Having read a number of SSD reviews, in particular, of those made by Crucial (a.k.a Micron), I've come to the conclusion that partitioning an SSD is going to make it slower. Here is the logic:  Those reviews explained that (at least the Crucial SSD's based on Marvel controllers) are essentially a RAID array of memory chips soldered to the board, invisible to the end-user as separate entities. I recall one or more of the reviews explicitly stated that the smaller capacity drive sequential access speeds were lacking because it had only half the number of chips of the larger drive. The slowdown was almost linear according to their testing. Thus, I conclude that when I partition such a drive, only a part of the chips are going to be in the partition, thus I'm going to suffer from the said linear slowdown.  Is the above true for Marvell based Crucials? For other drives such as Samsung-controller based, Sandforce-based, others? I'm particularly interested in the Crucial drives, them being the best bang for the buck right now. I'd be happy to also RAID a couple of those on an X79, but totally unsure about partitioning that either. However, that would be a separate question, and not a part of this one, so I'd like to first firgure out partitioning a single SSD drive.
121170
A wise guy who goes by the name of NickN maintains a lenghty  on his views about building a powerful computer (directed towards playing Microsoft's Flight Simulator X, a very demanding piece of software).  He sums up points about SSD drives somewhere, and he concludes the list as follows:     DO NOT PARTITION SSD    He doesn't elaborate on this unfortunately, but I wonder why he says this. What are the drawbacks of partitioning an SSD? (Partitioning in this context meaning >= 2 partitions)
100035
When configuring new SQL Servers on VMs, it is a good idea to have the Database, TempDB, logs, and backups on separate logical drives, even if the underlying storage is the same? I know that this is a good practice on physical servers; the separation actually helps us to reduce the pains caused by concurrent I/O.   I am trying to understand if having 3 drives instead of 5 would make sense. Can someone please provide their views/suggestions for this idea?
75866
I recently bought a Samsung 840 EVO 500 gb solid state drive for my laptop. There's a feature (disabled by default) called RAPID (Real Time Acceleration Processing of I/O Data) Mode. From what I can tell, this mode will use more memory/RAM to facilitate better/faster read/write speeds. A white paper on this feature can be found .  What is RAPID mode? RAPID mode is paired exclusively with Samsung 840 EVO SSDs and available as a feature of the accompanying Samsung  SSD Magician Software Toolset (version 4.2 and later). When enabled, RAPID mode is inserted as a filter driver in the Windows storage stack. The driver actively monitors all  storage-related activity between and among the operating system, user applications and the SSD. The RAPID technology  analyzes system traffic and leverages spare system resources (DRAM and CPU) to deliver read acceleration through intelligent caching of hot data and write optimization through tight coordination with the SSD.  So is it really worth enabling this feature? I have 8 gb of installed memory on my laptop (max that I can install). Is it worth this trade off of using some memory to improve speeds?
90568
I often read that one should not place swap partitions on a SSD drive, as this may harm the device. Is this true? Can you please explain the reason to me?  Because I otherwise would have thought that placing swap on an SSD is the best choice, as it's much faster than HDDs and therefore swapping RAM contents to the SSD is not as slow as it would be with the HDD...
28650
I bought an SSD and I am going to set up my desktop system with a completely fresh Linux installation. SSDs are known to be fast, but they have a disadvantage: The number of writes (per block?) is limited. So I am thinking about which data should be located at the SSD and which at the HDD drive. Generally I thought that data that changes frequently should be placed on the HDD and data that doesn't change frequently can be put on the SSD.  Now I read  question, with a similar scenario. In the answers there is written: &quot;SSD drives are ideally suited for swap space...&quot; Why are SSDs ideally suited for swap space? OK, I see high potential for raising the system's performance, but doesn't swap data change frequently and hence there would be many writes on the SSD resulting in a short SSD lifetime?  And what about the /var directory? Doesn't its contents change frequently, too? Wouldn't it be a good idea to put it on the HDD?  Is there any other data that should not be located on an SSD?
4981
I plan on installing Ubuntu 19.04 and give it 100 GB of my 256 GB SSD space and leave the rest for Windows as I would primarily be using Ubuntu.     A. Now, as I plan to install a lot of applications in Ubuntu, should I give more space to the / partition than the home partition? (Or maybe even drop the /home altogether?).    B. I have another 128 GB SD card for files like photos, audio and video files. Please suggest me the optimal partitioning for the use case.    C. Also, I have 8 GB of RAM so what should be the optimal swap partition size?    D. How would the distribution be if I choose "install Ubuntu alongside Windows" option?
