[captpackrat]

NTFS uses journaling; every time you change something on the drive, it first makes a journal entry, then after the data has written out successfully, it marks it as finished. That way if the machine crashes in the middle of a write, it can roll back any changes.

FAT32 doesn't use journaling, so it will be much faster.

Same goes for ext3 and ext2 for Ubuntu users. The latter will be faster because it doesn't do journaling.

A non-journaling file system will also extend the lifespan of the drive, since you're making fewer writes.

[tjweed]

Yes. The 64gb MDSSD64MLC-D is painfully slow even formatted FAT32. Best to await the faster version. Question please: would formatting it as two 32gb FAT32 partitions speed it up or best to drop back to the original 16gb and await? Thanks.

[earlyadopter]

Well, here is an update.

I've just removed the 64GB SDD and put the original 16GB back in.

The 'old style' 64GB drive was just too slow.

Here are examples. I could not install DirectX 9.0C so that I could play a game requiring it... the download process always, always timed out, no matter if I was using the A/B/G card or an ethernet cable. Startup took about 5 minutes to get to the point where I could click the 'start' button and get any response at all. Ehenever I went to deinstall software, the "working" screen would just sit there for at least twominutes before starting to work the drive for removal.

So, yeah, the advertising for the 64GB drive from where I bought was, essentially, false. This drive takes ten times as long to do anything that you could do on the original drive. It may be faster on FAT32, and I will report on that eventually.

When I get up the energy, I will reformat the drive using FAT32 partitions... I'm thinking 8GB for the OS, 16GB for World of Warcraft, and then two 15GB partitions for other applications and data files.

This was a thoroughly depressing experience, not to mention being out $170-$180 for the card and shipping. There is NO WAY that I will buy the "faster" 64GB card until I've heard from people on this forum with their experiences installing to it and then using it for applications.

[tjweed]

After trying one large 64gb FAT32 partition, two FAT32 partitions of 32gb each both with fresh installs implementing all suggestions posted to speed up XP, as well as restoring a disk image of the original Dell drive, ... Conclusion: the MDSSD64MLC-D does not live up to its previously advertised specifications: "This part is as fast as or faster than the stock SSD in your Inspiron Mini 9." with "Read/Write Speed: 70/40". It is unusable with incessant "hangs".
MDD My Digital Discount in no way wants to take responsibility for purchasing a load of useless, untested SSD's and hence will not accept a trade-in plus $ after 10 days for the supposedly faster but as yet unconfirmed RunCore model.
Given this false and misleading advertising coupled with sticking their clients with crap drives: don't bother wasting your money. If the RunCore is indeed decent I will be purchasing it anywhere but MDD.