Another solution for SSD: EWF?

It really depends on what's causing your ewf memory to fill, most common reason is the browser's cache(windows paging file and system restore should have been disabled by now), and as discussed before most folks move their browser cache to a separate SDHC card. If you are using Firefox, moving its cache folder to SDHC, can be done as described here http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/11/2 ... her-drive/ . There should be a similar procedure if you are using Internet Explorer.
Other than that, it really depends on what you are using your aspire_one for and what applications are causing ewf to fill. Whatever it is, best solution looks like shifting read/write intensive operations to a dedicated SD/SDHC.

 

1. is buying an extra sd card a must? can't we just partition in internal sd and use ewftool instead?
2. is there a difference between sd or sdhc? which one should i buy as 1gb.
2. disabling windows prefetch isnt mentioned, is it good or bad, strat-up time isn't important for me

thanks in advance

 

hi all,

i was not able to go fast with my pc until i have made these commands

should i do these commands every time i use my pc (i don't hope so...)?

ciao
bob

 

Thought I'd chip my 2 cents in:

For those of you running the 8gig Linux cheap-skate version like me:

I'd think carefully before committing to EWF (no pun intended). I bought this thing as a cheap, throwaway PC so I didn't want to plough money into memory upgrades etc. As such I'm running on an unmodded AA1 which the only addition being an old 500mb SD card.

Just like everyone else here I have found that the performance of Win XP is very poor, and thought I'd give EWF a go. The good news is that it works like a dream and XP runs like Usain Bolt, the bad news is that there's a very good reason for that; you're effectively removing your hard drive for the duration of your windows session and replacing it with a RAM disk. Windows is going to run very fast if everything is stored in main memory because main memory is considerably faster than any HDD /SSD, that is why modern computers still contain RAM.

This is fine if you're only going to write a small amount of data during your session (such as for web browsing, office documents, etc.) but is no good if you want to do anything more computationally expensive (games, multi-media, etc.). With the 512mb AA1 you simply do not have enough memory to devote half of it to being a storage partition. To make matters worse most articles also advise that you switch off your page file. Not only are you dumping data into your RAM that should be going to the disk but you're also preventing the OS from caching data out of memory. Very soon the whole thing collapses around its ears and you will see the all too familiar "Delayed Write" errors which are usually a precursor to a complete system lock-up. You will also find that all the cached data in your main memory is conveniently wiped when you are forced to perform a hard shut-down.

Now I'm not saying "Don't use EWF". For many people who use their Netbook as a.... Netbook this is an ideal solution to the constant hangs which plague XP on the AA1. However it's important that you don't confuse the sudden "speed boost" of EWF with a genuinely fast system. A fast system can run games and multimedia whereas your system can run them for the brief time it takes your memory to fill up and your system to crash. If you are looking for a netbook which will do more than web browsing then in my opinion you should consider trading in your 8gb SSD for one of the better models with an HDD and WinXP preloaded.

Cheers,

 

Further to the above, one technology which does seem to offer some promise is "SteadyState":

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum ... hp?t=47183

It's a Microsoft tool which functions in a similar way to EWF but uses the disk instead of RAM. Apparently, because all the writing is performed sequentially there is a noticeable performance boost over regular writes (which are random). I've not tried it, but I intend to give it a go at some point and will report back.

Cheers

 

Sorry for three posts in a row but I've also stumbled across another possible:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/pag ... _14_0.html

"Flashpoint" is a driver which buffers writes to the RAM to improve disk performance. It's in BETA at the moment but has seemed pretty stable so far. Performance is obviously nowhere near EWF but there is a noticeable improvement and it means I can use my hard disk again (even re-enabled the paging file).

Cheers,

 

Hi, I followed the tutorial in this thread for installing EWF posted by IDQ and now my Aspire is useable, it's really really quick.

Thankyou for the instructions.

 

Does EWF works well with Flashpoint?

 

I'm not sure... It would probably be okay whilst it was working, but if you ran out of memory I expect it would die a quick and possibly disk-corrupting death. I've been using Flashpoint for a while now and have found XP to run just as fast as my desktop machine so I see no reason why you'd need to use EWF as well.

Cheers,

 

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

Help. I'm losing saved files

Hi,

i have a big trouble. I've implemented this EWF in my Acer Aspire One. Now this pc is faster and usable.

But the problem is that I've saved photos in a new folder. After a reboot this folder and these files are lost. There are any photo and any folder. I've lost this important files

Is there any way to fin these files again?

Thanks for you help

Ciao
Roberto

 

Re: Help. I'm losing saved files

If you saved the photos in the new folder with EWF active, I have some bad news for you.
Since the EWF is using the ram based overlay approach in the above scenario, unless you remembered to commit the writes to disk before shutdown, all the files only existed in the ram based overlay and never on disk. That means they are lost now.

