Not my pool, but you get the general idea. That sucker’s FULL.

So yesterday it rained. All day. Relentlessly. It rained and rained and rained. Then it rained some more. And I didn’t work on the Jeep. Come nightfall it rained. Thursday turned into Friday and it kept raining.

In Florida it doesn’t matter how much it rains. Remember the genie in the 1996 movie Aladdin and the King of Thieves? “Sand… It’s everywhere, get used to it.” The sand just soaks up rain like… well, like sand.

It works great except, duh, where there’s no freakin’ sand! The driveway doesn’t soak up the rain, but it drains into – you guessed it – sand. No problem there. Then there’s the pool. Uh oh, the pool’s full of water, the same stuff that rain’s made of. And pools don’t automatically drain, no siree, they contain. So this morning I found the pool full – TOO full – of water. Close to overflowing, it was, so much water that the skimmer couldn’t skim. Up until then I had no idea that it was possible for a pool to have too much water. Live and learn.

It took about two hours to lower the water to the correct level.

Later in the day I formed a piece of brake line and installed it. I was about to begin bleeding the system when… uh huh… it started to rain.

The Dyna lookin’ awesome.

I gave the Dyna its first decent cleanup and detailing since I put tires on about a year ago. It was a lot of work – but worth it.

I was down to the last bit of detailing – the wheels. I don’t care whatcha say, handling laced wheels is the crappiest part of the job. I don’t mind the mechanical stuff – checking spoke tightness, wheel trueness, tire condition, brake pad thickness, rotor condition, and so on and so forth – but the actual cleaning itself has its own section next to “suck” in the dictionary.But this time I found some kind of gunk on *some* spokes, and on *some* of those the gunk had come dangerously close to getting through the chrome itself.

Now, by “some” I mean this. Imagine standing in front of the bike, maybe five feet to the right of the brake pedal, about a quarter-bike length ahead of the front wheel. Position a gunk-emitter at about air cleaner height and fire a bike-wide spray of gunk droplets at the rider’s ass but toward the ground. Considering that it wasn’t all the spokes and none of the rest of the bike had the gunk, it’s almost like the gunk-emitter was fired when it was parked.

It took serious work to get that stuff off. The best method turned out to be auto wheel cleaner to soften it, coupled with a razor blade to ease it off. A toothbrush was useful for applying the wheel cleaner, but the best way turned out to be manual. I got to learn where each and every hole in my hands’ skin was located – that stuff is nasty.

Job’s done now, and my hands have more-or-less regained their moisture. All that remains is to clean up the back end a little where water had splashed. Oh, yeah, and hit that back wheel with the other miracle product: NevrDull.

Still not sure where I picked that stuff up. It’s been about a year – the last tire change – I’ve given that bike a thorough cleanup. Even the last interval service didn’t get one. I hate working on a dirty bike, but I was so busy preparing to move…. It’s not on any of the other bikes, either. Probably a one-shot deal, no pun intended, when I rode through something or parked in a bad place.

I’ll just have to pay more attention from now on.

The other day Pam plunked down her sixty bucks, minus five with a coupon, plus another fifteen for a strategy book… lemme check the math, that’s seventy smackers, plus some Florida tax… damn, my head’s swimmin’. And for what? Not a lot.

She’s gone through the tutorial and that’s about it. The Origin servers are all down and there’s nothing else to be done. No serv-o, no play-o. The stuff she learned in the tutorial’s largely forgotten. After all, what you don’t put to use in 24 hours of learning is gone the next day, the brain folks love to tell us at training seminars. Use it or lose it.

Okay, everything’s social now. I get it. But SimCity’s largely a game where a single player tries their hand at lording over an infrastructure that happens to include, well, a simulated population. It’s not like your city’s populated with Aunt Jane or the dork you went to school with or… damn… your boss. No, the social part of this title is nothing more than a bag on the side.

So tell me… why’s it necessary to connect to Origin’s server to play?

Oh, yeah, DRM. Those evil thieves… er customers… are trying to steal your stuff.

Listen up, Electronic Arts.

