mind F*cked

I’d like to start off my blog with a recent purchase I made. I’m sure most of you on the cutting edge of technology have heard of this new drive called the Solid State Drive. It’s the latest in hard drive technology with some Solid State Drive’s (SSDs) boasting speeds of up to 300 Mb/s read and write. What does this mean to the average consumer? Faster file-transfers, boot-up times, and program loads.

There are a plethora of SSDs flooding the market now and each one claims to be more advanced than the other. Trying to find the right one is like trying to find the one prostitute that won’t give you a STD. Through my research, I have determined that there are two crucial kinds of SSDs to decide between: Multi-Level Cell or Single Level Cell SSDs. This site is very informative in the difference between these two drives.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=223173

For the lazy people out there, I did the research for you. Multi-level Cell (MLC) drives promises faster read speeds and that’s about it. Single-level Cell (SLC) drives have faster write-speeds and a longer life-span. The read and write speed doesn’t matter as much as the life-span. There is no hard evidence on the exact life-span of a MLC drive, while a SLC drive is meant to outlast the hardware it was made for. SLC is said to last around 50 years while MLC is much shorter; think of it this way, SLC drives have around 100,000 life cycles while MLC drives have only around 1,000 to 10,000 life cycles. Of course, SLC drives cost a fair amount more than MLC drives.

One of the main problems right now for SSD drives is its write speed for small files of the kilobyte size. The speed dramatically decreases from say 70Mb/s to 1Mb/s when writing these smaller files; oh yea, this also causes stuttering in the SSD drives. This is equivalent of having a hot ass girlfriend with the clap. She’s hot and you want to keep her around, then again, you don’t want to get the clap from her. Now, there are several “fixes” for this problem online. Not your girlfriend with the disease, but for the SSD. One of the ways to fix it is through the alignment of the drives before installation of the operating system; this sounds complicated and usually is unless you are versed in the inner workings of computer-software-magic. Yet, the great people at OCZ Forums have given step-by-step instructions on how to set up your drive. They can be found at:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=186

A more direct link for Windows Vista/XP installation is at:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showpost.php?p=333467&postcount=6

Another fair solution I have found is a program called Managed Flash Technology by Easy Co. This software claims to increase speeds of SSD drives by up to 50x’s. To my surprise, this number wasn’t just randomly thrown up; through benchmarking of my own SSD, my write speed for 4kb files have went from around 1Mb/s to up to 30-40 Mb/s. Another claim they make is that “MFT increases the write-life of Flash Disks more than 50-fold.” This is a bold claim, and if true, could make MLC SSDs viable to compete with SLC drives. I strongly suggest anyone interested in SSD drives to check out MFT. Their website is:

http://www.easyco.com/mft/index.htm

Ill add some more info later on how to install MFT on your system or align your SSD.