data bottleneck using SSD in notebook ??

pdc_irl

I'm doing some testing with a DELL D630 latitude system, I have replaced the provided SATA drive with a new Samsung 64Gb SSD drive (MLC type) and have done a clean XPSP3 install. Machine has a 2.4Ghz Core2 Duo CPU, 4Gb of RAM(667Mhz) installed and is patched up to the latest drivers/service packs, and has McAfee anti-virus 8.7 and HIPS v7.

What I've noticed is that when you login to the machine, it appears to hang for about a minute or two, then it flys along. The XP boot up takes no time at all, about 10-15 seconds

Having carried out some performance monitoring it appears, that after logging into XP, all the programs at startup are trying to load all at once.. so the disk queue goes through the roof, but when it does process the backlog, it tears along nicely. The other thing I noticed in the processes list (task manager), is that when the machine hangs, you see about a half-dozen processes appear all showing 40-50% CPU use.

I'm guessing it's the motherboard databus just can't handle the volume of data hitting it at once. (I'd seen similar occur at a training course, a few years ago in the early days of VMware, when the course trainer tried to run an active directory domain controller, exchange 5.5 & exchange 2003 from a cheapo desktop. The machine bombed when he tried an exchange migration).

I'd be interested to know if anyone else has seen a similar situation? Is there a way to prevent this happening? In vista you can delay services from starting immediately, but this functionalty isn't with XP, so I'm guessing it might be some registry tweaking??

Any suggestions would be appreciated

hobochris

I would also check your boot wait time. tweaking it may help your start up time.

pdc_irl

thanks for the response, are you referring to the system start up? (ie. the 30 second wait period before XP starts?)

If so, the issue is not when the machine starts up, but after XP loads and you login to the OS. Once the username and password is entered into XP, the OS begins the process of starting up services, this is the point at which I'm getting the bottle-neck.

Overheal

There are a few freeware programs out there (none that ive tried) that throttle your startup, and pretty much form an orderly stack so only one thing at a time is allowed to finish loading instead of 40 things trying to load at once.

Slutmonkey57b

Non-intel or indilix controlled MLC SSD's have issues with stuttering and pausing, this is most likely what it is. Unless it's a SATA-150 controller, you shouldn't have throughput issues.

AlmightyCushion

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

Non-intel or indilix controlled MLC SSD's have issues with stuttering and pausing, this is most likely what it is. Unless it's a SATA-150 controller, you shouldn't have throughput issues.

I thought it was just drives with the j micron controller that had this stuttering problem. The samsung drives shouldn't have a problem with stuttering at all.

Slutmonkey57b

afaik Samsung's SLC drives have no stuttering problems. The jMicron is the worst of the lot but there's no MLC drive that doesn't have some sort of performance issue with its controller, whether that's performance drop-off, stuttering, or lack of trim/NCQ/cache. Time to dig through Anand's 500 page SSD article again maybe.

pdc_irl

thanks for the feedback guys, much appreciated. I don't think its an SATA-150 controller. I've checked the dell site and currently having a look through the intel site for details, but alas no joy as yet.

The controller in the latitudes is an Intel ICH8M Ultra ATA storage controller, which I think is at best ATA-100, according to pg194 of this doc; <http://www.intel.com/assets/pdf/datasheet/313056.pdf&gt;

(if this is the right info )

AlmightyCushion

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

afaik Samsung's SLC drives have no stuttering problems. The jMicron is the worst of the lot but there's no MLC drive that doesn't have some sort of performance issue with its controller, whether that's performance drop-off, stuttering, or lack of trim/NCQ/cache. Time to dig through Anand's 500 page SSD article again maybe.

Well the performance drop happens with every ssd regardless of whether it's mlc or slc. The ocz vertex doesn't seem to suffer from stuttering and it will supposedly support trim under windows 7. I pretty tempted to get myself a 128GB version.

pdc_irl

I'm awaiting delivery of a couple more samsung SSD's, I think my next step is to try another same spec Dell D630, but this time put vista onto it and try setting the startup some of the services to 'automatic delayed start' in order to see if this changes the boot up.

As a matter of interest aren't the 'ocz vertex' drives, also using the samsung controller? Would these be a different to the controllers used by the samsun drives?

Slutmonkey57b

No, the vertex drives use a controller by Indilinx (a company set up by ex-samsung people).