Posted on 02/08/2017 5:35:31 PM PST by Bob434
A Quick Question to computer Gurus- Just bought a Samsung 850 pro- I tried to restore an image to it, but Macrium Reflect would freeze at the "Attempting ssd Trim" stage- The stage right before the actual restoration/transfer of files- It wanted to perform this stating that it supposedly was 'good for extending the life of the drive' and said that even if windows had it's own trim operation, that it couldn't perform the same process as Macrium's install trim could- The only way I could do the actual restore, was to turn off the "SSD Trim" option in the advanced panel-
The question I guess is this: The 850 pro is supposed to be rated for 10 years and like a gazillion write cycles or something- I'm assuming that is without any kind of Special trim operations like Macrium claims to do- Will the regular windows trim feature be enough? Would it be better to try to get the macrium's trim process onto disk? Without it, Regular trim operations will be fine won't they to keep the disk optimized?
1 Bonus Question- I also run linux in dual boot- Which i don't think enables trim automatically like windows does- How bad would it be to run linux pretty much constantly on it without trim?
I used the software that came with my drives and had zero problems.
I think you also need to keep some space open for overflow too. At least with windows.
Most importantly for performance you need to have 4x channels open to exploit the speed. I had to use an addon card and put it in the main bus. My M.2 slot was only 2x.
I’ve not been able to get Win10 Anniversary to install yet.
The thing is fast as hell.
Don’t worry about the Macrium Trim. SSDs don’t need the kind of optimization that an actual platter does. If Macrium did not come with your Samsung 850 (it didn’t with mine, I got Samsung Magician), I would just use the manufacturer’s utility software to keep the drive optimized. Defragmenting is mostly pointless. Basically, it uses caches etc. to reduce writes. (SSDs typically can do more reads than writes). Unless you are doing heavy data base stuff with constant writes, I wouldn’t worry about the effect on the life of the drive.
My limited understanding of flash technology: it has a limited number of writes and life (~10 years).
Like spinning media, it can reallocate bad sectors and this is how it manages defects and locations that go bad. It would be a good candidate for RAID.
Advantage: it is faster and no mechanical pieces to wear out or fail. Access is faster, too.
I am running an SSD on my laptop and am hoping that it will last as long as my other laptops. We shall see.
Anyway, say St. Francis's prayer and "accept the things you cannot change." Reflect was failing on the operation, so what else could you do? The quality of Macriums trim being used at cloning is probably questionable in your configuration if it couldn't get it to work in the first place.
[BTW: I use Macrium all the time and love it; I am not putting Macrium down in any way.]
As for Linux, I don't dual boot, but I have several Linux distros running under VM's that I run on my SSDs all the time. For Ubuntu, as least, have a look at some issues and discussion here: http://www.howtogeek.com/176978/ubuntu-doesnt-trim-ssds-by-default-why-not-and-how-to-enable-it-yourself/
I don’t think you need need TRIM when restoring an image to a blank SSD. Once you are using it Windows TRIM will be OK (and should be enabled automatically anyway).
On linux you can manually run or schedule fstrim. `man fstrim’ says that once a week is enough.
LOL
[[Anyway, say St. Francis’s prayer and “accept the things you cannot change.”]]
Oh I can changhe them alright lol- course it’ll muck everything up- but it’ll change for sure :)
I’ll check that link out- thanks-
Yeah the whole trim deal is foreign to me- I can do trim manually in linux, but the problem will be remembering to do it- and I’m not even sure if it really works- I’ll do a trimk, then reboot- and go to do the trim again, and it’s exactly the same size as before I did the trim- (something like 10 gig or so- the trim will say it’s down to 0- but then on reboot it’s right back up there at 10 liek nothign ever happened)
Trim not necessary with SSDs.
