full refund. I would like to have gotten it to work.


--
Alan

On Monday, December 9, 2013 11:17:05 PM UTC-5, ps56k wrote:
A friend has a Dell M1210 laptop running XP - works great.

He wants to expand his disk space,

and bought a SSD to replace the normal spinning disk.

Both are SATA.



However, in browsing around,

he has read several articles about probs with XP and SSD.



What kind of problems might there be ?



What about Win7 and using the same SSD (SATA) device ?



--

/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/

No Good Deed -

Goes Unpunished

I can't comment on SSDs with XP, which is just as well, because others have..

Samsung makes pretty good SSDs too, and I retrofitted 5 i7 laptops running Windows 7 with 512GB Samsung SSDs for a client. This was back in the summer and I have not had any complaints, only accolades. VERY fast for software development, Sharepoint, and humungous Outlook PST files. I also have a smaller 128GB SSD in my older small Win 7 laptop, and it is great on power consumption (8 hrs on battery), in addition to being really fast and less susceptible to head crashes. No head crashes means you don't need to be concerned about rapid or abrupt movement of the laptop.

And, yes, look into GParted Live for help with aligning partitions for XP. With a little help from YUMI (yes, another neat open source program), you can put the GParted Live ISO onto a even a small (256MB or more) flash stick, to boot it from there, rather than booting from a CD. Not sure what you will find in GParted Live, but these open source folks are right on top of things... Ben Myers

On Tuesday, December 10, 2013 6:05:38 PM UTC-5, Ben Myers wrote:
On Monday, December 9, 2013 11:17:05 PM UTC-5, ps56k wrote:

A friend has a Dell M1210 laptop running XP - works great.



He wants to expand his disk space,



and bought a SSD to replace the normal spinning disk.



Both are SATA.







However, in browsing around,



he has read several articles about probs with XP and SSD.







What kind of problems might there be ?







What about Win7 and using the same SSD (SATA) device ?







--



/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/



No Good Deed -



Goes Unpunished



I can't comment on SSDs with XP, which is just as well, because others have.



Samsung makes pretty good SSDs too, and I retrofitted 5 i7 laptops running Windows 7 with 512GB Samsung SSDs for a client. This was back in the summer and I have not had any complaints, only accolades. VERY fast for software development, Sharepoint, and humungous Outlook PST files. I also have a smaller 128GB SSD in my older small Win 7 laptop, and it is great on power consumption (8 hrs on battery), in addition to being really fast and less susceptible to head crashes. No head crashes means you don't need to be concerned about rapid or abrupt movement of the laptop.



And, yes, look into GParted Live for help with aligning partitions for XP.. With a little help from YUMI (yes, another neat open source program), you can put the GParted Live ISO onto a even a small (256MB or more) flash stick, to boot it from there, rather than booting from a CD. Not sure what you will find in GParted Live, but these open source folks are right on top of things... Ben Myers

And here's another tool to handle the partition alignment problem:

http://www.partitionwizard.com/parti...partition.html

On Tuesday, December 10, 2013 6:09:53 PM UTC-5, Ben Myers wrote:
On Tuesday, December 10, 2013 6:05:38 PM UTC-5, Ben Myers wrote:

On Monday, December 9, 2013 11:17:05 PM UTC-5, ps56k wrote:



A friend has a Dell M1210 laptop running XP - works great.







He wants to expand his disk space,







and bought a SSD to replace the normal spinning disk.







Both are SATA.















However, in browsing around,







he has read several articles about probs with XP and SSD.















What kind of problems might there be ?















What about Win7 and using the same SSD (SATA) device ?















--







/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/







No Good Deed -







Goes Unpunished







I can't comment on SSDs with XP, which is just as well, because others have.







Samsung makes pretty good SSDs too, and I retrofitted 5 i7 laptops running Windows 7 with 512GB Samsung SSDs for a client. This was back in the summer and I have not had any complaints, only accolades. VERY fast for software development, Sharepoint, and humungous Outlook PST files. I also have a smaller 128GB SSD in my older small Win 7 laptop, and it is great on power consumption (8 hrs on battery), in addition to being really fast and less susceptible to head crashes. No head crashes means you don't need to be concerned about rapid or abrupt movement of the laptop.







And, yes, look into GParted Live for help with aligning partitions for XP. With a little help from YUMI (yes, another neat open source program), you can put the GParted Live ISO onto a even a small (256MB or more) flash stick, to boot it from there, rather than booting from a CD. Not sure what you will find in GParted Live, but these open source folks are right on top of things... Ben Myers



And here's another tool to handle the partition alignment problem:



http://www.partitionwizard.com/parti...partition.html

Last of all, there is this article which tells how to align partitions with GParted Live:

http://lifehacker.com/5837769/make-s...ve-performance

100% of our 3 SSDs have failed from wearing out on
writes.

Few of the HDs have.
--


On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.