FlashFire is a software program for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 that can speed up computer systems with SSDs noticeably. The description on the developer’s website is a bit vague. FlashFire seems to make use of computer memory to speed up random writes of a connected SSD. Probably something comparable to a RAM disk.

The good news is that the software works. It works that well that the performance gain is very noticeable after installation of the software and a reboot of the system. There is another aspect that is kinda confusing. Some users state that they have a icon in the system tray upon startup. Some users on the other hand say they do not. This apparently depends on the version of the software program. There are two things that users need to know: Flashfire needs to be started with parameters and settings can only be changed in the Windows Registry.

To start Flashfire a user would use the command flashfire.exe on to turn it on or flashfire x where x is the drive number that the program should speed up. Users who use flashfire.exe on have to make sure that a SSD is the configured drive in the Registry. They need to navigate to

HK_Local_Machine\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ffire\Enum

and check the drive number of the Solid State Drive there. They then need to navigate to

HK_Local_Machine\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ffire\Parameters

and make sure that drive number is the value of the Disknum key. Flashfire can be turned off easily by issuing the command flashfire.exe off. Several users reported great success with Flashfire on Asus EEEPCs with Solid State Drives. Flashfire can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

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Their biggest downfall besides the price is the write speed which can be low. So low that it will slow down the computer system when data is written on that drive. Many programs, including web browsers, email programs, editors but also the operating system itself cache data on the hard drive or use the hard drive to store temporary data. That’s a problem if the cache folder of that application is located on the Solid State.

What can be done to speed up the overall computer system?

• Move the temp folders of the operating system to another hard drive.
• Move the pagefile and System Restore locations to another hard drive
• Move the cache of applications to another hard drive, e.g. web browsers, email clients.
• Disable programs that access the hard drive and that are not needed, like Windows Indexing Service
• Upgrade the computer memory of the computer system (only makes sense if sub 4 Gigabybtes on a 32-bit system)

Most of these tips center around moving the cache to a new hard drive and disabling features that slow down the computer system. If you cannot install a second hard drive to the computer system you might consider adding a fast external device that can be used for caching. The downside of this method is that you need to have it near the computer system all the time which can be annoying if the system is mostly used on the road.

Newer Solid State Drives (check the OCZ Vertex review for instance) are slowly introduced that beat conventional hard drives fair and square both in write and read performance. They come at a price though but this is going to change in the future. Prices will drop, capacities increase and the slower SSD will slowly cease to exist.

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This in effect means that all methods of overwriting free space are not sufficient for erasing the data securely on those drives. This also means as well that it is not possible to erase specific files securely on the SSD. Users who want to delete data securely on SSDs have therefor the following options at hand:

• Encryption
• Format
• Filling the Drive

Encryption is surely the best method of ensuring that the data on a SSD is secure as it cannot be accessed without decryption. Formatting the drive on the other hand is only reasonable if no data on that drive is needed anymore. It would otherwise require extensive backup and restoration procedures. Filling the drive with data might work as well as it would overwrite anything on the drive as well.

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OCZ on the other hand seems to be one of the driving forces in SSD technology at this point in time. Their OCZ Vertex drives look really promising in both read and write performance. Old Solid State Drives usually excelled in read performance but lacked the necessary write performance.

Their latest hardware that was first shown at the Cebit in Germany is the OCZ Z-Drive. This piece of computer hardware is connected via PCI Express to a computer system taking up two slots because of its dimensions. It is made up of four 256 Gigabyte MLC-based OCZ Solid State Drives and 256 Megabytes of ECC DDR2 RAM. This adds up to a total storage capacity of 1 Terabyte and promises maximum read rates of 600 MB/s and read rates of 500 MB/s. The sustained write speed is said to be 400 MB/s.

The only drawback is the hefty price tag which is expected to be between $1500 and $2000. The OCZ Z-Drive is expected to be available in April 2009 with additional models following later this year.

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24 drives equals a total storage of 6 Terabytes. The other system specs are as impressive. They added a combination of two Intel 3.2GHz QX9775 Quad-Core cpus, two ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards, 4GB of 800MHz FB-DIMM DDR2 SDRAM, two Corsair HX1000W power supply units, an Adaptec 5 Series RAID card, an Areca 1680ix-24 RAID card and of course the 24 256GB MLC Solid State Drives.