You’ve got this customer, her name’s Pam. She’s known about you since you were one of many. Back when I used to game. Think Archon on the Apple ][. Yeah, that long ago. She got into The Sims. I bought her a box to play it on. She bought every expansion pack. Then Sims 2. I built her a (then) kick-ass box to play that on and she bought all of those expansion packs, too. Sims 3? Yup. I think she has all of those packs. Books and guides for the lot of ‘em, too. I know, I just packed and moved ‘em all – a pretty big box – from Jersey down here to Paradise. So Pam knew Sim City from when I played it on the Amiga, and Sim City 2000, too. The ads and previews for the newest SimCity were pretty damned enticing. And not one review – as far as I know – had mentioned this insane reliance on a server connection. So here’s this customer, a good customer, a spendy customer, that threw Electronic Arts a pile of greenbacks for a promise.

And EA failed her.

Over the past few days she’s checked in to try to play, all hours of the day and night. All servers are down.

You failed her bad. There’s no reason to require a remote server connection for single player play. None.

If Pam listens to me, or to our son, or to countless others with similar experiences, she won’t be back.

Shame on you, Electronic Arts.

As big as you are, you really should know better.

Takin’ a break to ham it up a little for the camera. It’s January. The temperatures are in the mid-80s. There’s no shortage of motorcycles. What’s not to like?

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that this is a cheap post.

Let me point you to a set of images that chronicle the construction project that produced our new home. The series begins with Pam & me standing in front of an empty lot, the camera in roughly the same place as the image to the left.

We made the trip down in mid-December 2012. It was a bumpy transition, mostly because the project was late. In this next set I show some of that bumpiness, which continues through today as bits and pieces struggle for completion.

Enjoy!

This is also the second move that’s been somewhat less than ideal. There were wildly different reasons for that, but the result has been the same: lots of boxes stacked chaotically for a an extended period.

The movers delivered us, offloading into the garage, literally an hour after the garage doors had been hung and tested. That’s tight timing. Stuff went in as it came off the truck, nothing like the way it might be needed. We had about 500 pieces.

About ten days later I dug into the pile. The goal was simple. Stack like-sized containers into rows with their identifiers arranged so that they could be read. When the parade of subcontractors had subsided just a little, being able to find stuff by searching a list saved us a ton of time.

Yesterday Pam & me spent some time recycling empty cartons and rearranging the rows, the first time since the first triage. The bikes fit comfortably now and the idea of allocating some workshop space doesn’t seem so far off.

I need to spend a moment talking about the tools I used, mostly because it was a little different from the way I did it about a dozen years back. Back then it was a simple text file on a computer, which meant that I needed either the computer or a printed sheet to use the inventory. This time I used a document on Google shared using Google Drive. This meant that the inventory was always available no matter what device was handy. That was a big win. There were two downsides, though. The first is my own – I’m just not very effective with data entry on a phone. I don’t know how these kids do it. Voice input isn’t there yet. The second is that search blows, which is kind of funny since it’s Google. Search wasn’t terribly important until we hit the ground, so it was easy to turn the document into a portable and searchable PDF.

I guess I set the tone eight days before the moving van showed up when I took a crowbar to the master bath in the Jersey home for a ‘quick’ renovation. Needless to say, that went incomplete at showtime and I’ll need to go back to complete it before I hit the market. So what; I am a full-time Florida resident now.

This is the view from my office window. It’s a very pleasant change from NJ. Looks a little overcast and it’s a little chilly at some 50 degrees, but it’ll be in the mid 70s in a couple of hours.

I was pretty ambitions when I initially wrote about my plans back in July. I never actually documented the ups and downs of minding a construction project from so far away as I intended. I guess I’ll have to pick that up again.

For now, though, despite the inevitable screwups, it’s kinda nice. Got what passes for Internet service in rural Florida running a couple of days ago. The spa’s running and I had a good soak night before last under a pretty much full moon. The county signed off on all the trades yesterday, making us legal (we’ve been squatting in our own home for some 17 days). Yeah, kinda nice indeed.

More later. And this time I’ll deliver.

Just one more reason that I’m getting the fuck out of New Jersey, pronto.

Update: South Brunswick animal sacrifice found to be in compliance with state permits

SOUTH BRUNSWICK — All permits were found to be in compliance for the sacrificing of goats by a religious group on Friday at a Dey Road site.

Detective Sgt. James Ryan said officials from the New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals visited and determined the activities were consistent with state permits.

At about 11:30 a.m., township police received reports that members of a religious group were conducting animal sacrifices on Dey Road. Police checked with state officials and local animal control officials to see if a religious group has permission to sacrifice animals.

