[Caliber Mengsk]

Suggestion to turn your boot up time down a little. After having all of your drivers and programs installed, download and run a spiffy little program called BootVis. It is made by Microsoft, but isn't supported anymore. What it does is prioritizes drivers and startup items (including those in the msconfig) to where it loads faster. (I used to have a system that took 2 mins to start up, and it dropped the boot speed to 40 seconds... though, I had been using this system for over two years at the time.)

Hope that helps some!

[g-nome]

To be fair, I edited my original post to reflect quicker times for start up. My original post said 50-60 seconds with Flashpoint....I am consistently getting 40-50 seconds on start up with Flashpoint now (which is a full 30 seconds faster than normal). I have never bested 55 seconds on shutdown but I will report if I get it faster.

No other problems have been noticed or encountered after 1 day's constant use. It has not crashed, nor have any applications been noticeably slower or caused any hesitations or hang-ups. So far, I am pleased and keeping Flashpoint installed.

[devedander]

My results after a few reboot loops:

8GB STEC SSD

Boot time seems about the same, maybe 2 or 3 seconds faster. Usually about 25 seconds to the welcome screen with my name clickable.

Shutdown DRAMATICALLY worse the first few times. Normal shutdown time 40 seconds, first shutdown after flashpoint 1:40. Second shutdown the same. 3rd shutdown only 1 minute. Will see if it gets better.

During normal use things definitely feel snappier, even while the OS is still loading I can pop open IE and browse pages like nothing else is happening.

However what worries me is that my hard drive indicator shows my hard drive is running a LOT for a LONG time after boot. Before flashpoint after clicking my name to login usually about 20-30 seconds and the drive was done working. After flashpoint just sitting at a blank desktop, 1 full minute later its still blinking. When dealing with SSD this is not a good thing.

I am gonna keep trying it for a while (10k writes is still a lot of writes) and see if things change.

[devedander]

Originally Posted by Caliber Mengsk

Suggestion to turn your boot up time down a little. After having all of your drivers and programs installed, download and run a spiffy little program called BootVis. It is made by Microsoft, but isn't supported anymore. What it does is prioritizes drivers and startup items (including those in the msconfig) to where it loads faster. (I used to have a system that took 2 mins to start up, and it dropped the boot speed to 40 seconds... though, I had been using this system for over two years at the time.)

Hope that helps some!

I wouldnt use bootvis on SSDs. Bootvis works by defragging your drive andmoving driver files that load at boot to the fastest sections of your drive. Neither of these should have bearing on SSDs and the significant amount of moving stuff around will probably just eat up your drives life...

[norrisg]

Originally Posted by Caliber Mengsk

New tech is always great, but modifying something to be faster ALWAYS creates more heat if you haven't changed the components at all.

You are mistaken. Improving the efficiency of any system can make it faster and consume less energy at the same time. Take the familar example of a heavily fragmented hard drive: use that heavily and there will be massive, heat generating, head movement and poor performance. Defragment it, and head movement and accompanying heat generation is reduced, and performance improves.

With this tool, which sounds like some form of cache in memory, it is quite possible that many fewer small writes will be performed which would improve performance, slightly reduce heat generation, and decrease the number of erase cycles to which the SSD is subject (erase cycles being the life limiting factor of SSDs - not that you are likely to hit the limit in years of heavy use anyway). Note that I am *not* saying this is how this tool works, just that it could be.

[devedander]

Agreed...

I think the fact that my mini 9 has no fan and is not on fire proves that things can be faster and generate less heat simultaneously. Try this, take the transmission in your car, tack on another gear at the high end (obviously bigger than your current largest gear) you can now go faster at the same RPM thus not generating more heat but indeed going faster.

There is a fine line:

Modifying something to do the same thing but more times in a unit of time should indeed generate more heat.

Modifying to do something in a different way that is more efficient should result in less heat per unit of work (the definition of being more efficient means it must work less to generate more work).

My first guess at how this thing works is that it caches reads and writes to RAM and sends them to the drive in block sized chunks so that you don't write 2kb to a block over and over, but write a huge wad of 2kb files 128kb (or whatever the block size is) at a time or something of the sort...

[Smellyoulater]

If only my mini would show up so I could see for myself if flashpoint works... alas I still have two more weeks till mine ships.

Sorry, what were you saying about speeding up your SSD?

[hgallegos915]

well an update.. I started to get an error that the paging file was to large, I rebooted and now it says


Windows could not start because the following fine is missing or corrupt:


\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

So apparently I need a cd drive to fix this lol :/

It will have to wait until I get my hands on an externa cd drive.

[loooney2ns]

Originally Posted by hgallegos915

well an update.. I started to get an error that the paging file was to large, I rebooted and now it says


Windows could not start because the following fine is missing or corrupt:


\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

So apparently I need a cd drive to fix this lol :/

It will have to wait until I get my hands on an externa cd drive.

You don't need a CD drive. You can do this with a USB drive. Prepare the drive the way this thread explains:
install-win-7-via-usb-in-4-easy-steps-t4292.html

[jmbattle]

devedander, bootvis doesn't just defrag the drive - it also creates small .pf files and a layout.ini that seems to enhance boot speeds and program launches.

I posted a thread in the Windows XP forum querying the benefits of prefetching on SSD drives, however it has yet to garner any response. If you (or anyone else...) have any experience on this topic, I would be most grateful if you could post your findings in the following thread:

benefits-of-prefetch-on-ssd-mini-9--t5769.html

Kind regards,
James
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