How fast was the system after all? They managed to top 2 Gigabytes of sequential write and reading speed. They performed some tests like loading all Microsoft Office applications (in 0.5 seconds), all 53 apps of the Windows start menu (in 18.09 seconds), copying a 700 Megabyte DVD rip (0.8 seconds) or recycling 700 files with a total size of 5.6 Gigabytes (instantly).

The viral marketing campaign is highly successful with more than 250K views on Youtube already. Can you imaging running a system like this? What are your thoughts, let us know!

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A recent review of the OCZ Vertex Series 120GB SSD might be a turning point though as it is one of the first Solid State Drives that leaves even the fastest platter driven hard drives behind in both benchmarks but also real life tests. Benchmarks are great to compare speeds but the situation can be different under real life circumstances. CD Freaks have posted an extensive test of the OCZ Vertex Series 120GB SSD and compare it to other platter driven hard drives like Samsung’s Spinpoint F1 or Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.10.

The results are astounding: The OCZ Vertex Series 120GB SSD booted Windows Vista to the Welcome Screen in 11.54, install Vista SP1 in 16.12 minutes compared to roughly 40 minutes for all other tested hard drives, performed a Microsoft Office installation in 2.13 seconds compared to 3.43 minutes for the second place finisher or 24052 points in PCMark Vantage HDD suite result while the platter driven hard drives managed scores around the 4000 mark.

The conclusion of the reviewer is absolutely positive:

The OCZ Technology Vertex series drives are quite incredible. This is the first SSD drive I can honestly say is completely stable when used as a system drive. It’s also incredibly fast.

Reading access times are lightning fast and applications load in an instant, making the Vertex series of drives ideal as the operating system drive with all the user’s installed applications.

The only negative aspect about that drive is the price. The OCZ Vertex Series will ship with 60, 120 and 250 Gigabytes of capacity and retail for $199, $399 and $829 respectively.

Additional reviews:

PC Perspective

The new OCZ Vertex solid state drive is one of the most impressive SSDs we have tested to date. I know that there is much excitement in the hardware community about this drive and for good reason: it uses a brand new controller from a brand new company and as such performance was an unknown. Many in the community have been billing it as the first true competitor to Intel’s X25-M line of mainstream MLC drives and it indeed lives up to that status.

Benchmark Reviews

Based on the collection of benchmark performance tests we’ve conducted, the OCZ Vertex offers linear bandwidth so far ahead of previous competition that it might require calling this a new generation product in order to justify how so many other ‘new’ products have just been left behind. The MLC Samsung flash modules paired to a 64MB cache buffer on this 120GB Vertex SSD help yield a 0.10 ms response time. ATTO Disk Benchmark tool reported an impressive 249 MBps maximum read bandwidth in our tests, but only 138 MBps maximum write. HD Tach recorded additional high-performance results, with approximate bandwidth speeds reaching 236.6 MBps read and 162.6 MBps write. EVEREST’s linear full-sector bandwidth performance was a steady 247.6 MBps read-from, and an impressive 225.2 MBps write-to speed.

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This is even more important if a Windows operating system has been installed on the Solid State Drive. (It is basically the same deal for Linux users who should think about moving all write intensive tasks to other drives)

Three different types of tweaks can be applied. Tweaks that are applied directly to the hardware device in Windows, tweaks to the Windows operating system and tweaks to applications.

Hardware Tweaks:

• PIO Mode

Make sure the SSD is not running in PIO mode. To verify that go into the Device Manager, open IDE ATA / ATAPI controllers and double-click all Primary and Secondary IDE Channels.

Verify that there are no signs of PIO Mode under the Current Transfer Mode entry in Advanced Settings. It should list Ultra DMA Mode 5 there.

• Enable Write Caching

Click on Disk Drives in the Device Manager and locate the Solid State Drive. Double-click it and open the Policies tab on top.

Select Optimize for performance and enable “Enable write caching on the disk”. There is no need for the quick removal option as the SSD will never be removed from the computer (like any other hard drive).

Windows Tweaks:

• Moving the Pagefile

Moving the pagefile to another hard drive has a positive effect on the performance of SSD drives.

Go back to System Properties. Click on the Advanced Tabm there on Settings under the Performance entry. Again on Advanced in the new window and finally on the Change button under the Virtual Memory entry.

The Virtual Memory window opens and it will display all drive partitions on top and the size of their paging files. Select the Solid State Drive and check the “No Paging File” entry. Click the Set button to set the new preferences.

Now select another hard drive and assign the pagefile to this drive.