Ryan said group members told police they had a permit from the state Department of Agriculture to sacrifice a group of goats penned up near a white house on Dey Road, about 50 yards off of a two-lane country road near the Cranbury border.

South Brunswick animal control officers also responded to the scene. Ryan said the property had a large pen containing the goats.

The kid behind the counter glanced at me, I met his eye and said simply, “Coffee. Black.” The kid turned to his work… and turned back almost immediately with my black. The girl sputtered, started getting arrogant. I smiled and slid a fin, a crazy over-payment for the black, across the counter, turned and walked away. I didn’t look back.

I wouldn’t mind meeting up with her again in the middle of the apocalypse, watching her cope. It’d be cheap entertainment.

Shocked? Well, the time has come.

Pam and I plan our lives on rather long timelines. We may not know what next week holds. But we know what we want to be doing along periods measured by several years or even decades. This chunk was to finish raising Damian, get him though High School and off to college. That part’s just about done. (I think we did a fine job of it, too. What parent doesn’t?)

So we’re off to Florida. Why the Sunshine State? Mostly for the endless motorcycle riding season. Central Florida holds some of the best riding on the east coast, and the best of that will be in our backyard. We figure it’ll hold our interest for many years to come.

Another big reason is that New Jersey is literally sucking us dry. Cost-of-living, taxes and more. So many hands in my pocket I can’t find my… well, you know. We stay here, by the time we’re ready to recreate full time there won’t be anything left.

So, we’re packing up. Taking our property, our money, our spending, our business, and all that other good stuff. Away. To where it’ll do US good.

So far we’ve acquired property, custom-designed/modified a plan (AutoCAD rocks!) for a home that’s perfect for us, contracted our builder… We’ll be breaking ground soon. And come 2013, not a dime more goes into New Jersey’s coffers. Yeah, it really feels damned good to write those words!

Over the coming months I’ll tell you more about this all-consuming adventure. You’ll hear about some of the cool people I’m meeting and doing business with.

WTF, maybe you’ll end up following us down!

“Be seeing you.”

Yesterday we took a ride down, the first time this season. It just might be the last. Huh?

It’s ruined. The atmosphere is, well, gone. Where to begin…

In the past, the first thing you’d see were the potted plants and trees, even a fake palm. Gone. Now just a sign announcing SECURITY and ID requirements. The outside seating, once tall tables and chairs, now replaced by low, slouch-style plastic seating. It’s comfortable enough, I guess, but encourages sleeping, not socialization. What’s worse, the view from the low seats is now dominated by railing, not ocean and beach. We went for their Sangria, once pretty good, but they no longer offered it. We quickly switched to beers. We were hungry for a little lunch but no, there was no menu, no food for love or money. Time and again I saw people sending one of their group out to the boardwalk to bring food back. The experience was a total disappointment – except for our server, who was competent and attentive.

Now, I’m not shy so I asked around. (I won’t give any clues about who I talked to; most were candid and deserve to keep their jobs.) It turns out that management changes had brought a series of changes. Employee protests had fallen on deaf ears. It’s as simple as that, a story we hear all too often. Was it just too early in the season? Nope, this is it. How’s business, overall? Okay, but not like it was – and trending downward. Any hope for change? Any hope for better drinks? Any hope for food? Those I talked to had heard it all before – from customers and fellow employees alike – but it just didn’t matter.

Only 4-5 weeks into the season? Could be trouble. Bummer, that.

I had a look at their Facebook page just now. The contrast between last year’s activity and now is like night and catfood. Yeah, that different.

I’m afraid I can’t, in good conscience, recommend this place anymore.

We left, much quicker that usual, to find nourishment elsewhere in town.

Well, I guess it was to be expected. The innards were choked with dust. The squirrel-cage fan on the graphics card, one of those big honkin’ GeForce cards, hardly had room to spin! I looked inside the box, looked at the can of Dust Off in my hand, looked back inside, thought about how many cans I might have in the basement store… Nah, this would never do.

So I set up a work table outside the garage door and hauled out my shop compressor. 100 PSI? I thought about the possibility of blowing components right off the motherboard, the moisture that would accumulate in that air after a few cycles… I changed the blowgun tip to something a little more diffuse and got to work.

