What is a solid-state drive? How do you use it?

What is a solid-state drive? How do you use it?

Correct use of solid-state hard disk method

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In general, the proper use of solid-state drives is nothing more than 4K alignment and the ability to turn on the hard drive AHCI. In addition there are a few people will not notice the details, the previous article has not been detailed with you, the following article to explain in detail under the solid state hard drive how to use, want to improve the performance of solid state HDD rookie friends will see OH.

Lifting solid State hard disk performance first: Solid state hard Drive 4K alignment

In general, if the SSD 4K is not aligned, the hard drive read speed is very large, SSD hard drive the biggest advantage is to have a traditional hard disk twice times or even higher stored in reading data, if not 4K alignment, its speed advantage can not be fully reflected. about how to set the SSD 4K alignment, there are many articles before, such as we can use the hard disk partition tool Diskgen software (at least 3.7 version above) on the solid-state hard disk 4K alignment, as shown in the following figure, only need to check the alignment item can be, the following figure:

4K alignment of solid-state hard disk partitions using the Diskgen hard disk partitioning tool

Lifting solid State Hard disk performance second: Turn on hard drive AHCI feature

Found that a lot of friends complain about the solid-state hard drive 4K alignment, performance or theoretical speed difference is very large, this is mainly because the AHCI feature may not be turned on. We know that by turning on the AHCI mode of the hard drive, you can improve the performance of solid-state drives to some extent. For now, most desktop computers default to IDE mode, and the hard drive AHCI mode needs to go into the BIOS setting to open. Most of the notebooks are already using AHCI mode by default.

BIOS to enable AHCI functionality

The approximate steps to enter the BIOS to turn on the hard drive AHCI mode are: Reboot the computer, press Del to enter the BIOS when starting the computer, select Devices→ata drives Setup→configure SATA as→ahci in turn, Finally press F10 to save and exit the BIOS as shown in the figure above.

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The ability to open AHCI in the BIOS is a required operation for solid-state drive optimization, when the solid-state hard drive can support NCQ, when the queue depth (QD) increases, performance will increase at a geometric level, while the IDE does not support NCQ, queue depth increase performance will not be too much change, Let's take a look at a set of test data to see if the AHCI feature is turned on and the solid performance speed is compared without the AHCI feature turned on.

IDE mode (AHCI feature not turned on)

Turn on AHCI capabilities read speed for SSD drives

As shown in the above illustration, we can find that the effect of not opening AHCI feature and opening AHCI function on solid-state hard disk read speed is very large, and it can effectively improve the performance of SSD by opening AHCI function. Also found that some friends of the computer in the BIOS to open the AHCI function, easy to cause the computer blue screen panic, encountered such a problem friends can be modified to solve the registry, please read: Win7 open Achi function blue screen solution.

Lifting solid State Hard drive performance third: Other project optimization

The most effective upgrading of solid-state hard disk performance in addition to the above two basic points of knowledge, there are some other areas of greater impact, such as the motherboard to open the energy-saving function and mistakenly connected to the third party SATA3 interface, etc. will have a greater impact on the speed of solid-state drives, under the introduction below respectively.

1 The motherboard opens the energy saving mode causes the solid state drive performance to drop

The power saving function of the motherboard is usually opened, CPU frequency will be reduced, which will also lead to the performance of solid-state drives down, because the CPU frequency is reduced by 10% in energy saving, the delivery of instructions will be 10% slower, so the theoretical SSD performance will be reduced by 10%, so if you want to play the best performance of solid state drives, Motherboard Please do not open energy saving mode.

Here we use a 240GB solid state drive as a test, and by contrast we can see that the power-saving mode on the motherboard will have a significant impact on the performance of solid-state drives, as shown below:

Motherboard energy-saving switch full shutdown of solid-state hard drive read speed

Motherboard energy-saving switch full-state hard drive Read speed

Solid state Drive speed after C1E and EIST on motherboard

As shown in the above test results, we can clearly see that if the motherboard turned on the energy-saving features, then the performance of solid-state drives is also very significant impact. Now the solid-state hard disk performance is very high speed, 4K QD1 arbitrary can be thousands of. In the high load running Division software (as SSD Benchmark, Crystal Disk mark, etc.) to test the ultimate speed of SSD, when the performance of 10% weakened, the result is naturally very "cup". And our mechanical hard drive 4K ioPS is still between 70-150, therefore, a friend using a mechanical hard drive will naturally not feel the impact of energy saving on its performance (the system can fully meet its needs) and in order to enable SSD to play its full strength, we recommend that the motherboard's energy-saving settings (such as AMD's CNQ, Intel's C1E, EiST, etc.) shutdown to minimize the impact of energy-saving technologies on SSD performance.

2 incorrect access to third party SATA3 interface affects performance

Now many mainstream motherboards support the SATA3.0 interface, such as Intel's B75 above motherboards and AMD's A75 above motherboards have SATA3.0 interface, which is also very important for solid-state drives, if we choose the motherboard does not support the SATA3.0 interface ( such as H61 or A55 the following motherboard does not contain a SATA3.0 interface), then the impact on solid-state hard disk performance. On the other hand, the third party SATA3 interface program test results are almost lost to the primary SATA3, especially in the starting applications speed is a good 20mb/s. (Starting applications: use IE to open PCMark 7 Specification 1.0 document waiting for a fully responsive hard drive operation record. Of these, 85% were randomly read. Thus leading to a significant drop in scores, the adoption of a Third-party SATA3 chip scheme greatly reduces the random speed, resulting in a sharp decline in performance.

Third-party SATA3 interface Solid State Drive performance

Intel now has a majority of high-end chips (H67, P67, Z68) with only 2 native SATA3 interface, but we can see some motherboards have 4 SATA3 interface, so there are 2 third-party chips for the SATA3 interface, However, the SATA3 interfaces provided by the third party have high latency and technical limitations, which are often far worse than the native SATA3 interface in performance.

Motherboard Native SATA3 interface

And when you encounter a motherboard with more than 2 SATA3 interfaces, we need to look at the motherboard specification, which clearly illustrates the location of the native and third party SATA3 interfaces, so that users do not connect to the wrong interface and result in significant performance degradation.

3 cannot use large test software to test solid State drive

Many friends buy solid state hard drives are very excited, will want to test the speed of solid-state drive performance, but in fact, we often use some such as crystal disk mark and other violent run test software, itself will have a certain impact on solid-state drives, mainly in, like Crsytal disk A test like Mark produces a lot of junk files, the following diagram defaults to test 5 times, the test model data size is 1000MB, the default model is all random data, that is, one test will be generated: 4 (4 test projects, SEQ, 512K, 4K, 4kqd32) *5 (5 test) *1000 ( Test model size) =20000MB, several times down, a lot of garbage random uncompressed data will fill the entire SSD, and this time garbage collection cleaning up a lot of useless data will occupy a large amount of master performance, not only affect write performance, but also affect read performance. (At this point, the user will be able to dance when using the computer, due to the large performance of the master control.) and writes large amounts of data, it can also seriously affect SSD NAND life.

Avoid brute force test on solid-state drives

So if you really want to test the hard disk can be directly in the hard copy data to see the effect, there is no need to use this kind of brute force software testing, in addition to testing, it is recommended to use some relatively small models, such as using as SSD benchmark test software for generating small capacity of 2G data test, 1G read, 1G write, It can also effectively avoid the production of excessive hard disk garbage, which affects the performance of solid-state hard disk.

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