A simple guide for gen1 owners( Apex, solid, core V1/V2) or raid array owners who want to consolidate free space and clean the remaining Nand on the drives. OCZ gen2 drives..Vertex, Agility, Solid2, TURBO owners with FW 1.5 you do not need this.

[Tony]

I know the title is a little silly, but we needed a name for this and it was all I could come up with while trying to relax on a saturday.

The big issues with SSD is a fragmented drive and no block consolidation...I think I have something that may work on ALL SSD's and even in raid.
When OCZ first released the gen1 drives we took quite a lot of flack over the lack of performance...during this time I asked the makers of perfectdisk10 and Diskeeper to come over and promote their product explaining the pro's and cons...

My personal choice for the defrag side of things went to perfectdisk10 who also have now just gained win7 approval from Microsoft.

PD10 has 3 options for defragmentation...SMARTPlacement....Consolidate Free Space...and defrag only.

Consolidate free Space is what were are interested in, although I have just started testing SMARTPlacement also...so things may change.

Overall what we need from a system is data to be written to full blocks and the remaining blocks to work at full speed..I think I can deliver this.

Here is how:

Install Perfect Disk 10, Once installed, you have a few option to set:

1 under the defragmentation tab set



Next navigate to the drive properties option and check the option for Aggressively consolidate free space.



Once you have these set you need to navigate to the AUTO Pilot tab:



Once there hit the Stealth mode button and consider setting the options something like:



This is my basic setup, you may want to tweak settings.

Now with these basic settings all in place all you need do now for the first run is go back to the Defragmentation tab and hit the green go button and do a manual defrag...it takes a while so go make a hot drink.

Please note Perfectdisk10 is safe for use with SSD as is Diskeeper

once this first run is finished you now need to minimise PD10 and if not already on you PC download and unzip AS-Cleaner built by forum member nsa666.

I will attach it to this first post so its easy to find.

Open AS-Cleaner, make sure you check with FF



Hit the clean button, do not worry by the blue bar going to max quickly, it goes up and down while its working. if you want to see how the application is progressing open my computer and refresh the screen to see the drive you are working on fill up.
once AS-Cleaner is done, it will fill the drive completely then delete the file its created.
Be patient, it can take a while.

AS-Clean writes logical 1's across all free blocks on the drive, writing 1's actually erases the blocks so this is much like a TRIM.

So to recap, you have now consolidated free space and reset the remaining blocks with no or invalid data to an erased state.

I have tested this on Gen1 drives as well as Gen2 and both returned speed gains.

I suggest you run this once or twice a week, it has to be executed in the order I outlined here, you have to consolidate the blocks before you reset them.

Now remember I am using non OCZ software here, while both have been tested safe any support should come from the authors of each.

Perfect disk10 is available here: http://www.perfectdisk.com/

Freespacecleaner AS-Clean is available here

http://www.perfectdisk.com/support/kb/821


Some added info from one of the members:

Tony, I was blue screening after installing PD10. I was unable to follow your guide without blue screening with an rdbss.sys error ever time. I found out that PD10 has some compatibility issues with some programs. In my case it was NIS 2010. The fix was easy for me as described in the support article below. The article list some 3rd party programs that may cause system crashes when run with PD10. I thought this may help some others if they experience blue screens after installing PD10.
I will bench tomorrow with IOmeter and share the results after using your guide.

2 last things, this may not be good for raid5 arrays (possibly 6 also) and before you benchmark make sure you close down PD10 and make sure you end all its services running in the background...if you do not then the benchmarks may look terrible.

Edit 18-11-09

In the interest of seeing what our competitors are talking about i went over to the C forum and noticed they are talking about Tony-TRIM.

Now it seems they are a little confused about what this does and why its not a permanent fix etc....so let me explain.

PD10 and Diskeeper/Hyperfast are SSD safe, just email them if you are unsure, AS-Clean was modified to write FF as on MLC nand filling all blocks with FF (1's) is actually Erase.

So...what you are doing with Tony-TRIM is erasing all data on free or marked deleted blocks so they do not have the erase before write speed penalty. To help the drive free up space you need to consolidate free space which will increase write cycles to the drive much like GC FW does...Then you run AS-Clean to reset all those now free blocks. So TT is more like manual GC than TRIM really.

You will get an instant speed up by doing this...BUT you have to make it part of your SSD weekly/monthly care regime for it to be most effective.

So...you run Tony TRIM and after a week the drive slows down again...why?

Windows writes randomly with often tiny fragments of data, when a small fragment hits a block it gets written to it, but in order for that block to see another write it has to erase first...hence the drives slows down once all free clean blocks have been used. This is why regular maintenance helps keep drives fast

I personally feel for those using drives or raid with no TRIM or GC Tony-TRIM is a real bonus, make it part of a weekly care program and the system will not see a slow down.
i use it on an old gen1 Apex in this laptop, the drive had utterly horrid performance and stuttered like crazy...now i'm working near stutter free and ATTO reports speeds that are within 95% of what the drive was like when it was new...that really is not that bad

So if you happen to go to the C forum, make sure to tell them I updated my guide to explain a little more why TT helps but it has limitations etc.

[HDCHOPPER]

Exellent Iam glad to see Perfect Disk 10 staying on the ball !
big kidos for the CEO of PD10 ...

[m.oreilly]

hehe, it works. i believe we have a winner. tony, thanks again for putting up the guide. much appreciated