It took a while. But when I was finished Thor’s innards once again looked like new. I closed the box, cleaned up my tools, wrestled the box back upstairs. And it wouldn’t boot.

Nothing really seemed out-of-place, I was careful with the air streams, I hadn’t forgotten any cables. Still, no boot. Or, more precisely, the pulsating orbs of Windows 7 starting up would halt and the blips of drive activity would take on a regularity that indicates a hang. To add an interesting twist, it booted nicely to Safe Mode.

Because of the way Windows works, this was pointing toward an issue with video. The card was obviously initializing so I replaced the driver and exercised the various modes. All looked fine but the situation was unchanged.

Maybe the boot drive was going south from running in all that heat before the cleanup, and the shock of moving stuff around pushed it over the edge. Before I went to work I imaged the drive. I could virtualize the image, recover Pam’s settings and apply them to a new Windows 7 install. As part of Thor’s long-overdue maintenance I planned to change out the boot drive for one of those hybrid drives I like and the drive was in there anyway, empty and waiting. The install media booted fine and the installation began. Wouldn’t you know, though, when the installer got the point that it boots the newly installed kernel, before personalization, it hung again!

Puzzling. The hardware POSTs, Safe Mode boots, a normal boot hangs, as does a new Windows install. Log checks in Safe Mode, as well as other diagnostics run from bootable media all seem okay. Everything pointed to a video issue.

So I pulled the GeForce card out, grabbed a loupe and looked it over. Aha! There was corrosion on some of the contacts! Cleaned ‘em up, that’s what I did, and coated ‘em with Stabilant. What’s that? From the tech notes…

Stabilant 22 is an initially non-conductive amorphous-semiconductive block polymer that when used in thin films within contacts acts under the effect of the electrical field and switches to a conductive state. The electric field gradient at which this occurs is established is during its manufacture so that the material will remain non-conductive.
Thus, when applied to electromechanical contacts, Stabilant 22 provides the connection reliability of a soldered joint without bonding the contacting surfaces together!

It’s amazing stuff. It’s also seriously expensive. It’s by far the most expensive fluid in the house. Old whisky? Nah. Even printer ink is way cheaper. But it works. On the good side, a little goes a long way. I’ve still got more than half of the 15 mL I bought back in 2006.

The graphics card slipped into its connector with friction-free ease. And not only did Thor POST faster than I’d ever seen it POST, but it booted like nothing had ever been amiss.

Approaches to responsibilities vary among students. These students were found sitting and chatting - not at all unlike real moms - while club activities went on around them. Across the room, another flour baby languished, abandoned face-down on a lab table.

On the convenience front, many students elect to provide care for a pseudo-baby, a small sack of flour that they get to carry around everywhere in their day-to-day life. I think they even need to dress the thing. I suppose (but I’m not sure) that at the end of a period of time the sack’s inspected for wear and tear. A couple of years back, with the assignment complete, one student ‘celebrated’ his regained freedom by hurling his sack across the gym up into the bleachers.

Turning to economics, the assignment has students researching the costs of the necessities of life, from food, shelter and transportation to phones and cable TV. The inevitable conclusion is that you really can’t afford it, especially in New Jersey.

So where’s the spam come in? In at least one instance, a required source of research material was a commercial Website where the student was compelled to register with their email address. Recognizing the potential problem, we created a new email address specifically for this purpose. It turned out to be a worthwhile precaution. The spam received there swelled until the account was shut down. But the school apparently passes student information to others, too. The assault on our physical mailbox continues. It started with the magazines that target new parents and grew from there to include envelopes full of coupons, pitches from insurance companies, photographers, doctors, drug companies, internet services like picture and social sites, and a whole lot more. Some companies send samples, too: diapers, formula and so on.

And once the spammers get going you know they don’t stop.

In fact, I saw an interesting somewhat related Forbes article where a dad found out about his daughter’s pregnancy by way of advertising from Target. Pretty creepy stuff.

Google+ just rocks. I’ve met more smart, creative people on Google+ than you can shake a stick at. There’s a lot of stuff that Google’s gotten right with Google+, and the features just keep coming. It’s open social, wrapped around the whole (online) world. If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend having a look.

Facebook is, well, Facebook. People had been pestering me, to one extent or another, and yet I resisted. So after years of holding out I finally took an account there some months back. Over the Christmas holidays I became a little more aggressive about establishing relationships which, as everyone knows, must be reciprocal. Managing Facebook is, frankly, a pain in the ass. But I have been catching some up with people I forgot I knew. Remember that old platitude, “we are the people our parents warned us about”?

