Are its partitions properly aligned?

Run the AS SSD Benchmark program and it will display the partition offset. It should be on the line above your SSD's storage capacity. If it is "1024 K - OK" or any value that is cleanly divisible by 4, then your SSD is aligned.

The number of cases where ramdisk shows a visible improvement has significantly reduced with SSDs, but it is still not zero.

It should regain most of its speed on either format or secure erase. But it is also not worth the trouble and your performance loss might not reduce much if your SSD has already achieved 'steady state' performance.

One method would be to start over from scratch. Repartition and reformat the SSD with the Windows 7 installer, confirm that it is aligned and then reinstall everything. Windows 7 and above will always create aligned partitions if they are given the opportunity to repartition the SSD/HDD.

Only reformatting will not fix the problem, as the problem lies with the partitions itself.

An alternative would be to clone your SSD to another HDD/SSD, and then clone back to your SSD but with the partitions aligned. You'll have to find out which cloning software can do this or how to do it. It might be as simple as creating the partitions first and then cloning the contents.

I recommend reinstalling from scratch if you did not do a clean install of Windows 7, like upgraded from Windows XP.

This post has been edited by everling: Jul 28 2013, 09:38 AM

You can use quick format if that option is available. A full format is only needed once in a very long while or when you need to confirm that there are no bad sectors.

As for the 'damage', don't worry. You can theoretically reformat once everyday and still expect the SSD to survive to its third year. If it was quick formatted, it won't even notice.

I hope that you deleted all the partitions and recreated the partitions during installation. This is done before formatting. Otherwise you might still get the same "1 K - BAD" status.

This post has been edited by everling: Jul 28 2013, 03:09 PM

That does look fine, and you're welcome.

On the Windows platform, wasn't TRIM enabled if the SSD was on AHCI and you have a TRIM-supported OS?

Windows 7 and above (including Windows 8) supports TRIM. Windows Vista and below doesn't support TRIM.

I can't confirm if your intended laptop would default to AHCI or not, but I would be surprised if it defaulted to IDE. And even more surprised if you can't manually change it to AHCI. I have a five year old laptop that can be manually switched to AHCI, long before SSDs came around.

It also doesn't matter if it defaults to AHCI or not, as long as you can manually switch it to AHCI.

My current laptop also defaults to AHCI and I certainly would expect any modern laptop to default to AHCI and fully support SSDs. So much so that the very idea hadn't crossed my mind until you brought it up; and hopefully it won't come up again thereafter. But without access to a Lenovo G400S, I can't confirm it.

Reads do not harm SSD life, so this is not an issue.

Writes do exhaust an SSD's limited writes, so this is an issue. However, the probability of normal users exhausting their SSD's write lifespan approaches zero. You need to focus and work hard on destroying your SSD to successfully kill it through write exhaustion before your three year warranty is up. I don't worry about unnecessary writes.

A partition alignment expert already!

Pro-tip: Partition alignment isn't only for SSDs! It also improves write performance by an average of about 5-10% on Advanced Format HDDs, which is roughly all HDDs since January 2011.

Only if "fresh installation" includes wiping the partitions or on unpartitioned SSDs/HDDs. Windows Vista and above only creates aligned partitions if there were no existing partitions. If there exists unaligned partitions, Windows Vista and above will keep these unaligned partitions.

For example, if you default install a Windows XP onto a HDD/SSD, that HDD/SSD's partitions will be unaligned. And then if you clean install Windows Vista/7/8/above on it with format, the partitions will still be unaligned; formatting only isn't enough. You need to delete all the old partitions and then create new ones to get aligned partitions.

Here is the proof.


Default Windows XP installation. Unaligned.
(As a side note, it seems that Windows XP's "diskpart" doesn't report the offset correctly, which can lead to mistaken assumptions.)


Default Windows 7 installation on the same disk. Format is used. Partitions not recreated. Unaligned.

This post has been edited by everling: Aug 2 2013, 07:08 PM

Even on the MSAHCI, it was already good enough. It's practically impossible for an ordinary person to tell the difference between the two without the benchmarks giving out the performance numbers. But it is better now.

This post has been edited by everling: Aug 4 2013, 10:24 AM

You haven't experienced how poisonous SSDs are yet?

You really don't need to wait for a UEFI motherboard. UEFI only takes care of the pre-boot. SSD takes care of the boot and everything else afterwards. Take your SSD poison today!

From 15 seconds down to 0 seconds isn't as unthinkable as coming from > 1 minute down to 20+ seconds...

One, SSDs was a highly lucrative business, which is great for publicly-owned businesses driven by profits. Reducing the price, and thus the profits, will make their shareholders very unhappy. And unhappy shareholders can potentially destabilise their businesses.

Two, both Seagate and WD do not have the infrastructure required to build NAND chips, particularly chips in the 20nm or the 10nm range. They must buy their NAND chips from NAND manufacturers. And there are limited NAND manufacturers in the world, who are already selling everything they can make.

This post has been edited by everling: Aug 6 2013, 02:37 PM

For me, it is not worth the extra two years, especially with how quickly SSDs depreciate in market value.

I bought a cheap 128GB SSD three years ago (RM900~) and I'm glad I didn't buy a more expensive one, compared to today's prices.

When talking about transcoding videos, if they're Blu-ray sources, they only need about 4.5 MB/s transfer rate for real-time transcoding. HDDs will perform fine for such work, even if your CPU is good for 10x real-time transcoding (~45 MB/s).

To actually push the limits using only video transcoding, you're talking about applications that 99.99% of consumers probably won't ever encounter. Like YouTube's server farms.

Compared to ordinary 2.5" SSDs, that reading is poor.