EWF functions in one of two ways, either as a disk-based overlay, or as a ram-based overlay. The reason you have installed EWF, is to speed up the operation on an SSD equipped AAO, which means you are using the ram-based overlay method. If you shutdown the AAO without manually commiting any changes to the SSD disk, the changes gone.
You have to remember to commit writes to the disk before shutting down, if you want the changes stored.

Read more about the EWF filter here : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... .5%29.aspx

 

I've just created a batch file with this content:

ewfmgr c: -commit

and put a shortcut to the batch file in the startup folder. That command in the batch file sets the boot command of EWF to commit. So everytime I shut down my netbook the data stored in RAM is written to the disk first.
I've also created two partitions on the SSD with Easeus Partition Manager(it's free), one 3GB for XP on which EWF is enabled and 4,5GB for data without EWF.
Since I've configured my netbook like that I rarely use my full sized notebook any more :mrgreen:
Just for fun run an atto benchmark with EWF enabled
Aspire One + EWF + Firefox 3.5 = WIN!

 

Does Not Compute... A batchfile located in the StartUp folder will be executed upon boot of Windows. Not upon shutdown of Windows. Unless you manually execute the batchfile before chosing to shutdown, your writes won't be commited to the harddisk, but just be in the rambased overlay and therefore get lost upon shutdown.

 

Re: Help. I'm losing saved files

Hi dutch,
many thanks for your reply
You have answered in a very experienced way but I hope that somebody else could give me some methods to obtain that photos again...........that photos are so important...

In any case, in the past i've saved some files on that pc and they were not lost....in other cases they disappeared....why?

Ciao

 

The ewfmgr will remember the last command you gave, so when you shutdown Windows it will execute what you told in the startup batch file. You can check this by executing 'ewfmgr c:' whithout additional command, it will just display the current status. Under boot command it will therefore display 'commit' if you do it like I wrote.

 

Re: Help. I'm losing saved files

The only way to get the photos back are from your memory card in the camera - assuming you haven't refilled it with more pictures.
The ones you put on your AAO are gone - it only saved them to RAM and when you powered down....zappo.
There are many image recovery programs (free and paid for), if you have Sandisk cards, they normally come with a mini-CD with an image recovery program.

 

I would like to know how could i do to save my files on this pc without losing them at next startup

thanks for your help

 

Best thing you can do is get a large sd card in the left slot and move the My Documents folder to the sd card. But first you must make windows see your sd card as a fixed hard drive. Google "Hitachi Global Storage Technologies driver" download it and use it as the driver for that card slot instead of the default microsoft one.

good luck

oscar

 

Hello and two first comments: thank you to all the contributors to this forum which has allowed me to make my AAO much more pleasant to use! Second, I'm preparing this post off line so if the format comes across goofy I'm sorry, I have several questions.

I purchased an AAO with 8Gig SSD and WinXP. I cleaned out a lot of the stock packages and use Firefox and Thunderbird, and MSWord and MSExcel. By moving the Firefox cache to my D drive I got significant browser improvement before I installed EWF. More on that later.

I made the registry entries by hand from the first post. I noticed in the post that gave the .reg scripts that the keys affected are different than those in the first post. While I have no reason to believe my install is incomplete, are there any critical keys that aren't included in the first post?

Is there a way to monitor memory usage with base tools? I see in the Windows performance monitor some trends of memory but I'm really not sure what I'm looking at. I have 1GB of system memory, so if EWF is grabbing 256Meg, what am I supposed to be watching to avoid a system crash? Near the end of this thread I see a memory monitor someone has contributed: is this the best tool to add to my desktop if I don't want to keep dropping into cmd mode and running ewfmgr? I see my memory usage ramps up to 20-30 megs quickly then seems to stabilize. My prime use of the AAO is email/browsing/iTunes while away from my home systems or while watching TV, etc. elsewhere in the house.

By moving the Windows TMP & TEMP directories to my SD card D drive have I simply moved from one slow memory to another and will I be contributing to accelerated aging of the SD cards? I routinely backup my C drive but if I don't typically backup my D drive but that's where my iTunes podcasts are stored (not much music, mainly podcasts). If my ewf managed storage seldom goes above 40 Meg based on my usage habits wouldn't I be better off putting the Firefox and Windows temp files back on C?

I used to seldom turn off the AAO because it took so long to come back to a usable state and I'd just put it to standby before leaving the house (disabled lid close actions). Now I shut it down when I'm done using it as startup and shutdown is so quick so my cached operations have never been huge. I've added the -commit command to my startup folder so I don't have to mess with ewfmgr except to monitor memory usage.

Lastly, I see activity in this thread has dropped. Does that just mean the topic has been well covered (which I think is true), or is there another thread that I should be following?

Thanks again for all the great information!