• Move the temp files

The Advanced tab under System Properties has a button entitled Environment Variables. Click it and locate the temp and tmp variables for the user and the system. Change the path to another hard drive if they are located on the Solid State Drive.

• Disable the Indexing Service on the drive

Right-click on the drive letter of the SSD and select Properties from the menu. Locate the Allow Indexing Service to index the disk for fast file searching line and make sure it is disabled.

Application Tweaks:

Most application tweaks center around the idea of moving temporary files to another hard drive. Take the cache of web browsers or temp files during video production for example. Moving them to another hard drive will have an impact on the system’s performance.

Do you know of additional tweaks that might improve system performance of SSD drives?

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The only real downside of SSDs was their rather low write speed which was especially true for last generation’s drives. This is quickly changing with the release of this generation’s SSDs that have a twice as fast write speed as last generation thanks to multiple parallel channels and interleaving single-layer cell NAND flash memory.

Samsung has announced a state of the art SSD that is aiming for a release in the first quarter of 2009. The Samsung SS805 Solid State Drive will offer 100 Gigabytes of storage space with a sustained sequential read rate of up to 250MB/sec. and a sustained sequential write rate of up to 170MB/sec.

To put that in comparison. The OCZ Core Series II SSD drive that I bought last year had a sustained sequential read rate of up to 170 MB/sec. and a sustained sequential write rate of up to 98MB/sec. and won almost every read speed benchmark at that time.

Samsung’s SS805 SSD will increase the read speed by about 50% and the write speed by almost 100% in comparison. The only factor that could play a role in the drive’s success is the retail price of the device.

Intel’s 32 Gigabyte X25 Solid State Drive retails currently for a price of $650-700 at most online shops.

The SS805 SSD is therefor aiming at the enterprise market but hints at what the consumer market will see in the near future.

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With more and more Solid State Drives hitting the streets it is important to understand the differences. Defragmentation describes the process of physically organizing the contents of a hard drive or partition so that the data sectors of each file will be stored close together to reduce load and seek times.

Solid State Drives can access any location on the drive in the same time. This is one of the main advantages over hard drives. This also means that there is no need to defragment a Solid State Drive ever. These drives have actually been designed to write data evenly in all sectors of the drive which the industry is calling wear leveling. Each sector of a Solid State Drive has a limited number of writes before it cannot be overwritten anymore. (this is a theoretical limit which cannot be reached in work environments)

If you did defragment your Solid State Disk you can rest assured that you did not harm it in any way. It is just that this process is not needed and that defragmentation causes lots of write processes which means that the drive will reach its write limits sooner.

No need for defragmentation is therefor another advantage of Solid State Drives.

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The question however is if you want to shell out the extra bucks for that visible speed gain and I think it comes down to a discussion among video card enthusiasts. Some purchase the top product that produces a few additional frames but costs double the amount of the video card that computes less frames. Still both make the games playable.

It’s the same with the current generation of Solid State Drives except for a few scenarios where they really shine. They need less energy to run and are completely silent which makes them an ideal candidate for a notebook hard drive replacement. That’s in my opinion the number one reason to purchase a Solid State Drive, to place it in a mobile device or computer that is being used as a media player.

samsung hard drive benchmark

ocz core series ssd benchmark

samsung hd103uj benchmark

ocz core series ssd 64gb benchmark

Where operating systems and desktop computers are concerned I would probably wait for the next generation that surely sees another huge price drop and speed increase.

Don’t get me wrong.. The Solid State Drive is faster than my shiny new Samsung hard drive, it loads pretty much everything faster but some of its gains, the silence, can only be effective if I would remove the conventional hard drives and that is not possible until the flash drives come with sufficient storage space.

Conclusion:

You should consider buying a Solid State Drive if..

• You turn on and off the operating system regularly
• You load and close many applications and files during the computer uptime
• You do not need space but energy efficiency or silence
• You want bragging rights
• You got the money to buy one

Everyone else is better of waiting for the next generation of flash drives in my opinion.

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Some information about the drive. I ordered an OCZ 64 Gigabyte Core Series Sata II 2.5″ Solid State Drive which can be connected with the normal SATA cables. It’s pretty tiny, completely silent and I had to think a bit before I found a placement in my computer for it. Since I’m not moving my computer I put it on top of the 3,5″ bay.

It was immediately recognized by the Bios if my computer and by Windows without having to install drivers or do a Bios update. Keep in mind that I have a relatively new Bios from January 2008 though.

