Difference between SSD and HD Win 7 install?

[snubby]

Is there any difference between how Windows 7 installs to an SSD compared to how it installs to a regular hard drive? As in, if I had a 120GB SSD and a 120GB hard drive partition, and installed Windows 7 to each of them, would they be different? I plan to install Windows 7 on a hard drive (~120GB partition) and migrate it to an SSD later, but would this give something different to an install directly on to an SSD?

Come to that, is there any difference to how it installs to 2TB drives to cope with the sector count?

[Funkstar]

No, it doesn't make a difference at all.

[snubby]

Cool, thanks. I'd been tempted by all the 64GB SSD offers, but of all the things I want my NAS box to have, an SSD boot drive is the thing that will improve most by delaying buying.

[peterb]

Well an SSD boot drive will make it boot fast, but if it is running 24x7 it won't be booted very often. However SSDs are lower power, but still taking more than using a partition on your conventional data storage drive.

And I'm not sure I'd be using Windows 7 as an operating system for NAS. It is an expensive piece of software to use for a function it really isn't designed to d. You would probably be better off with a Microsoft home server system, or a linux distribution.

[snubby]

I have a technet subscription, so I was using Windows 7 as an example of a recent Microsoft OS. Peterb, you're right, I probably will end up using 2008 R2 with Linux and Win 7 VMs. By placing the OS and the VMs on an SSD, with the NAS-shared storage on a 2TB drive normally spun down, I hope I can get it quieter more of the time, and possibly lower idle power too. The performance improvement will be handy, but as you say it doesn't make a lot of difference for a server running 24x7 with a small set of services always running.

[matty-hodgson]

You'll need Windows 7 if you want TRIM.

[peterb]

You'll need Windows 7 if you want TRIM.

Not true.

Linux kernel 2.6.33 onwards (released early this year) supports the trim function, and so does Windows server 2008 RC2 (released late last year). However, as I said in my previous post, an SSD may not be the most cost effective solution for a NAS that is running 24x7

I have a technet subscription, so I was using Windows 7 as an example of a recent Microsoft OS. Peterb, you're right, I probably will end up using 2008 R2 with Linux and Win 7 VMs. By placing the OS and the VMs on an SSD, with the NAS-shared storage on a 2TB drive normally spun down, I hope I can get it quieter more of the time, and possibly lower idle power too. The performance improvement will be handy, but as you say it doesn't make a lot of difference for a server running 24x7 with a small set of services always running.

Yes, that would work, although using a VM seems to add a level of complexity for not much benefit - why not just use a native Linux OS?

As for noise, in my experience most noise comes from the cooling fans. You don't need a lot of grunt for a file server. I have one using a fanless mini-itx board (well - the board is fanless, there is a 40mm fan on the case - a larger case and I could probably do without it). I run that from a 90W pico psu and use a couple of 2.52 drives and a hardware RAID controller. It acts as a file, web and mail server.

I have built another (for someone) using two 1.5Tb drives, using mdadm as a RAID controller in RAID one, using a 1.8GHz Mini-itx board. That also ran off a 160W pico PSU (fanless) until I added a tape drive! The pico PSU ran out of puff at that point! The board wasn't fanless though and because it was mounted in a cabinet, I added case fans which added to the noise..

When I come to replace my present set up (or upgrade it) I will probably go for mdadm, and make a decision about drives and cases nearer the time (it won't be for a couple of years).

My own system is backed up using DUMP over the LAN to another machine with a tape drive installed.

I do like the idea of an SSD solely for the OS and spinning down the data drives when not needed - and for a local network NAS that is probably worthwhile. |However it is doing other functions, I think I'd rather keep the disks spinning than repeatedly cycling the drive motors.

[Funkstar]

Matty probably meant you'll need W7 for TRIM if you want any version of Windows

[snubby]

According to wikipedia, Windows Server 2008 R2 also supports TRIM too. Not surprising really, as it's a close sibling of Windows 7.

[peterb]

According to wikipedia, Windows Server 2008 R2 also supports TRIM too. Not surprising really, as it's a close sibling of Windows 7.

Yes (as I posted in an update - but you beat me to it! )

[mikerr]

The question is, does W7 create partitions on 4k boundaries?
It does if installed on an SSD, not sure if it does on standard HDDs

XP didn't, and that leads to a big performance drop in SSDs.
Imaging a drive from one to another doesn't fix this either.

[Agent]

2 things to keep in mind:

If taking the data from the HD to SSD, the TRIM flag will not be set (as a normal HD doesn't support it!). You can find if this needs changing through "fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify" at the command prompt.

Allignment. If you simply mirror the HD image to the SSD with partitions, you might end up with an unalligned drive (bad bad bad!). The solution is to format the drive under the Windows 7 install disk (you only need to get to the HD formatting part) and then image the DATA only over to the drive, writing to the partition you made.

And make sure you grav http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...-Tweak-Utility for easy changing of other Windows settings for SSDs

[BobF64]

No, it doesn't make a difference at all.

Whilst the actual installed files arent different, I believe that Windows 7 configures some settings slightly differently if you install to an SSD, and its one it recognises as an SSD.

The question is, does W7 create partitions on 4k boundaries?
It does if installed on an SSD, not sure if it does on standard HDDs

W7 supports the "Advanced" disk format, that is the 4k sector sizes on some new HDDs, but I dont know if it does this for SSDs or not, I would imagine it would sensibly do so, but you never know sometimes.

[mikerr]

W7 supports the "Advanced" disk format, that is the 4k sector sizes on some new HDDs, but I dont know if it does this for SSDs or not, I would imagine it would sensibly do so, but you never know sometimes.

4k sectors are something different (for 2TB drives & above)
alignment is what's important for SSDs

[snubby]

2 things to keep in mind:

If taking the data from the HD to SSD, the TRIM flag will not be set (as a normal HD doesn't support it!). You can find if this needs changing through "fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify" at the command prompt.

Allignment. If you simply mirror the HD image to the SSD with partitions, you might end up with an unalligned drive (bad bad bad!). The solution is to format the drive under the Windows 7 install disk (you only need to get to the HD formatting part) and then image the DATA only over to the drive, writing to the partition you made.

And make sure you grav http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...-Tweak-Utility for easy changing of other Windows settings for SSDs

Cool, that's the kind of thing I was trying to ask. Thanks for that, Agent!

So if I start off installing to a partition on a 2TB disk:
- the partition will be aligned to 4k sectors
- files in the partition will be aligned to 4k sectors
- Windows will not have set options for an SSD

If I simply image the partition and dump it to an SSD, the partition will still be aligned to 4k sectors, which may or may not be aligned correctly for the SSD. If I do as Agent says and at least partition the disk under the Windows installer before writing the image to that ready-made partition, it will definitely be aligned to the SSD's preferred alignment. The files will still only be 4K aligned, so presumably it's still possible to end up with many misaligned reads and writes.

Is that true, or does Windows try to allocate files on SSD erase-block boundaries? If it doesn't, I can't see how aligning the partition anything more than 4k helps.

[matty-hodgson]

Oh, my bad. I thought that Windows 7 was the only OS to support TRIM. If Server 2008 supports it then awesome .

Mac OSX support of TRIM is the only thing holding me off putting one of these 80GBs in it tbh.