SSD activity light active when laptop switched off?

googler

Just installed a Solid State Drive on a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop.

All seems well, except that when I shut down the machine, the drive activity light keeps flashing, long after the screen has gone blank and the fans have stopped.

I can't believe this is normal behaviour, and I'm sort of wary of unplugging it now, don't want to do this when the drive is active....

anotheruser

Have you actually shut down or did you just close the lid?
Take the battery out, it'll turn off then!

googler

I've shut it down with the Shut Down option within Windoze.

Taking the battery out will have the same effect as unplugging it - removing the power whilst it's active, which may not be the best policy......

googler

Also, I seem to be missing the much-vaunted speed that's promised by SSDs - it boots up quickly, but it's painfully slow in other respects.

S0litaire

What version of windows are you using?

Was it a new install or one from a recovery disk?

If it;s a new install then windows should recognise that you have a SSD and change a few internal settings accordingly

if it was from a recovery disk then windows might think it's still using a spinny disk hard drive and that can cause a few problems (defrag running constantly in the background is one that hurts SDD and can slow the system down)

googler

Fresh install of Win XP SP2 from the original install disc that came with the machine. Downloaded SP3 once I had the machine online.

I followed a few online tips, such as turning off pre-fetch, etc (didn't keep a note of which), to no avail.

The defrag panel carries no indication that it's running automatically - I've always defragged manually in the past.

GoldenNugget

Don't SSD's do a thing called 'wear levelling' when they are dormant and have power on them?

S0litaire

Yup it's called "TRIM"

Basically it self tidies the SSD (by freeing up deleted sections of the chips so the next item stored their happens quicker.) and a few other technical things.

Though it usually does this in the background when the PC is powered on.

It might just be clearing the "cache". Usually when you save a document it's stored for a short while in memory before writing it to the drive on one large dump. This is to cut down on the many small changes that are written to the drive in normal operation. This gives better power efficacy and speed as well as increasing the longevity of the drive.

With some drives this is turned off by default (fast disk access and reliability means that this is not usually required)

With some flash and removable drives it's stuck on by default as it's more reliable to push the data on to a flash drive in one big lump in case it's accidentally removed. That's why you sometimes get a "preparing to remove" message when you eject a USB stick from your PC.

Nilrem

Does windows XP even have the ability to see that it's an SSD? (iirc you had to install drivers with some versions of windows to tell it how to behave with the SSD).

Having said that, even if you tell the machine to shut down, if there are updates pending installation it will be doing that for a while after it starts to shut down.

googler

Nilrem wrote: »

Does windows XP even have the ability to see that it's an SSD? (iirc you had to install drivers with some versions of windows to tell it how to behave with the SSD).

Does it need to? There's all sorts of hints all over the web for tweaking SSDs with XP, so the authors of those obviously think they're generally compatible


Having said that, even if you tell the machine to shut down, if there are updates pending installation it will be doing that for a while after it starts to shut down.

It's shut down totally, has been since last night, the drive activity light was flashing when I went to bed, and it's still flashing now, some 8-9 hours later - a regular twice or thrice per second flashing.

almillar

1. DON'T DEFRAG SSDs. DON'T!
2. Windows XP doesn't know what an SSD is. Why are you still using XP?
3. You should have the BIOS set to AHCI for an SSD when you install in, then a fresh install of Windows 7 or 8 SHOULD activate TRIM (see above) to make efficient use of the space.
4. REMEMBER NOT TO DEFRAG!