System stalls while writing to SSD?

Every so often, my box will hang while the drive light is on, then catch up. It seems to run fine when I'm just browsing around, but from time to time it will hang far a few seconds.

I have the 1GB RAM stick and I used the aone-config script to set up the desktop. I have a 4GB card in the expansion slot as well. I would think that it could handle writing to the drive every so often without the whole x windows system being unresponsive.

Anyone else see this behavior? Any ideas? Thanks.

 

Yeah I have this to, some times its more noticable than others.
Not sure of a remedy yet.
Its not Linpus related, as it does it in XP, and now with Ubuntu that I am running.

 

Which SSD are you using (press f12 at boot to see a list)? Mine's the Intel Z-P230 PATA Solid State Drive. I'm actually talking to Intel, several SSD vendors, as well as Microsoft about this issue. The Aspire One is not the first PC on which this has occurred. I actually had a problem with OCZ-branded Samsung SSDs when I was putting together PC World's Dream PC earlier this year. Updating drivers cured the problem.

At that point, it was explained to me as a timing issue. Apparently the SSD returns a bit of info (sorry I can't be more specific, I can't remember) faster than the driver get's around to looking for it, then said driver waits around till it finally times out. That's a very crude explanation, but it does seem to make sense.

On another note, within XP Home SP3, I installed the latest Intel 82801 one drivers. I then tried to update and was given a choice of three. I switched to one called ID2 and performance seemed to jump drastically. I now consider this thing fast. I've only been using it 15 minutes with that little change, so I'll get back on this. Anyone else tried this?

JLJ

 

That's good info. The SSD shows as SSDPAMM0008G1, I have no idea what that means

I want to install Ubuntu as that's what I run on my desktop both at home and at work. But I want to do as much as I can performance wise with the existing OS before loading something else. Although I am much more familiar with Ubuntu than Fedora.

<edit> Seems to be a Samsung SSD.

 

That is the Intel SSD.

 

The thing still seems a lot perkier. I did say I'd done the other tweaks, such as disabling the swap file, etc?

 

Mine is the P-SSD1800 which is the faster of the two drives shipped with these units.

I am surprised more is not said about the slight stalling isssue. I mean its not really an issue with linux, but its not the point.

 

I know that it may seems a newbie question but... where can i find the latest 82801 drivers? The one linked in this website/acer website are the latest drivers?
It's many hours that i'm hanging in downloadcenter.intel.com and i couldn't find any... Well, actually i can find thousands of drivers but not even one will work on the AA1... Can i ask you a link to the file or the name of the file itself?

Another thing that i did not get is: what do you mean by that? What exactly did you do? Update what? Drivers? If yes, with which driver? Can we have a link or a filename? Wich procedure did you use to update?


I'm sorry to ask many newbie questions but i have both SP3 and the latest drivers from acer website and it STILL hangs regulary... And it's more than annoying...

Thank you again and sorry for my english

PS: i have the P-SSD1800

 

Acer Aspire One 110
Using All the latest Drivers
1GB of Ram
16GB SSD

After putting on XP I did all the optimizing I could to stop all catching by windows and programs, and turned off restore point but it still hangs on me at random times and I'm pretty annoyed. I got the 'faster' drive P-SSD 1800, so do you really think it will improve with a driver update?

 

It might be write caching in XP. If you have write caching enabled, XP won't actively write to the disk when you make a file change, but it will wait until it hits a checkpoint before doing a batch write. Given the slow performance of the SSD, the periodic cached writes will lead to periodic "waits" while XP catches up with the stuff that's waiting to be written.

Best way to improve performance is to make sure the system is formatted under FAT32 (better performance) add RAM & get rid of the windows swap file (reduces the writing to disk when memory gets low), turn off system restore (changes to the disk will be not be logged).

You can't easily get past the issue that the performance of the SSD is the bottleneck, though - replacing the SSD isn't easy but it will give you a much more responsive system - swapping the SSD for a compactflash card is a popular mod & gives much better read/write performance, which overall gives a much more usable system. I've swapped my SSD for a Transcend 300x card & upgraded the RAM to 1.5GB and the change in performance is dramatic - even the windows swap file works fine.

 

But I can't disable write catching, everything under policies is grayed out! O_O

 

Thuse who have not read AnandTechs test of the Intel X25 SSDs should really do so as it gets to the bottom of this entire issue
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/in ... i=3403&p=8
Make sure to read page 8 at least!

Kjeld

 

So apparently we should seriously stay away from JMicron controllers?

Looked up the small transcend SSD:s to see what controller they use, but the haven't specified it in their data sheet