I’ve drawn the line at games and apps on those platforms. They’re just too invasive. The closest I came was with a billiards game on Google+. It looked interesting, like it might be fun while I waited for this process or that to finish, so I ran the installer. The first thing it did immerse me in a competitive world of other players. Statistics,rankings, invitations to play, and more! All I wanted to do was bang some balls around now and then, not make a career out of it! I uninstalled, and so much for that.

I guess I’ve got some stuff to fix.

Sometime after the build, Seagate brought their hybrid drives to market. Hybrids combine a conventional spinning disk and conventional cache with a few gigabytes of SLC NAND memory configured as a small SSD. The system sees the drive as it would any other drive; an Adaptive Memory (Seagate proprietary) algorithm monitors data use and keeps frequently used stuff on the SSD. You’ll find people arguing over whether or not a hybrid drive provides any kind of performance boost. I wrote about my experiences with the Seagate Momentus XT (ST95005620AS) back in June 2010. Today when I build a multiple drive system I routinely spec a hybrid as a boot drive. It’s cheap and it helps.

So about a month ago I ran across a good deal on a fast SSD, a Corsair Force Series GT (CSSD-F240GBGT-BK) and I jumped on it. The specs are just tits: sequential reads and writes of 555 and 525 MB/s respectively. (Sure, that was with a SATA 3 interface and my motherboard only supports SATA 2; I wouldn’t see numbers like that, but still… It even looks great.

Integrating the thing into a working system was a bit of a challenge, mostly because I didn’t want to purchase additional software simply to clone the existing boot drive. I’ve got no trouble paying for software I use; it simply seemed like too much for something to be used but once. So part of the challenge was to find a cost-free alternative.

Strategy and Concerns

The general strategy would be to clone the current two-partition boot drive to the SSD, swap it in and enjoy the performance boost. The SSD partitions would need to be aligned, of course, and somewhere along the way the C partition would need to shrink to fit onto the smaller SSD.

The top concerns came down to security and reliability. Erasing a conventional hard drive is easy: repeatedly write random data to each block. You can’t do that with SSDs. Their blocks have a specific (and comparatively short) lifetime and so on-board wear-leveling routines become important. When data is overwritten, for example, the drive writes the data elsewhere and marks the old blocks for reuse. And unlike conventional drives, it’s not enough to simply write over a block marked for reuse; the entire block must first be erased. The bottom line is you can’t ever know with certainty whether or not a SSD is ever clear of confidential data. Disposing of them securely, then, means total destruction.

As for reliability, a conventional hard drive has to have some pretty serious problems before it becomes impossible to recover at least some data. There’s generally a bit of warning – they get noisy, start throwing errors, or something else that you notice – before they fail completely. Most often an SSD will simply fail. From working to not, just like that. And when that happens there’s not much to be done. This makes the issue of backups a little more thorny. If it contained confidential data at the time of failure you’ve got a hard choice to make: eat the cost and destroy the device, or RMA it back to the manufacturer (losing control of your data).

Considering backups, you can see that monolithic backups aren’t the best solution because they’re outdated as soon as they’re written. Instead, a continuous backup application, one that notices and writes changed files, with versioning, seems prudent.

In my case, this is to be a Windows 7 boot drive and and all confidential user data is already on other storage. The Force Series GT drive has a 2,000,000 hour MTBF, fairly high.

Software

SSDs are fast but they’re relatively small. It’s almost certain that existing boot partitions will be too big to fit and mine is no exception. Windows 7 Disk Manager will allow you to resize partitions if the conditions on those partitions are exactly right. There are commercial programs that will do the job where Windows won’t but my favorite is MiniTool Partition Wizard. I didn’t really want to do that in this instance. The fundamental problem I had with pre-shrinking is that it would involve mucking with a nicely working system. Come trouble, I wanted to simply pop my original drive back in the system, boot and get back to work.

