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About LinkBacksRead more.Microsoft has provided a Q&A for solid state drives in Windows 7, detailing a number of OS-specific enhancements.
Read more.Microsoft has provided a Q&A for solid state drives in Windows 7, detailing a number of OS-specific enhancements.
Interesting info in the comments under the blog about SSD RAIDs.
Seems the SSD features will work if you RAID controller tells the OS it's disk are zero speed.....now I am going to have to do some digging to find out where to check that
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I still don't understand why an Operating System needs to be aware that much of the underlying disk structure.
An SSD's controller should make it behave in an appropriate way, and hide the rest of the goings on.
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The OS isn't enhancing the drive, its optimising itself to perform better with an SSD.
There are certain features in the OS that become obsolete with an SSD due to its very fast access, things like Indexing which helps speed up searches, implemented because of how sluggish spindle drives can be in that respect.
Indexing is beneficial irrespective of the storage architecture. It's a time-order complexity issue, not a disk speed issue.Originally Posted by LuckyNV
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How does the RAID controller even tell whether a drive is a disk or SSD, much less pass on that information to Windows?
I could be wrong, but as far as I know, only the firmware on the drive itself is aware of what type it is. The only thing the RAID controller and/or OS knows is that it's a "SATA device".
Am I right or wrong?
wouldn't think the raid controller needed to do any of that, i mean, it knows the physical makeup of the drive but i wouldn't have thought it had to act on it in any way... as long as the OS knows its all good?
Vodka
SSD's are detected by reporting a rotational speed of 0, if the RAID controller passes this information along to Windows 7 the drives will be treated as SSD drives by Windows. So I guess it depends on the RAID card being used and the information provided to Windows by the card.
If the RAID card's have problems with not sending this information Microsoft should allow some configuration option to set the drives as SSD devices but they don't really go into detail on the subject.
So maybe you could have the trim command sent to all your drives, SSD or not, and if not supported they will just ignore it.
Interesting blog post, I'm suprised to read that TRIM was supported in the beta of Windows 7 aswell as the RC, I thought it would be added with the retail release or maybe even in SP1. Keeping the page file on the SSD being recommended is also a suprise, I have my page file disabled anyway.
It'll be interesting to see how long it takes manufacturers to enable support for the command and which manufacturers don't bother adding support or try to get their customers to upgrade to a newer drive.
Leaving the page file enabled is not a surprise because you're NOT meant to disable it, even if you have a SSD or lots of RAM.
I was refering to moving the page file over to another HDD if you have one to reduce wear, which is what most SSD manufacturers recommend. While disabling the page file isn't recommended I've had no problems with it disabled and have been running my PC this way for over a year.
There is actually a fair bit of information passed between the disk and controller. At the heart of this you have CHS information (Cylinders, Heads and Sectors). In the old days you'd have to set this manually, and doing it wrong could mean anything from non working hardware, to corruption.
This doesn't even take into account that the controller could just read the drive firmware directly if it really wanted to (although this is long winded and rather pointless - it can be done).
There are also a number of other technologies that expose themselves to the controller like NCQ. If the drive didn't pass this information to the controller, they wouldn't work.
These days things like CHS information is done without the user ever seeing it. You plug the driver in, and it works.
So as far as the firmware only knowing what the disk really is - hell no, the controller and the disk pass a lot more information than you realise. If the controller uses this though purely depends on the device
And the OS can of course override all this and take complete control and do everything itself.So as far as the firmware only knowing what the disk really is - hell no, the controller and the disk pass a lot more information than you realise. If the controller uses this though purely depends on the device
When disks moved to 48bit addressing to get over the 137GB limit of 32bit addressing, you needed a controller that knew about 48bit addressing..... or just just a new Linux kernel that could deal with it all itself regardless of what the BIOS or controller thought it was doing
lol. Welcome everyone to Linux in a Win7 thread. ;-)
Give it a few - OSX will be along shortly too.
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