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SSD File System Recommendations

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yksyks:
Recently I got my wife an Acer Aspire One notebook with WinXP, 1 GB RAM and 16 GB SSD. It's surprisingly nice little machine, especially with regard to its price (I got it for free when buying a lawn mower).

It was pre-installed and I'm surprised it has FAT32 file system. I've read many diverse and divergent articles, but it seems that converting to NTFS would be a good idea to speed it up a bit. But what about the cluster size? The only thing those articles seem to agree is that it's quite critical value for an SSD, but they don't give any unambiguous answer.

Does anyone here have any experience or piece of advice? Thanks in advance.

4wd:
Recently I got my wife an Acer Aspire One notebook with WinXP, 1 GB RAM and 16 GB SSD. It's surprisingly nice little machine, especially with regard to its price (I got it for free when buying a lawn mower).

It was pre-installed and I'm surprised it has FAT32 file system. I've read many diverse and divergent articles, but it seems that converting to NTFS would be a good idea to speed it up a bit. But what about the cluster size? The only thing those articles seem to agree is that it's quite critical value for an SSD, but they don't give any unambiguous answer.

Does anyone here have any experience or piece of advice? Thanks in advance.
-yksyks (May 08, 2009, 06:01 AM)
--- End quote ---

NTFS is not a real good filesystem for SSDs, it does too much housekeeping, (ie. writes), which can reduce the life of them.

I also have an AAO, 512MB RAM, 8GB SSD Linpus originally, now 1.5GB RAM and running a much nlitened version of XP Pro.  The biggest speed up is by not having the thing write to the rather crappy SSD, (at least the 8GB is), in the first place.

See my post here about using Microsoft's Enhanced Write Filter to redirect system writes to RAM i.l.o. SSD.

If you're interested I'll elucidate further but right now it's 0440 and I'm off to bed.

Oh, a couple of good resources:
Aspire One User
macles*

yksyks:
Thank you, I've already read your post before. And thanks for other links, too.

I'm not afraid of NTFS because of shortening the SSD's lifetime, based on articles like this. In fact, I already decided to go for NTFS, especially with regard to synchronization to other machines which utilize NTFS, and would prefer to avoid having twice a year the havoc of all files timestamp shifting.

I'm just not sure about the cluster size. Is it really so critical?

4wd:
I'm just not sure about the cluster size. Is it really so critical?
-yksyks (May 08, 2009, 01:58 PM)
--- End quote ---

I think that the default that Windows gives, (4kB for disks >2GB), is probably the best all-round compromise so I would leave it at that.

If you want to get really technical you could calculate an average, (as that is really all it is), as given here.

If you want to speed up your SSD access a bit you could also try FlashPoint SSD accelerator.  The forum discussion regarding its performance and any problems is here.

f0dder:
EWF is a nice thing and all, but imho not suitable for normal desktop (or laptop, for that matter) use - power loss or BSOD, *blam*, all unsaved data gone? No thanks.

NTFS doesn't really do that much more bookkeeping than FAT, but it does do fs metadata journalling which I wouldn't want to be without. You'll probably want to disable "last access-time timestamps" (iirc Vista does this by default, but XP certainly doesn't).

As for cluster size, dunno... if you start speculating in this, you'd have to know the erase-unit size of your flash, and you would have to get your partitions aligned to this boundary as well... otherwise it's pointless.

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