The only thing that I did so far was to install Windows XP on the drive and do all the driver and system updates. I have not installed any applications except for Firefox and Thunderbird yet.

Please point me to any benchmarking tests or other tests that you would like to have performed so that we can evaluate how fast the drive actually is. I’m thinking of benchmarking system start and startup of several applications that I will install on both hard drives. (I have another Windows XP system on my old hard drive).

So, if you got anything let me know and I will perform the test if I can grab the right software to do it.

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The matter is even getting more pressing if the supply is limited, say a limited edition of a computer game or a super duper price for a product that usually costs a lot more. That’s like putting more pressure on the consumer and it usually works.

I’m sometimes hard pressed to stop myself from buying a device after reading about it on the Internet. I came up with a system that is beating impulse buying fair and square and it will definitely save you some money.

It’s actually a pretty easy system. If I see or read about something that I want I think about it for a second. Do I really need the device right now? The answer would be yes in the case of a crashed hard drive but no for a gamin system or computer game.

Every item where I come to the conclusion that I do not need it right away lands on my 90-days list. I add the date and the name of the product on that list. I check back after 90 days and see if I still want to buy that product. If I do I buy it but more often than not I don’t care anymore. Let me give you an example where this worked perfectly.

You might remember that I wanted to buy a SSD (Solid State Drives) for my new computer. SSDs were expensive and rare at that time and most could not really live up to the promise. I put that SSD drive on my 90 days list and ordered one just a few days ago because I still wanted one. Those 90 days however saw some great product releases of reliable and fast SSD drives and I was able to grab one of the fastest for a third of the price that I would have paid back then. As I said, it works pretty well and more often than not it saves you money.

Ladies, this works extremely well for non-tech related products like shoes, perfumes, clothes or books.

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The situation seems to be changing slowly with 64 Gigabyte SSD drives available in larger quantities and better prices. One SSD drive that I was looking forward to was the OCZ Core Series SSD drive with 64 Gigabyte capacity and the guys at Hot Hardware managed to get their hands on one of those drives and compared it to the ultra fast WD VelociRaptor hard disk.

While the OCZ Core Series SSD drive lacks behind in write speeds (tops 87 MB/s compared to 129 MB/s for the VelociRaptor) it managed to win the read speed benchmark (140 MB/s compared to 123 MB/s) and of course in random access times.

Far more impressive than those computed values are values from real applications, and those tests make a difference.

How about a Windows Vista startup of 51 MB/s compared to 15.6 MB/s for the conventional hard drive ? Similar results are available for gaming (77 MB/s vs. 12.5 MB/s), application loading (21 MB/s vs. 3.7 MB/s) and Windows Defender (66 MB/s vs. 19.8 MB/s). The SSD drive managed to beat the hard drive in every test which has to be attributed largely to the low random access time.

This convinced me and I just ordered a OCZ Core Series SSD drive with 64 Gigabyte capacity for 200 Euros. Once I have that will do some tests with various operating systems and benchmarks.

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How I know that ? I looked it up in the software Crystal Disk Info. This software basically displays all kind of information about hard drives and Solid State Disks and two that are not displayed in every other of that type are the two I mentioned above.

It does display all the usual information as well. Begins with the hard disk temperature, serial number, transfer mode, drive letters and supported features among other parameters. Two of the aforementioned parameters are worth a closer look if you are experiencing crashes or slow downs.

The temperature of the hard drive can be a cause for system crashes. It if goes to high it can lead to data loss and errors. The transfer mode can be interesting if you think that your hard drive is not as fast as it should be. Check the supported transfer modes of your drive and compare them to the one that is currently being used for it. It might very well be that it’s not the fastest available.

Crystal Disk Info is a portable application that is compatible to Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows Server 2003 / 2008.

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We will probably see lots of announcements regarding Solid State Drives in the coming months and hopefully some huge price drops as well. As you might now I’m planning to buy one SSD for my soon to be build desktop computer to use it as my boot hard drive.

I think the problem that most users face at the moment is that many SSD don’t live up to the promise of faster speeds and that the new generation of SSD will deliver what they are expecting. It would be really awful to buy a 32 Gigabyte SSD for $600+ only to find out that it is slower than a normal 7200rpm SATA drive.

Harvey Liu, Advanced Media President. “The read rate of our 2.5″ SATA SSD drive provides users with a phenomenally fast speed. For instance, it reduces boot up and seek times to mere seconds, while installation of new software programs can be accomplished in seconds rather than minutes

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