WEI score went down for my SSD?

I have a Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB Solid State Drive. when I first put the computer together and ran the WEI I got a 7.9 for this drive. Just recently I decided to re-run the assessment and the score dropped to 7.5. I decided to try re-installing the Marvell SATA 6 GB/s Controller driver and the score actually increased to 7.8. I assume some viruses actually got in and corrupted the drivers, since I had a ton of viruses when I scanned. Now I'm just concerned why it's stuck at 7.8 and not 7.9. I know that it's a very small difference and kind of silly to rely on WEI, but it still bothers me that this drive used to get a 7.9 score. Are there any other drivers that could have been corrupted that would affect the Disk score? There are no more viruses on this computer, I scanned with a few different ones, like Malware-Bytes and Avira, and it removed all of them.

I know a .1 difference is very small, but I don't like the fact that it's lower than what I originally had, even if I can't really notice a performance decrease. I really wish I could figure out why it's not receiving the 7.9 score anymore.

Your virus scanners may have removed the viruses from your computer but they cannot undo the damage that the virus has done. If your hand gets a bacteria or infection and needs to be amputated, the anti-biotic you take or disinfectant may kill the bacteria or infection but your hand cannot be UN-amputated and put back. Same goes for viruses. More over, just because Malware-Bytes and Avira scanned doesn't mean anything, you might still have plenty of viruses.

How full is the drive? SSDs tend to slow down a bit when they are near to full.

Honestly though, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Your drive is fine - it still outscores (barely) my X25-M G2.

What does your X25-M G2 get?...mine gets a 7.8.

Really, don't worry about it. WEI is a completely meaningless metric.

hmmm well I was curious so I did some research and it seems ssd's really do slow down the more you use them, although it seems that only write speed is largely affected. I ran a disk read/write monitoring program that I had run when I first got the ssd, and it seems that my write speed did decrease a little from it's initial speed, which would explain the slight score decrease. That's pretty unfortunate that that happens, though from what I read, a secure erase/format would restore the drive back to its initial speed?

To be honest, I'm also not entirely sure if the computer is virus-free, so I probably will just do a fresh install of windows, which means I might as well do the secure format too.

yea no kidding lol that's why I was considering not giving my primary gaming computer an internet connection. I can accept the problem with the SSD's, as the decrease in performance is barely noticeable (if at all), and takes a long time. But the viruses are just ridiculous, and can screw your system up so fast. It doesn't seem to matter how careful I am on the internet, I always get loaded with them. And it's like blackhawk said, you can remove them, but the damage is already done.

7.6.

Actually I forgot I had all of my firewalls turned off because I do a lot of LAN gaming with my friends and it always interferes. Maybe that could've been some of the issue Also I've been going without an active AV guard for a long time, only just recently started using one. Normally I've just been scanning with Malware-bytes every day or so, guess that's not really good enough lol

Wow...and you're surprised?

I can't imagine going for even a second without a Firewall and AV guard...having nothing is just crazy. For "reasonable" security you should have a firewall, user account control on, an anti-virus/anti-malware guard and a password IMO.

If you have a router then it will most likely have a firewall (unless that is what you disabled). Router/hardware firewalls are generally pretty good because they don't just keep ports closed, they hide them as well, although I'm sure there are software firewalls that also do this. When a port scanner probes your computer the router simply doesn't respond and the computer doing the scanning doesn't know any better so moves onto the next target. If you're using NAT (which you almost certainly are if you have a router) then the router will never respond even to legitimate packets unless they are a reply to a connection initiated by a computer on your network, or if you've explicitly allowed an external computer to initiate a connection with a computer on your LAN (ie. port forwarding).

try using atto benchmark,your results are much better than my ocz vertex 2 90gb!

Benchmarking hammers the drive, especially AS-SSD. If you want the drive to live long enough to be used for what you bought it for I suggest you stop worrying and just use it

^^+2

The good news is that after an initial dip in performance, SSDs tend to level off..

Users typically notice that an SSD drive runs at the manufacturer's stated peak I/O performance at first, but soon after that it begins to drop. That's because, unlike a hard disk drive, any write operation to an SSD requires not one step, but two: an erase followed by the write.

When an SSD is new, the NAND flash memory inside it has been pre-erased; Users start with a clean slate, so to speak. But, as data is written to the drive, data management algorithms in the controller begin to move that data around the flash memory in an operation known as wear-leveling. Even though wear-leveling is meant to prolong the life of the drive, it can eventually lead to performance issues.

SSD performance and endurance are related. Generally, the poorer the performance of a drive, the shorter the lifespan. That's because the management overhead of an SSD is related to how many writes and erases to the drive take place. The more write/erase cycles there are, the shorter the drive's lifespan. Consumer-grade multi-level cell (MLC) memory can sustain from 2,000 to 10,000 write cycles. Enterprise-class single-level cell (SLC) memory can last through 10 times the number of write cycles of an MLC-based drive.

A brief refresher on the difference between the two technologies: SLC simply means one bit of data is written to each flash memory cell, while MLC allows two bits, or more, to be written to cells. MLC drives are notably less expensive than SLC drives.

Manufacturers moderate how long the flash memory in an SSD will last in several ways, but all involve either adding DRAM cache -- so data writes are buffered to reduce the number of write/erase cycles -- or using special firmware located in the drive's processor or controller to combine writes for efficiency.

According to Bob Merritt, an analyst with research firm Convergent Semiconductors, another element of SSD longevity is whether extra memory cells are available and, if so, how many. Some manufacturers over-provision storage, so that when blocks of flash memory wear out, additional blocks become available. For example, a drive may be listed as offering 120GB of memory, but may actually contain 140GB of capacity. The extra 20GB remains unused until it's needed.

The performance problems involving Intel's consumer-grade X25-M SSD were related to its wear-leveling algorithm.

At its most basic, wear-leveling algorithms are used to more evenly distribute data across flash memory so that no one portion wears out faster than another, which prolongs the life of whole drive. The SSD's controller in wear-leveling operations keeps a record of where data is set down on the drive as it's relocated from one portion to another.

been there..

Wow this post is very unlike your other posts of "+1".
I would almost think that this is a case of plagiarism.... ...just kidding....
Great information! Where did you get this information from?

is there a program that can erase or restore your SSD ???? Or maintain it ?

Performance Degradation Over Time, Wear, and Trim

As mentioned above, flash blocks and cells need to be erased before new bytes can be written to them. As a result, newly purchased devices (with all flash blocks pre-erased) can perform notably better at purchase time than after considerable use. While we’ve observed this performance degradation ourselves, we do not consider this to be a show stopper. In fact, except via benchmarking measurements, we don’t expect users to notice the drop during normal use.

Of course, device manufactures and Microsoft want to maintain superior performance characteristics as best we can. One can easily imagine the better SSD manufacturers attempting to overcome the aging issues by pre-erasing blocks so the performance penalty is largely unrealized during normal use, or by maintaining a large enough spare area to store short bursts of writes. SSD drives designed for the enterprise may have as high as 50% of their space reserved in order to provide lengthy periods of high sustained write performance.

In addition to the above, Microsoft and SSD manufacturers are adopting the Trim operation. In Windows 7, if an SSD reports it supports the Trim attribute of the ATA protocol’s Data Set Management command, the NTFS file system will request the ATA driver to issue the new operation to the device when files are deleted and it is safe to erase the SSD pages backing the files. With this information, an SSD can plan to erase the relevant blocks opportunistically (and lazily) in the hope that subsequent writes will not require a blocking erase operation since erased pages are available for reuse.

As an added benefit, the Trim operation can help SSDs reduce wear by eliminating the need for many merge operations to occur. As an example, consider a single 128 KB SSD block that contained a 128 KB file. If the file is deleted and a Trim operation is requested, then the SSD can avoid having to mix bytes from the SSD block with any other bytes that are subsequently written to that block. This reduces wear.

Windows 7 requests the Trim operation for more than just file delete operations. The Trim operation is fully integrated with partition- and volume-level commands like Format and Delete, with file system commands relating to truncate and compression, and with the System Restore (aka Volume Snapshot) feature.
Windows 7 Optimizations and Default Behavior Summary

As noted above, all of today’s SSDs have considerable work to do when presented with disk writes and disk flushes. Windows 7 tends to perform well on today’s SSDs, in part, because we made many engineering changes to reduce the frequency of writes and flushes. This benefits traditional HDDs as well, but is particularly helpful on today’s SSDs.

Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation on SSD system drives. Because SSDs perform extremely well on random read operations, defragmenting files isn’t helpful enough to warrant the added disk writing defragmentation produces. The FAQ section below has some additional details.

Be default, Windows 7 will disable Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching on SSDs with good random read, random write and flush performance. These technologies were all designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could easily be a major bottleneck. See the FAQ section for more details.

Since SSDs tend to perform at their best when the operating system’s partitions are created with the SSD’s alignment needs in mind, all of the partition-creating tools in Windows 7 place newly created partitions with the appropriate alignment.
Frequently Asked Questions

Before addressing some frequently asked questions, we’d like to remind everyone that we believe the future of SSDs in mobile and desktop PCs (as well as enterprise servers) looks very bright to us. SSDs can deliver on the promise of improved performance, more consistent responsiveness, increased battery life, superior ruggedness, quicker startup times, and noise and vibration reductions. With prices steadily dropping and quality on the rise, we expect more and more PCs to be sold with SSDs in place of traditional rotating HDDs. With that in mind, we focused an appropriate amount of our engineering efforts towards insuring Windows 7 users have great experiences on SSDs.

Will Windows 7 support Trim?

Yes. See the above section for details.

Will disk defragmentation be disabled by default on SSDs?

Yes. The automatic scheduling of defragmentation will exclude partitions on devices that declare themselves as SSDs. Additionally, if the system disk has random read performance characteristics above the threshold of 8 MB/sec, then it too will be excluded. The threshold was determined by internal analysis.