For cloning and shrinking partitions there are several free or almost free applications. I found that most of them have drawbacks of one sort or another. I’ve used Acronis before – Acronis supplies OEM versions of their True Image software to some drive manufacturers, it’s an excellent product. But their free product won’t resize a partition image, bummer. I used EaseUS some years back, too, but a bad run-in once with their “rescue media” – in that case a bootable USB stick. My disks got hosed pretty bad from simply booting the thing and I… wasn’t pleased. Maybe they’ve gotten better, people say good things about ‘em, but I wasn’t confident… Paragon seemed very highly rated but in testing I had too many validation failures with their images. Apparently the current version is worse than the back revs. Whatever, I was still uneasy. I ended up settling on Macrium Reflect from Paramount Software UK Ltd. For no rational reason the name of this product bothered me, sending it to the bottom of the test list. Macrium. The word makes me think of death by fire. I was reluctant to even install it. About the only negative think I’ve got to say about Macrium is that it takes a fair bit of effort to build the ‘rescue disk’ – bootable media to allow you to rebuild a failed boot volume from your backup image(s). The rescue media builder downloads and installs, from a Microsoft site, the Windows Automated Installation Kit. WAIK weighs in at more than 2 GB. The end result is a small ISO from which you can make bootable media of your choice. Except for that final burn – you’re on your own for that – the process is mostly automated; it just takes a while. Probably has to do with licensing or something.

Finally, I bought a copy of Genie Timeline Pro to provide the day-to-day realtime backup insurance, mentioned earlier, that I wanted.

Preparation for Migration

I started by installing both Gene Timeline Pro and Macrium Reflect and familiarized myself with each. I built the rescue media for each, booted from the media, and restored stuff to a spare drive in order to test. It’s an important step that many omit, but a backup that doesn’t work, for whatever reason, is worse than no backup at all.

I did some additional maintenance and configuration which would affect the C: partition. I disabled indexing and shrunk the page file to 2GB. The box has 8GB RAM and never pages. I suppose I could omit the page file entirely, but a warning is better than a BSOD for failure to page. I got rid of all the temp junk and performed the usual tune-up steps that Windows continues to need from time to time.

Satisfied, I imaged the System Reserved partition and the C: partition of my boot volume, verifying the images afterward. For each partition, which I backed up with separate operations, I used the Advanced Settings in Macrium Reflect to make an Intelligent Sector copy. This means that unused sectors aren’t copied, effectively shrinking the images. Then I installed the SSD via an eSATA port. Yes, this meant it would run even slower than SATA 2 but it saved a trip inside the box.

It was at this step that I noticed the only negative thing about this drive. The SATA cable is a bit of a loose fit. It doesn’t accept a retaining clip, if your cable is so equipped. Ensure there’s no tension on a cable that might dislodge it.

Creating Aligned Partitions

Partition alignment is important on SSDs both for performance and long life. Because of the way they work, most will read and write 4K pages. A very simplistic explanation is that when a partition is not aligned on a 4K boundary, most writes will require two pages rather than one which decreases performance dramatically and wears the memory faster. (There’s more to it than that, really, but you can seek that out on your own. The Web’s a great teacher. Being the curious sort I learned more than I needed to.)  Windows 7, when IPLed, will notice the SSD and build correctly aligned partitions for you. Some commercial disk cloning software will handle it automatically, too. But migrating users are on their own. Incidentally, it’s theoretically possible to adjust partition alignment on the fly, but if you think about the logistics of how this might be done – shifting an entire partition this way or that by some number of 512 byte blocks to a 4K boundary – you’ll realize it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Better to simply get it right in the first place.

Fortunately it’s easy!

Using an elevated command prompt (or, in my case, a PowerShell), use DISKPART. In my case, my existing System Reserved partition was 71 MB and change, and the remainder of the SSD would become my C: partition.

diskpart
list disk
select disk <n> (where <n>is the disk number of the SSD)
create partition primary size=72 align=1024
active (the System Reserved partition needs to be Active)
create partition primary align=1024 (no size specification means use the remaining available space)
exit

You can also use DISKPART to check the alignment. I’ll use mine as an example.

diskpart
list disk
select disk <n> (where <n>is the disk number of the SSD)
list partition
exit

My partition list looks like this.

Partition ### Type             Size    Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1   Primary           70 MB 1024 KB
Partition 2   Primary          223 GB   73 MB

To check the alignment, divide the figure in the Offset column, expressed in kilobytes, by 4. If it divides evenly then it’s aligned. For Partition 1, the System Reserved partition, 1024 / 4 = 256, so it’s good. Partition 2′s Offset is expressed in megabytes so we have to convert to kilobytes first by multiplying it by 1024. So, 73 * 1024 = 74752 and 74752 / 4 = 18688, so it’s good, too.

