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Windows 7 gets a thorough SSD optimization guide
We all know we want an SSD, but do we truly know what to do with one when we get it? Sure, you could plug it into the familiar SATA and power cables and consider your job done, but that's not really the way of the geek. To educate us wistful, hopeful, soon-to-be SSD owners, TweakTown have put together a comprehensive guide on optimizing your solid state storage -- starting from the very first step of picking out the right drive. What lies ahead is a full breakdown of the controllers available on the market today, along with helpful reminders of the importance of Trim command and garbage collection support. After you pick out your perfect life partner, you'll be wanting to ensure it plays along nicely with Windows 7 as well, and they've got you covered on that front too. Just hit the source link and get informed. We did, even though we still can't afford to buy one of these mythical drives.
AnandTech explores the virtues and woes of today's SSD
If you're interested in SSD, chances are you've been paying attention to the allegations of performance degradation in Intel's X25-M drives. AnandTech dives into the issue (and many, many more topics) in 31 page exploration of the state of solid state. It's a spine-tingling read, in part explaining how write-speed degradation is largely thanks to partially used pages containing portions of deleted files. We all know deleted files typically aren't really gone until they're overwritten, a problem in SSDs because to clear a section of a page the entire page needs to be cleared. That entails moving anything you want to keep to the cache, wiping the whole page, then re-writing that good data from cache. The hope is that a new delete command dubbed TRIM (set to find support in Windows 7) will speed up writes by forcing the system to perform this work during deletes, but ahead of that the article still recommends Intel's drives; even at their worst they're still generally faster than the comparably priced competition when it comes to average use -- not to mention faster than your platters.
