What makes you a geek?

[LavCat]

I decided to try to answer some of these questions for myself. It still doesn't look like I will ever be able to afford a new SCSI drive, but I recently received a little Intel X25-V SSD that cost less than $125. The drive worked out of the box in Windows and was great for WoW, but getting it optimized has been a nightmare.

Intel says to update the firmware to the latest version, but the firmware update software didn't find the drive. Disconnecting other drives did not help, nor did ripping out the SCSI controller. I eventually updated the firmware by connecting the SSD to the first SATA channel. This was trial and error. Oh, and the SATA controller has to be in IDE mode, can't be RAID either.

Next I tried to align the partition. Windows has a tool, DISKPART, for creating partitions. I could create partitions all day long, but the alignment didn't work. Turns out it doesn't work in the XP version of DISKPART. In desperation I booted from my Windows 7 upgrade DVD, clicked through a bunch of stuff and got to a command prompt. I typed DISKPART and it worked. I could create an aligned partition. Went back to XP and was pleased to see the partition recognised. I could then format, and I used 64K allocation units.

Then it was time to run Intel's SSD Optimizer. Of course it didn't work. Had to go back into the BIOS and set up SATA in IDE mode. Then the software pretended to work, but just sat there for hours and hours. Many hours. Turns out it didn't like 64K blocks. Went back to 4K and the Optimizer worked. Also tried 16K and that worked too. All of this is trial and error, no information from Intel helped (except the part about having to be in IDE mode).

I left out a whole bunch of other experiments that didn't work, but I may be seeing light at the end of the tunnel. In very limited testing, WoW textures load noticeably faster. Anyone else have experience with WoW on an SSD?