Whew!

It’s worth noting that what DISKPART didn’t show in the list is the tiny unused space – about 2MB in my case – between Partition 1 and Partition 2 which facilitated alignment.

Someone pointed out to me that partition alignment can be checked without DISKPART. Fire up msinfo32. Expand Components, then expand Storage, then select Disks. Find the drive in question and divide the Partition Starting Offset fields by 4096. If it divides evenly you’re all set!

Migration

I used Macrium Reflect to restore the partition images I created earlier. Rather than allowing the software to create the partitions (which would negate our alignment effort) I pointed it to each target partition in turn. When the restore was finished I shut the system down.

I pulled the SSD from the eSATA port and pulled the existing boot drive from the system. I mounted the SSD in place of the old boot drive. (Windows gets upset when it finds multiple boot drives at startup, so it’s a good idea to have just one.) I took extra care with the data cable.

I powered up and entered the system BIOS, walked through the settings applicable to a drive change, saved and booted.  Things looked good.

Living With the SSD

Wow! Coldstarts are fast. (See below.) So fast that getting through the BIOS has become the perceived bottleneck. Applications start like lightning, especially the first time, before Windows caches them. Shutdowns are snappy, too. (See below.) There’s no shortage of anecdotes and benchmarks on the ‘net and I’m sure you’ve seen them. It’s all delightfully true.

But all wasn’t perfect. After a week or two some new patterns seemed to be emerging.

Every so often, unexpectedly, the system would become unresponsive with the drive use LED full-on solid, for some tens of seconds. Most of the time the system would return to normal operation but depending on what application was doing what at the time, the period of unresponsiveness could sometimes cause a crash. Sometimes the crash would be severe enough to bring on a BSOD. The biggest problem I have with BSODs or other hard crashes is that it causes the mirrored terabyte data drives to resync, and that takes a while. Usually the System Log would show Event ID 11 entries like this associated with the event:

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort6.

And once, following a BSOD, the boot drive was invisible to the BIOS at restart! A hard power cycle made it visible again and Whisky booted normally, as though nothing abnormal had ever occurred.

Hard to say for sure, but it seemed as though these oddities were happening with increasing frequency.

Firmware Update

Prowling the ‘net I found others reporting similar problems. What’s more, Corsair was on the case and had a fresh firmware update! The update process, they claimed, was supposed to preserve data. I checked my live backup and made new partition images anyway. The drive firmware update itself went exactly as described, took but seconds and left the data intact. The next boot had Windows installing new (or maybe just reinstalling?) device drivers for the drive, which then called for another boot. All this booting used to be a pain in the ass but when the box boots in seconds you tend to not mind that much.

Benchmark performance after the update was improved, but only marginally – nothing I’d actually notice. The troublesome hangs I mentioned seem to occur on bootup now, when they occur at all. They seem less ‘dangerous’ because they don’t interrupt work in progress at that time. So far, anyway, I just wait out the length boot and log in, followed by a cold shutdown. The next coldstart invariably goes normally, that is, very, very fast.

What’s going on? Maybe some periodic housekeeping going on in the drive? Maybe some housekeeping that was underway when I interrupted with a shutdown? Or maybe it’s that data cable? Remember, I mentioned it’s sort of a loose fit without a retainer clip. Time will tell.

Videos

I goes without saying that SSDs are fast. Many people like to judge that by how fast Windows loads. I threw together a couple of videos to illustrate.

System Startup with SSD
00.00 - Sequence start
01.30 - Power on
04.06 - Hardware initialization
13.20 - Video signal to monitors
15.83 - BIOS
23.93 - Windows Startup
39.83 - Login prompt
44.93 - Password entry complete
54.50 - Ready to work

Power on to Windows startup duration is 22.63 seconds.
Windows startup to login prompt duration is 15.90 seconds.
Password entry to ready-to-work duration is 9.57 seconds.

System Shutdown with SSD

00:00:00 - Sequence start
00:08.32 - Shutdown initiated
00:24.27 - Shutdown complete

Shutdown initiation to power off duration: 15.95 seconds.

http://boingboing.net/2011/11/11/stop-sopa-save-the-internet.html