RAM speed

[John Rumm]

The "safe" way to do it would be to install win10 x64 on a new SSD, then you can always fallback to the previous install if required.

[John Rumm]

It will certainly work in most cases - but it may not be optimal.

With Windows, there are some rare occasions when migrating from an old drive that was originally partitioned under XP (or earlier). Since the partitioning code predates the introduction drives supporting "Advanced Format" 4k sectors. That can result in lower SSD performance because the partition start address may not be aligned on a 4K boundary - and so each logical disk sector now spans two blocks of flash memory, and so each single sector read has to be translated into a double page access to flash. Worse a single sector write now requires a read modify write activity when writing since you will always be overwriting half a page of flash rather than a full one.

Generally this is not that noticeable unless reading large number of small files, or randomly accessing a file such as a database table.

The usual recommendation is to make sure all partitions start on a 1 MB boundary, since that will be divisible by all the common sector sizes that a drive may present.

With Linux the alignment aught to be ok, but you may need to manually enable TRIM support when migrating to SSD.

With MACOS it normally only enables TRIM automatically for some "apple approved" SSDs, so again you need to do it manually.

Yeah they were fairly useless, but very cute!

[Martin Brown]

You probably used up some of the SSD's working lifetime then. It will still work perfectly well but some things that Doze does to spinning rust make absolutely no sense on an SSD (and shorten its life).

HDD to SSD is one of the most potent upgrades.

When small SSD's first became available I had one configured as a RAID disk cache. It was also the only one I have so far ever had fail.

[R D S]

As it happens the PC has a SSD in it with Ubuntu on, and a HD with Windows.

Neither installation seems to have been used much and it looks like it hadn't been booted for years so i'm good to wipe the lot and put Windows on the SSD.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Not very likely, what sort of hard drive has it got? An ssd might be a better plan, but then 3 cores is a little lame and if its not hyperthreaded then even more so. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Well try cloning first, it may then be time to restart, but to be honest a second hand ex business pc will probably work better and be cheaper than upgrading the current one. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Things are getting better in ssd speed wise I notice, but I'm still not totally convinced they would last as long as a good mechanical drive. I had a drive go after just 5 years, 256gig, but the current half a terrabyte seems faster and more reliable from the start. The old one came mounted on the Motherboard and that made me a little suspicious being non standard Samsung. Brian

[Paul]

You can query the partition and see what it is set to.

Cloning with one of the tools that uses VSS and Smart Copy, avoids the excess writes of using dd.exe .

If you haven't been fooling around destructively with the alignment options on the cloning software, the 1MB alignment of the original disk will be preserved on the clone.

And Microsoft has been doing some small things to avoid excess writes to C:

1) Pagefile no longer operates the way it used to. 2) Volume bitmap on disk is not updated and is stale. 3) MFTMIRR is no longer valid, exactly why I've not seen an explanation how this helps.

Paul

[Paul]

i3 does not equal three cores.

i3, i5, i7, i9 are trademarks, and Intel makes them "measures of device class"

The following table is meant to illustrate the concept but should not be used for real work. For example, tenth generation i9 is 10 cores, eleventh generation i9 is 8 cores.

Name Cores Threads

---- ----- -------

i3 2C 4T i5 6C 12T i7 8C 16T i9 10C 20T

The ark.intel.com site can be used to help decode the part number, like i9-11900K versus i9-10900K. ( That's if you can find the box to type the search into :-/ )

The one with the "11" in the name, is eleventh generation. The one with the "10" in the name, is tenth generation.

The eleventh generation one, has a four lane bus for

8GB/sec SSD drives. The tenth generation does not have that. And the tenth generation would profitably use 4GB/sec SSD drives. (The ways around this are not particularly popular.)

Intel processors go to higher numbers, like 28 cores 56 threads. The INTC Pricelist seems to be discontinued, and this is about as close to the last one as I can get. Sorting these by price, sometimes gets you a fat core count. At least one recently announced product was something like two CPU dies inside a single package, but that won't be on this list.

The processors were also noteworthy by memory buses.

2 channel - consumer desktops, still perfectly usable

3 channel - LGA1366 enthusiast

4 channel - LGA2016 ? Or maybe LGA2066 ?

6 channel - The Intel high end last year or so

8 channel - Something this year ? (Intel must match AMD)

Memory channels are useless, as the measurable bandwidth does not go up. The buses function as "parking space for more RAM". And this is because the cache line orientation does not allow sucking data from eight channels at the same time :-)

Some processors have resorted to using pairs of busses independently, but I've no details or the name of that technique. There was an earlier AMD processor where you could "uncouple" the dual channel memory to allow this to happen. Then it depended on the workload, as to whether this was a clever choice or not.

Paul