next »

[Please Support Us!]

Please Support Us!

Please help keep (=WDG=) alive

• Server rules
• Forum rules
• Join us
  
• Clan members
• About the clan
• Server stats
• WDG YouTube Channel
• WDG Downloads
• IRC Webchat

Steam groups:

• WDG community
• WDG clan group
• WDG Battlelog Platoon

Our allies:

• [NuB] TF2 clan
• Velocity Gamers Hub
• Destination Gamer

GoG Links:

• Wix Discord
• Wix IRC channel

TF2 Links:

• Official TF2 Blog
• TF2 Steam Forum
• The Fort 2

October 2025

Mo	Tu	We	Th	Fr	Sa	Su
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31
	Birthdays
Chaos (40)
	Upcoming Events
Upcoming Birthdays: Chaos (40)

[aquila]

Got the 120 bigfoot OCZ vertex.  Everything opens up that much faster and I get to the next map in tf2 before anyone has selected a team!

Graph of HD tune isn't as smooth as Junta's until it gets to 60% of whatever when it flatlines at just under 230Mb.

The raw data is - Transfer rate;  Min 147.4, max 228.3, Avg. 195.3, Burst 172.8

must look into what is going on below 60%.  Might be something to do with running a 4 disc raid 10 and the SSD off the same Intel ICH10R?

Summary:  Its nice but not a must have at home, where time isn't money!

On the plus side I now understand at least part of the mklink command.

[Zarf]

Tea, the Vertex2E is the same as Aquilas bigfoot (bigfoot is 3.5", Vertex is 2.5"), so he can tell you from first hand experience, but yes, It's pretty well rated.

Don't worry about your bench too much Aquila, the Sandforce controllers in Vertex2 series drives use real time compression before writing data, so traditional benchmarks are a poor way of judging real performance (because the benchmark data isn't going to be the same compressibility as real life data). If you run an AS-SSD benchmark it'll give you worst case performance, and If you run ATTO it'll give you best case performance.

Have you put the latest Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers on (version 10)? They increase the system memory cache size, so might give a smoother graph. Leaving the drive idle for a few hours might help as well because they "garbage collect"

http://www.station-drivers.com/page/intel%20raid.htm - they are official WHQL, just not posted on Intels site yet. I'm running them myself.

[Teatime]

Okay, caved in and ordered an 120GB OCZ V2.

So, anything special to consider when using the SSD as system disk? Or is it handled the same way than a regular HDD?

Also: What's the easiest way to move Win7 to the new disk? I'm too lazy to reinstall Win7 so would prefer to avoid it. Can I make an image of my system partition and copy than on the new SSD? (Damn, a few years ago I had found a freeware tool which would just copy the system from one HDD to another on XP, but I can't remember the name*)

*PS: Think I used xxClone, but since the last version is of 2007 I shy away from experimenting with that (yeah, cloning should have nothing to do with the OS, but still)

[Lazzars]

Also: What's the easiest way to move Win7 to the new disk? I'm too lazy to reinstall Win7 so would prefer to avoid it. Can I make an image of my system partition and copy than on the new SSD? (Damn, a few years ago I had found a freeware tool which would just copy the system from one HDD to another on XP, but I can't remember the name)

POW!

(scroll to the end)

[Zarf]

You can use the windows backup tool to do it. Take a system image, then unplug the old drive and connect the new SSD and boot from CD. you should be able to use the windows 7 install disk to restore the system image onto your new drive.

You do have to be a little bit careful with cloning since some cloning tools mess up partition alignment (alignment doesn't matter on HDD's and convention was to offset the partitions by 31Kb, however SSD's need an offset that's divisible by 4Kb to run most efficiently. Your original Windows 7 install will have an 4Kb divisible offset even on HDD , but not all cloning tools have caught up to the existence of SSD's and they replace the original offset with one at 31Kb.
From what i've read, the windows cloning tool should preserve the offset from your original disk.

[Junta]

Okay, caved in and ordered an 120GB OCZ V2.

