mike said:
I've been considering booting from a usb flash drive, for convenience,
not speed.
It's not as simple as one might think. You can't just plug one in.
The things wear out of you don't do anything to help.
If you have someone else do it, make sure they know what they're doing.
Presumably, Alienware do...presumably...
Here's a start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Write_Filter
I'm about to start some experiments, so if anyone has more info on the
subject, I'd like to hear it.
To translate your premise a bit:
1) Devices work when you plug them in. I'm not aware of
USB flash sticks or SATA SSDs absolutely refusing to work.
They work right away. If you know next to nothing about
computers, you can get them to work.
2) The user can do things to prolong the service life of the SSD drive.
Of the many optimizations published on the Internet, some are
downright silly and others make sense (have moderate benefit, no cost).
3) Depending on the OS used, some of the items in (2) are taken
care of by the OS. Windows 7 is "SSD aware", and at least knows
it should not be running the defragmenter on them. And
Windows 7 seems to align the partition on the SSD (to sector 2048).
You can read more about EWF here. This doesn't sound entirely bulletproof,
but I didn't read the whole thread.
http://www.mp3car.com/winnt-based/1...7-32-bit-or-64-bit-enhanced-write-filter.html
As a consequence of (1), a manufacturer of computers can do practically
anything they want. They can ship the system with zero optimizations
if they want. There is nothing preventing them from doing it. Alienware
ships a RAID-0 configuration...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM
"The TRIM command does not work on RAID volumes."
Optimization is a semi-complex subject, at least in terms of
gathering all the tricks together in a list, evaluating which
ones are silly, and implementing the rest. But if you don't
want to, you can always just plug it in and use it.
The importance of "polishing" your purchase, can be affected
a bit by the type of flash used. SLC flash chips have higher write
cycle limits than MLC. And MLC chip technology is heading in
the wrong direction, with last year's chips doing 5000 write
cycles, and this year's chips doing 3000 write cycles. If you
wish to be a "dumb" SSD user, then owning an SLC drive
could help give you a longer service life. SLC technology is
preferred in Enterprise class drives (with elevated pricing).
HTH,
Paul