99194
I got this SSD out of an Apple laptop that's broken from liquid damage.  What is this connection called and how do I mount this storage device to retrieve data from it? It looks like PCIe. Does Apple sell a part to mount this via USB adapter or something?
85830
I was reading about . How would this be done? The post talks about a 'looped mode' and comments suggest having a different controller to lie to the OS.  I went and bought one of these devices, tried it and it worked as advertized (overwriting data when it was full), although when I formatted it, it started showing its 'true' capacity.  How is this achieved?
4298
My question:   Can anyone confirm or disprove the support of NVMe drives (like the Samsung 960) by the Sintech M.2 PCIe SSD MacBook adapters for macOS Sierra and High Sierra, or would you have any information that could help me confirm or disprove this support?  Below are the results of my research so far.    SSDs comparison  "Official" MacBook SSDs  Officially supported MacBook SSDs are really expensive. For example, with the Macbook Air/Pro 2013, 2014 and 2015 models:   : $299 for , $399 for , $649 for  : $524 for 256GB, $649 for 512GB, $949 for 1TB.   Equivalent PC SSDs  Globally, an officially supported MacBook SSD (PCIe M.2 AHCI with a proprietary 12+16pin connector) cost from about $1 to $2 per GB, while equivalent PC SSD (PCIe M.2 AHCI and NVMe with a key M connector) cost from about $0.4 to $1 per GB.  NVMe:   : $196 for 512GB (low quality) : $219 for 500GB : $316 for 480GB   AHCI:   : $300 for 480GB : $450 for 512GB   So standard PCIe M.2 devices seems to be up to 3x cheaper than the MacBook PCIe M.2 SSD. Plus, NVMe SSD are globally way faster.    NVMe SSD compatibility?  Connector adapter  At first for the connector, I often seen the   recommended to use the AHCI SSD above in a MacBook Air/Pro. The product page clearly stipules only compatible with a limited set of AHCI SSDs, but I do not see any reason for these "incompatibilities", as there is no other software/hardware standards for the PCIe M.2 AHCI models. It seems they simply give as compatible the list of the AHCI SSDs they've tested, and as incompatible the most known NVMe SSD models.  Interface compatibility  Then for the interface, what I understand from AHCI/NVMe is that it is only a controller interface, depending on the system drivers on the MacBook and not on the hardware itself.  Which seems to be consistant with:     I emailed the store which sell that adapter and problem is that macOS doesn't support 3rd party NVMe SSDs, but Windows 10 and Linux do.      -- From a  on a upgrade video with a AHCI SSD and the Sintech adapter.   So Sintech may have given these NVMe SSD as incompatible not because of the adapter incompatibility, but because of the destination OS incompatibility.  System support  Finally for the system, macOS now support NVMe SSDs, from unofficially OSX El Capitan (with a  to boot) and natively macOS High Sierra (even as boot, see an article about the  and a confirmation from the ).  I sent an email to Sintech to get more informations on their adapter. I got a reply with some references (added to this post), but no answer since.  Edit (23/06):     Unfortunately, we are busy in other projects, and still can't get new system to test it.     Similar researches  After I created this post, I seen there is some people with the same question in other communities, waiting at the same step. I share the links there in case of some of them got a return from a test with the Sintech adapter or an other one.  On    Por Chumjan (02/27/2016):     I think about to upgrade. Samsung 950 pro is interesting. But i'm not sure it can use for this model.  trumanhw (12/21/2016):     You can buy an adapter from M.2 to MBPr or Air for about $20... (...) The REAL question is if the NVMe protocol will be a hiccup (as in, I don't personally know that answer) ... and if it'll get the full speed of the 950. In principle, I don't see why it wouldn't. And I WILL be testing this out.  Fabio (06/10/2017):     [ About the patch ]. It is meant to be used on hackintosh but I think it might work on a macbook pro from 2015 with the adapter and a nvme ssd like the samsung 960/950 evo/pro. If someone tries or has tried it please let me know.
30312
What are the benefits of paying for SSD storage when it comes to webhosting? I know that SSDs have better read speeds is that necessarily better or is it negligible?  I have sites that use databases with php so will it really benefit me to pay extra for SSD storage? I read somewhere that SSDs increase fetching times from the db but also read stuff that are contrary to it and the fact that I can cache mysql results using apc or memcached so kind of confused, can someone shed some light please?
12871
I know that Wubi is slower in disk IO, but I can't find anything about it online other than vague statements such as "slightly slower disk seeks".  Has anyone done any benchmarks to quantify the speed difference?