The random read threshold test was added to the final product to address the fact that few SSDs on the market today properly identify themselves as SSDs. 8 MB/sec is a relatively conservative rate. While none of our tested HDDs could approach 8 MB/sec, all of our tested SSDs exceeded that threshold. SSD performance ranged between 11 MB/sec and 130 MB/sec. Of the 182 HDDs tested, only 6 configurations managed to exceed 2 MB/sec on our random read test. The other 176 ranged between 0.8 MB/sec and 1.6 MB/sec.

Will Superfetch be disabled on SSDs?

Yes, for most systems with SSDs.

If the system disk is an SSD, and the SSD performs adequately on random reads and doesn’t have glaring performance issues with random writes or flushes, then Superfetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadDrive will all be disabled.

Initially, we had configured all of these features to be off on all SSDs, but we encountered sizable performance regressions on some systems. In root causing those regressions, we found that some first generation SSDs had severe enough random write and flush problems that ultimately lead to disk reads being blocked for long periods of time. With Superfetch and other prefetching re-enabled, performance on key scenarios was markedly improved.

Is NTFS Compression of Files and Directories recommended on SSDs?

Compressing files help save space, but the effort of compressing and decompressing requires extra CPU cycles and therefore power on mobile systems. That said, for infrequently modified directories and files, compression is a fine way to conserve valuable SSD space and can be a good tradeoff if space is truly a premium.

We do not, however, recommend compressing files or directories that will be written to with great frequency. Your Documents directory and files are likely to be fine, but temporary internet directories or mail folder directories aren’t such a good idea because they get large number of file writes in bursts.

Does the Windows Search Indexer operate differently on SSDs?

No.

Is Bitlocker’s encryption process optimized to work on SSDs?

Yes, on NTFS. When Bitlocker is first configured on a partition, the entire partition is read, encrypted and written back out. As this is done, the NTFS file system will issue Trim commands to help the SSD optimize its behavior.

We do encourage users concerned about their data privacy and protection to enable Bitlocker on their drives, including SSDs.

Does Media Center do anything special when configured on SSDs?

No. While SSDs do have advantages over traditional HDDs, SSDs are more costly per GB than their HDD counterparts. For most users, a HDD optimized for media recording is a better choice, as media recording and playback workloads are largely sequential in nature.

Does Write Caching make sense on SSDs and does Windows 7 do anything special if an SSD supports write caching?

Some SSD manufacturers including RAM in their devices for more than just their control logic; they are mimicking the behavior of traditional disks by caching writes, and possibly reads. For devices that do cache writes in volatile memory, Windows 7 expects flush commands and write-ordering to be preserved to at least the same degree as traditional rotating disks. Additionally, Windows 7 expects user settings that disable write caching to be honored by write caching SSDs just as they are on traditional disks.

Do RAID configurations make sense with SSDs?

Yes. The reliability and performance benefits one can obtain via HDD RAID configurations can be had with SSD RAID configurations.

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

* Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
* Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
* Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

Are there any concerns regarding the Hibernate file and SSDs?

No, hiberfile.sys is written to and read from sequentially and in large chunks, and thus can be placed on either HDDs or SSDs.

What Windows Experience Index changes were made to address SSD performance characteristics?

In Windows 7, there are new random read, random write and flush assessments. Better SSDs can score above 6.5 all the way to 7.9. To be included in that range, an SSD has to have outstanding random read rates and be resilient to flush and random write workloads.

In the Beta timeframe of Windows 7, there was a capping of scores at 1.9, 2.9 or the like if a disk (SSD or HDD) didn’t perform adequately when confronted with our random write and flush assessments. Feedback on this was pretty consistent, with most feeling the level of capping to be excessive. As a result, we now simply restrict SSDs with performance issues from joining the newly added 6.0+ and 7.0+ ranges. SSDs that are not solid performers across all assessments effectively get scored in a manner similar to what they would have been in Windows Vista, gaining no Win7 boost for great random read performance.

LOL.

If you want to avoid degrading the SSD then you need to prevent the writes in the first place. The frequency of deletion isn't important, only the amount of data that is deleted, which is going to depend on how much is actually written. It's not really an issue unless you're writing huge amounts. Windows is forever writing data anyway.

Cached memory is memory that is being used by SuperFetch. It's prefetching data for commonly used programs and putting it in memory so that when you run those programs some or all of the data is already there and doesn't need to be read from the HDD/SSD on demand. If a running application requires more memory than is available then some of the cached memory will be freed to accommodate it. There's no need to worry about having a lot of cached memory, it's purely part of Windows' default memory management policy. You can disable the SuperFetch service if you want though.

what's the gfx in the new system.?

^
nice @ stock..

Odd, my OCZ V2 60gig scores a 7.8.

Oh? Then would someone explain to me why I had to actually disable this in Win 7 64 myself? I have two Zalman N-Series 128 GB drives I just built into my new "little beast" system (with no other drives mounted).

It appears that now in Win 7 Task Scheduler (TS) has become an integral part of the OS. In fact, Win7 Pro 64 will not even let you disable the service, at all. And in TS I found the scheduled defrag, using autoruns. Well, it isn't gonna run now!

And neither is just about anything else, either- because I have disabled just about everything in there- and there is a LOT of stuff scheduled by default. And still here typing so, can't be that bad. I do all my updates manually.

Not running defrag is weird to me, as I get used to this SSD thing.