SSD in a MicroA1. Is it worth it?

Hi Guys.

I was thinking of trying this out, have a small SSD drive. I am aware that I will need to buy a an IDE to SATA Converter for the SSD. But before I even bother, as I said above, would it be worth it - Heck would it even work??

Cheers

@Mikey_C

Wouldn't you lose the speed gained from the ssd to the bottleneck that is the converter?

@Raziel

I dunno, that's why I'm asking!!

I have that setup: works like a charm!

And it's definately faster than the IDE-drive I just to have (which I might add was a bit old). But the biggest advantage for me was the physical size of the drive, and it's silence.

it is a good thing but instead using a converter from ide to sata or viceversa just buy a sil3114 pci card that works with pci (I used it when I had the micro) and it is faster than using the converter and you can take full advantage of ssd disk

@Mikey_C

Don't forget to check the specs of the drive you have, some are optimised for reading (computer use: booting, gaming etc.) others for writing (camera use: video, cctv etc.) so if yours was originally disigned for a video camera it won't be as good in a computer.

I'm tempted to try a hybrid drive which automagically moves the files you use most often to the SSD section so in theory you could add a 'wait 30; reboot' to user-startup and leave the machine rebooting overnight and all the files needed for a fastest possible boot should be moved onto the SSD

@Severin

Its a generic SSD Drive for a Laptop.

Anyone here got any idea how its configured? Same as a standard drive?

Cheers folks

When you install the drive, change heads and sectors per track so that one cylinder has 2048 sectors. Then all your partitions will automatically be aligned to megabyte boundaries.

When creating partitions, change file system block size to 4096 so that file system clusters are aligned to SSD pages. (Note that only FFS supports block sizes other than 512. If you use another file system, leave it at 512.)

Leave a certain percentage at the end of the drive empty, then the drive can use this space as spare sectors for its over-provisioning and things like that.

DO NOT FORMAT PARTITIONS!! Always use quick format. If you do normal format, the drive will be unable to do its garbage collection and such because all sectors have been written to already. GC and automatic TRIM need sectors which have not been written to.

If you still have the choice, buy one which is advertised with automatic TRIM, garbage collection and all these features, because there is no support in AmigaOS for SSDs. The drive has to do all the work on its own.

@thomas

How do you change "Heads" or any other "Physical Data" with Media Toolbox?

I tried and it won't let me, the information displayed in MT's RDB/disk geometry window is just that, information, with no means to be edited.

Also, i've got Cylinders, Secors, Heads and Blocks per cylinder, Total cylinders, Total sectors and Block size, but i don't find any "Secotrs per track".

Regarding block sizes, i'm using SFS with 4096 and it works like a charm, what would be the advantage of using a block size of 512 other than it "might" be slower on SSD's?

@Raziel

Quote:

No idea. I thought they were editable in expert mode. HDToolbox allows to edtit them.

They are not physical after all. There are no heads, tracks and cylinders in an SSD and even a harddrive does not allow access to this internal geometry data.


Quote:

'Cylinders' is the same as 'Total Cylinders'.

'Sectors' is the same as 'Sectors per Track'.

'Heads' is the same as 'Tracks per Cylinder'.

'Blocks per Cylinder' is just the result of multiplying Sectors and Heads. 'Block' is used as a different word for 'Sector' in this context.

'Total number of Sectors' is just the result of multiplying 'Sectors per Cylinder' by 'Total Cylinders'.


Quote:

The documentation says that SFS does not support anything but 512. That it "works like a charm" does not mean that it is safe.

@thomas

Quote:
Nope, the only thing editable in Expert is the following:

RDBBlocksLo
RDBBlocksHi
HighRDSBlock
First Usable cylinder
Last Usable cylinder
Blocks per cylinder
Autopark seconds

@Raziel

Quote:

Well, if I've understood all of the above correctly, you *CAN* set "Blocks per cylinder" to 2048 very easy then.

Well, it looks like I'm going to be a guinea pig on this one!!!

Will let you know how I get on...

@Mikey_C

If you're getting an SSD for your uA1 make sure you use it regularly as according to my brother SSDs lose the data that's stored on them if they're left without power for too long (as in for a few months or longer).

Also you should probably check the SMART data every once in a while to make sure that it's OK.

I got a new PS3 (the one before got RLOD) along with a 120GB Kingston SSD a little over two years ago and it just suddenly died on me a week ago losing all my data (saved games and whatever else I had stored on it). At least the warranty was for three years so I guess they will send me a replacement SSD for the broken one if nothing else.

@salass00

ya I've heard similar stories about SSD's and I'll happily stick to my tried and tested HD's and religiously backup

@Gazelle

You are right, albeit it's not very easy to change those if you've never done it before.

I managed to change it to make it use 2048...the SSD does run a little faster...

Thanks