Maximize SSD Performance with the SSD Tweak Utility

If you’re an early adopter of solid-state drive technology, odds are you’re interested in squeezing every last drop of performance out of your system otherwise you probably wouldn’t have spent $300 on 80GB of storage (or considerably more than that a few months ago).

There’s a wealth of information to be had about SSD tweaking and with a bit of research you’ll find various adjustments for Windows that can help you make the most of your drive. The thing is, to fine tune Windows, you’ll waste a lot of time navigating menus and that’s where SSD Tweak Utility steps in.

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TweakTown’s Solid State Drive Optimization Guide

There is no doubt that SSDs have gained a lot of market share with enthusiasts and even mainstream notebook users, and 2010 is going to be a big year for the technology.

As SSDs continue to gain popularity, the questions about how to properly set them up have become more frequent. To make matters worse, there have been so many sources of bad information published on the web. Even worse, a few companies have sold software that “Enables up to 50 times extra performance from your SSD”. When tested, the software actually slowed down disk performance.

Today we are going to cut through all of the hype and discuss proven methods that will allow you to get the most out of your high performance desktop or notebook. We have a lot to cover today, so let’s get started.

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Fusion-io ioXtreme PCI Express SSD Review

It’s rare we get genuinely excited around here about a product. To be honest, likely we’re spoiled by all the bleeding-edge technology we have the great opportunity to look at week in and week out. Or perhaps it’s just that we’re jaded a bit and have heard one too many marketing pitches, but truth be told it takes a lot to get us fired up about a new product or technology. Sure we can appreciate and will occasionally hand out high praise for a major evolutionary advancement but we honestly can’t remember the last time a product really officially “changed the game” for us, or so to speak.

The first time we looked at Fusion-io’s ioDrive product, we offered the notion that it was a “disruptive technology”, something that had the potential to set the industry on its ear. Of course the ioDrive is an enterprise-class product that showed the significant potential of PCI Express direct-attached SSD storage but its cost structure was such that the mainstream market couldn’t possibly even begin to justify it, no matter what the upside performance looked like. And then of course we heard of Fusion-io’s more consumer-targeted play, the ioXtreme, which debuted at E3 this past summer.

Obviously, E3 is a consumer electronics entertainment venue so it became abundantly clear that Fusion-io wasn’t only productizing their technology for the enterprise space but for the enthusiast, workstation professional and power user as well. Today we’ve got a full deep-dive look at Fusion-io’s ioXtreme PCI Express Solid State Drive. Weighing in at a pricey $899 for 80GB (standard card), it’s definitely still a high ticket item but it’s at least approachable now, for those of you that have the need for speed as they say. Just how much speed? And what about RAIDing a couple of these bad boys together? We aim to quantify that for you, as well as a couple of the product’s early release caveats, in the pages ahead.

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Anatomy Of SSDs

SSDs are perhaps the hottest new hardware development in storage. They offer the promise of very high performance and low power. From the lowly laptop SSD to the ultra high-performance of Fusion-IO and Texas Memory, SSDs have a great deal of buzz about them as witnessed by the number of reviews and tech-focused articles around the web and the print media. As with all technologies there are benefits to them and there are limitations. This goal of this article is to help understand the technology including the benefits and limitations by beginning with the building blocks the NAND Flash chips. To truly understand them you have to start with the underlying technology, floating-gate transistors.

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[Good job. Very well explained.]

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Windows 7 HD and SSD Performance Analyzed

Windows 7 is undoubtedly the most exciting new operating system to come out of Microsoft within the past decade–and with good reason. The user interface is superb, gone are many of the oddball Vista quirks, and the operating system is light and snappy, marking a massive 180 degree shift away from the heaviness and bloat of Vista. Despite the fact that it’s based on many of the same core Vista elements, Windows 7 is a different beast, and should be looked at in a fresh new light.

Today we’re going to look at how various types of disks perform under Windows 7, both of the traditional platter based variety and new solid state disks. We’re not only curious about how disk performance changes between the operating systems, but if Windows 7′s new solid-state specific optimizations and tuning give you even greater performance compared to Vista.


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