16545
I have just learned that one should "Never defragment your SSD". But I have no idea if that is true.  I believe that Windows 10 was automatically scheduled to finish  defragmentation on my SSD, but I cancelled it. Would it cause any problems for defragmentations done before?  The SSD is still not partitioned, because I cannot see the SSD drive in My Computer folder, only in system hardware manager. What are the correct steps I should take to install Windows on an SSD (it's my first SSD)?
53565
I've doing some researches since few days and I haven't really got an answer to my question.  I am in the process of building a huge file server for the company I work for. We bought a server case  with 24 bays and drives. Now I am stuck at the point where I have to choose the RAID card. I saw a RAID card from LSI that offer 6 internals mini-SAS 8087 ports (6x4) and would work perfectly with my build. However, it's not cheap.  I have been reading about the subject and I found something called SAS Expander. They are cheap.  with 6 mini SAS 8087 for 225$ (instead of 1150$ of the other one).  Now my question, how would I link an SAS Expander with a RAID card ? Do I need to a buy a RAID card with only 1 external 8088 port and link it with the other card ? Could someone clarify this for me because I haven't found any good documentation on it.  Thanks you.
91446
I'm looking to build a nice little RAID array for dedicated backups. I'd like to have about 2-4TB of space available, as I have this nasty little habit of digitizing everything. Thus, I need a lot of storage and a lot of redundancy in case of drive failure. I'll also essentially be backing up 2-3 computers' /home folders using one of the "Time Machine" clones for Linux. This array will be accessible over my local network via SSH.   I'm having difficulties understanding how RAID-5 achieves parity and how many drives are actually required. One would assume that it needs 5 drives, but I could be wrong. Most of the diagrams I've seen have only yet confused me. It seems that this is how RAID-5 works, please correct me as I'm sure I'm not grasping it properly:  /---STORAGE---\    /---PARITY----\ |   DRIVE_1   |    |   DRIVE_4   | |   DRIVE_2   |----|     ...     | |   DRIVE_3   |    |             | \-------------/    \-------------/   It seems that drives 1-3 appear and work as a single, massive drive (capacity * number_of_drives) and the parity drive(s) back up those drives. What seems strange to me is that I usually see 3+ storage drives in a diagram to only 1 or 2 parity drives. Say we're running 4 1TB drives in a RAID-5 array, 3 running storage and 1 running parity, we have 3TB of actual storage, but only have 1TB of parity!?  I know I'm missing something here, can someone help me out? Also, for my use case, what would be better, RAID-5 or RAID-6? Fault tolerance is the highest priority for me at this point, since it's going to be running over a network for home use only, speed isn't hugely critical.
52842
I have 4 HDDs here with me, from 3 different manufacturers, and all of them have the following 4-pin extra interface beside the SATA connector:    Looking on internet, I can see that it exists on all HDD devices, but not on SSDs:    On old IDE devices there was a similar interface used to select operational mode(master/slave), but on SATA it doesn't makes sense any more.... So, could someone tell me what this interface is intented to do and why it doesn't exists on SSDs? It is used on any practical situation?
74246
describes the RAM specifications for many of the MacBook laptops. In the section for my laptop (13" Pro Late 2011), it says:     Additional Notes: For best performance, fill both memory slots, installing an equal memory module in each slot.   This isn't the first time I've heard of this phenomenon, and it's definitely not specific to Apple.   Why is this the case? Other than the obvious decrease in available memory, why would it be worse to run with 6GB (1x4GB + 1x2GB) than with 8GB (2x4GB)?
103032
I am looking for a solution to [dramatically] improve an enterprise database performance on a system that needs to support thousands of transactions (inserts &amp; large selects) per second. Besides the database/queries optimization, we are also looking for hardware improvements, too.  I need someone with experience in database administration that used SSD drives to store databases. What RAID configuration did you use? RAID1 looks like a good choice maybe combined with another redundancy-focused configuration, also SLC technology would be preferred for SSD drives I suppose.  The questions are: what type of SSD drives are you using (make, model)? How are they organized in RAIDs, what improvements did you achieve and how many (major) issues did you encounter? How much are you worried about the reliability of current SSD drives? Would you recommend using them for database (meaning critical) storage?  Also, what was the approximative price (at the time you implemented the solution, of course) of the implemented solution?  Maybe this post can also provide hystorical data about how SSD+database relationship has evolved over the time.  PS: If important, we are currently using SQL Server 2008 R2. Database size: over 400GB at this time, but my question is not only related to my specifics.  Thanks.  An interesting article found here: