Recently I got my wife an Acer Aspire One (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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)
I'm just not sure about the cluster size. Is it really so critical?-yksyks (May 08, 2009, 01:58 PM)
I completely agree with both of you. EWF seems to me too dangerous. How about the FlashPoint? Is it worth trying? Some speeding up would be nice, but the data reliability is the highest priority, you know.-yksyks (May 09, 2009, 03:41 PM)
I'm still slightly skeptical wrt. the registry not being persisted, though.-f0dder (May 10, 2009, 07:08 AM)
How about the FlashPoint? Is it worth trying? Some speeding up would be nice, but the data reliability is the highest priority, you know.-yksyks (May 09, 2009, 03:41 PM)
To Kamel: I don't think so. In my experience when I reformatted a bunch of old HDs, which I'm using now as external via USB, from FAT32 to NTFS, I got an increase in performace 5 to 10 times faster, both reads and writes. This might not apply to SSD, of course.-yksyks (May 11, 2009, 03:48 AM)
Interestingly enough, exFAT is not used currently for formatting hard drives. It is being recommended in Flash memory storage and other external devices only. This is why it is currently not considered a huge competitor to NTFS on hard drives.
However, exFAT should be a true competitor to NTFS on systems with limited processing power and memory. NTFS on flash memory has been known to be inefficient for quite some time. exFAT’s smaller footprint/overhead makes it ideal for this purpose. Of course, only if your definition of “ideal” allows software to be proprietary and not open source.
Vista will happily read FAT, exFAT, and NTFS from flash. ReadyBoost may not work with exFAT formatted flash drives, however.
In conclusion, basically, FAT is a simple system. This limits FAT system by losing efficiency at large sizes, but allows it to run with less resources. The complexity of NTFS increases features but requires more memory and processing power.
Kamel: you can't compare linux NTFS access speed to native speed... the only reliable NTFS support for linux is ntfs3g which is implemented in userland, and at least previous versions have been known to be pretty slow.I am aware of this, and I did not compare speeds in linux alone. It is also important for you to understand that the drive was read from raw access, not by using a driver of any sort. (aka, no driver necessary)-f0dder (May 12, 2009, 12:46 AM)
I don't know how the FlashPoint works, but it works really perfect. Kudos to the developers!My guess is that it uses a filter driver to catch writes going to the flash drive, and imposes a delay on the writes so it has a chance to merge several smaller writes into fewer large ones - since small random writes are what kills performance on most of the flash drives around today. If the developers are smart, they will have gathered data on the write and erase block sizes of the drive, and try to do erase-block size aligned (and sized) writes.-yksyks (June 22, 2009, 08:33 AM)
My guess is that it uses a filter driver to catch writes going to the flash drive, and imposes a delay on the writes so it has a chance to merge several smaller writes into fewer large ones - since small random writes are what kills performance on most of the flash drives around today. If the developers are smart, they will have gathered data on the write and erase block sizes of the drive, and try to do erase-block size aligned (and sized) writes.-f0dder (June 22, 2009, 11:08 AM)
Basically, FlashPoint translates small random writes to big sequential writes with RAM buffer to get better write performance.
We have stopped beta testing and distributing the software.
Hopefully, we will resume the distribution, soon!
Thank you.-http://mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-9-discussion/5980-flashpoint-solid-state-drive-accelerator.html
The developer's site (http://zflashpoint.blogspot.com/) is not accessible anymore.-yksyks (July 05, 2009, 04:23 PM)
Hello, everyone!!
Finally, we are doing fresh restart with the new name, 'FlashFire'
FlashFire version 0.99 is now available here.
( http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flashpointusers/files/)
FlashFire 0.99 is functionally same with FlashPoint Beta 6 version, but now it has a installer.
In addition, it is only supports Windows XP.
Previous blog can be accessed with this address (http://zflashfire.blogspot.com), and you can leave feedback there.
Thank you.
Hyojun Kim