So, anything special to consider when using the SSD as system disk? Or is it handled the same way than a regular HDD?

Also: What's the easiest way to move Win7 to the new disk? I'm too lazy to reinstall Win7 so would prefer to avoid it. Can I make an image of my system partition and copy than on the new SSD? (Damn, a few years ago I had found a freeware tool which would just copy the system from one HDD to another on XP, but I can't remember the name*)

*PS: Think I used xxClone, but since the last version is of 2007 I shy away from experimenting with that (yeah, cloning should have nothing to do with the OS, but still)

Just remember to move the page file off the SSD - If I recall correctly, SSD's are either fast enough without one or you don't want the constant data access for virtual memory management on the SSD itself. Constant writes will eventually shorten the lifespan.
I understand this to be the case regardless of TRIM support in the SSD.

[Teatime]

Okay, shiny new stuff arrived.
Before haggling with the SSD however my first step will be to setup my new storage HDD (2TB ) which should take all day.
Step two will be the SSD.

So, once more: Anything different in the process? Do I need to format it or initialize in any way?
(I guess using the restoring feature of Win7 should take care of formatting etc, but just in case I'll have to do a new install for some reason, like screwing up the restore in best Hzza tradition)

Also:

Just remember to move the page file off the SSD

Make so much sense, still: Can anybody confirm this? Any other files/folders which should be moved off a SSD? (What about system temp folders?)

[Hzza]

like screwing up the restore in best Hzza tradition

Can I just point out that, apart from a RAID0 fail (which a) wasn't my fault and b) inevitable really) I haven't actually buggered anything up all that much, computer wise.

I may have got poo in my eye once and regularly take the tops of my knuckles of grating cheese, but I'm not the incompetent buffoon you all think I am.

[Zarf]

Don't move the page file off.

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?
Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.
In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

• Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
• Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
• Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

On decent SSD's there's no need to worry about moving stuff off. The drives will be obsolete well before they wear out. At the rate my Intel's are wearing they'll last me another 20 years. No special stuff to worry about apart from making sure the offset is OK (automatic on a fresh install) and turning off Defrag (will turn itself off automatically when the windows performance test runs on first startup and Windows7 realises you're using an SSD)

[Teatime]

Cheers Zarf!

Revisiting Hardlinks/Junctions:
Final explained well how to move a folder (in my case I will probably just move the TF2 folder). Would it be recommended to move the gcf-files as well?
And how do HL/J behave in copying/moving actions (e.g.backup). If I make a copy of the steamapps folder will the linked files/folders be copied as well, will it simply add additional links or none of the above?

[Finaldeath]

You could move GCF files, but it is just more painful to do, since there are so many folders are easier to start with for sure, only Valve games really do GCF stuff, and I don't keep the SP stuff installed so it's not too much (L4D2 and TF2 mainly).

Anything that is a shadow link sure does get copied, just tested it now to be sure. It acts as if the folder was actually there physically; it therefore copies it to a new location (however; I don't know about "move" - I'm not willing to try that on the off chance it moves the entire folder and I have to redo a link, too lazy to try easier if you do so you know what happens for what you want).

[Teatime]

Well, of course there has to be some obstacle
I've created a system image but I'm not able to recover that image to the SSD.
It stops with a error message that the image can't be created. I suspect there are more details, but sadly the window only shows the upper part of the message (well done, MS).

So before I resort to other means: Are there any preparations necessary for the SSD? I did a quickformat and set the SSD to active.

Damn, could it just be easy for once ...  

[Zarf]

Ah, might have to shrink the old windows partition first to something smaller than the ssd size before taking the image.

[Teatime]

Ah, might have to shrink the old windows partition first to something smaller than the ssd size before taking the image.

No, it's not that simple 
Old partition ~50GB (used~35GB), SSD ~120GB, Image ~21GB.

[Zarf]

Hm, i've NFI then. Never actually used windows imaging before. Usually use Acronis, or Ghost myself, but they aren't free.

It's probably possible to clone the partitions over using a linux live cd and gparted.