Well i didn’t want a complete clone- (i had a coupel of reasons why- mainly because I had isntalled the newer 18.1 linux mint on another HDD, got everythign how I wanted it. and wanted to use that instead of the linx 17.6 on my main hard-drive which i was restoring from- (I wanted the windows off it, but not the older linux)- the software with hte drive I think only did straight clones, not restore partitions- but I’m not sure- Macrium worked perfectly fine once I figure out to turn off the SSD Trim option- but wow was it a bear before that- clocking up the system, both on desktop and from live CD environment-
[[I think you also need to keep some space open for overflow too. At least with windows.
Most importantly for performance you need to have 4x channels open to exploit the speed.]]
Hmm, I’m lost- that is lingo I don’t know- overflow? 4x?
I’m getting about 269 MB per second buffered read speed- My HDD used to get about 140 MB p/s
I’m booting up in about 18 seconds to windows- a little longer into linux- around 26 seconds- HDD used to take almost a minute and half- for windows (To desktop- not to the point where you can actually open programs yet)
Does 270 MB p/s seem slow? I have no idea how fast the reads should be- I know games open lickity split now-v compared to the HDD-
I found this about the importance of TRIM support: http://www.digitalcitizen.life/simple-questions-what-trim-ssds-why-it-useful
I did see a report on ‘life of SSD’s put out by a tech site that ran an experiment on several different brand SDDS- and the results they got were insane- over a petabyte (sp?) which is huge- that was with constant writing to the drive- and it took many years to compelte the test- some drives didn’t last quite that long, and suffered slowdown but only like way after the manufacturer’s estimated length of life for the drives-
I do loads of photo post production processing- which has lots of writes- I beleive- but I don’t think it owudl even come close to what the test was doing per day-
Thanks I’ll check that out-
Flash memory doesn’t need defragmenting. It does however have behaviors that you should be aware of. Each “block” has a finite number of write-cycles in its life. It also uses special checksum (ECC) techniques to validate that what it just read from a given block is ok and if not it is able to repair the data and will rewrite to another block. The system has no idea this is going on, there’s a physical block address to virtual address translation done by the drive. So effectively, data is moved around to “wear level” the writes across blocks, extending the life of all the blocks.
The other aspect of SSD’s, if a block is not read in a long time it will degrade - making sure all blocks are read every once in a while “refreshes” things...doing regular backups will accomplish this.
All of this will give you a longer drive life without corruption. However, be warned, once things go south (blocks reaching limits of write-cycles) the drive will fail rapidly, even though you may not see the signs as it’ll continue to try and “fix” things but will have less and less success as it keeps hitting blocks that have reached the end of their wear-life. So I really recommend doing regular backups, which should be done anyway. In this case, if the drive lasts 10 years, great...if not, well, I’m sure another one will cost a lot less and be higher performance in the future :)
yeah- the price right now isn’t too great- I always seem to get tech stuff fairly early when it’s pretty expensive - unfortunately-
I think the 10 year estimate is for single boot systems- running windows- not sure how it will fare out dual booting with Linux as main os- looking into how to run trim automatically daily- i think it’s set for weekly automatically with the new linuxes- but I’m not sure-
I do regular backups- fairly regular at least- so that shouldn’t be a problem - I’m actually looking into weekly backups as i work with tons of photos processing them- and don’t wish to lose em-
It doesn’t affect the amount of free space on the filesystem because the files have already been deleted. It tells the drive to perform a physical operation of removing data that is not part of the filesystem.
When you delete files the data stays on the drive until the blocks are needed again but on an SSD the blocks have to be emptied before they can be rewritten. The extra step takes up some time and slows down the system when it starts writing to previously-used blocks. Running trim does the deletion step in advance, so files can be written faster if the drive is reusing old blocks.
You will almost certainly not notice any improvement from running trim regularly unless your SSD is very full or you are regularly writing and then deleting a lot of files (a substantial fraction of the drive). Even once a month or less is probably fine unless the drive actually slows down.
The trim is kind of a background cleanup. If you don’t have it your cleanup will eventually start happening when you write and they say your speed will drop over time. Also you shouldn’t optimize like you do with an HDD.
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