SSD and Rollback

[sheldon]

I've currently bought an SSD and have read a lot about installation and changes of system preferences to be done. More than once, it has been written that tools with permanent imaging of the system drive (like True Image Try&Decide, Rebit, Goback, RollbackRx ...) are not good for the SSD.

I wonder whether installation of Rollback on a different partition on my other HDD (drive T in my case) could be a solution. Rollback would than protect T: on HDD and System drive C: on SSD.

Has anybody tried that or has information about using Rollback on a SSD drive? Thanks in advance

[HDS-Jacob]

Hi sheldon! Thanks for stopping by the forum.

I found a thread that relates to Solid State Drives here:
http://horizondatasys-forum.com/roll...new-drive.html

Here is what I found on the knowledge base for Solid State Drives:
Horizon DataSys Support Portal

Hope that helps!

[Mr.Patrick]

ssd´s with trim does not work with products like rollback, eaz and comodo time machine, trim will whack profiles user settings and all your snapshots

the ssd market is expanding rapidly and theese tools would be perfect for ssd´s, unfortunately they do not work, ssd (trim) users downloading trialversions will learn the hard way

i think comodo is now working on a solution

[cwm9]

I own an x-25m with rollback installed and it is the most pleasant computing experience I have ever had. I have zero complaints, and nothing but praise. (Just don't run any trim utilities!)

As for "bad for the drive," I think that's just a lot of nonsense. I am a hard core user, on my system nearly every hour of every day, and my SMART still shows the drive to not even have had a single failed block.

People way overestimate how much writing they do on a daily basis. The drive can tolerate something on the order 20 gigabytes worth of erasures and rewrites EVERY DAY and still last 5 years. In 5 years SSDs will be so cheap you'll be able to replace your worn out drive for a song and a dance -- that is if you can even sustain that kind of write volume.

Worrying about a good SSD's lifespan is more for transaction oriented volume computing, like hospital-sized medical records databases or stock transaction systems.

I mean, think about it. Even if you were downloading 24/7 nonstop at 500 kiloBYTES per seocnd off of the internet, you could only download 41GB per day. That's just twice the rated performance, and your drive would still last 2.5 years. Who downloads that much data to a solid state drive?!

People are worried that because rollback moves data around when you do a defragment this will cause the drive to wear out. Assuming you needed to move 10% of the drive around every time you did a defragment (and that's seems like a lot to me), that's only 8gb/day on a 80gb drive, less than half the rated value.

But the thing is, because the drive is a monster at random reads and writes, you don't need to do a defragment unless you need to reclaim drive space anyway.

So I just turned off auto-defragmenting and when my drive space gets a little low I delete any snapshots I don't want and do a manual rollback defragment.

You never have to worry about doing a real deframgent again. You never have to think about uninstalling and reinstalling to get decent performance.


Will it scream along like a non-rollback striped SSD system? Of course not. Will it rock the pants off any non-rollback regular hard drive? You bet your bottom dollar.


Compared to using a normal hard drive, the system responds incredibly fast and I don't even notice that rollback is installed. In the old days if I had too many snapshots the computer would start to crawl.

Do it. Don't think twice.

[HDS-Jacob]

Thanks for posting and stopping by the forum!

Looks like the link I posted for the knowledge base didn't include the page with the search result so I'm copying it here:

Knowledge Base
Horizon DataSys > Rollback RX Pro > Will it work with... > 64GB Solid State Drive? USB Thumb drive? Flash Drive?

Rollback Rx will only protect Drive Zero (the primary drive). If your primary drive is a solid state drive, then it must meet the following criteria:

NTFS file system
Uses "standard" Windows drivers
Does your particular solid stare drive meet these criteria? The easiest way to tell is to install Rollback Rx on your particular drive and see if it will work.

If your solid state drive is not the primary, then Rollback will not protect it. It can, however, be used as a target for an Offline Save. The same is true for USB Thumb Drives, etc.

[FyrmnJ]

I have been using an Intel SSDSA2MH080G1GC 80gig hard drive for quite a few months without trim support and have had no problems with rollbackRX

[sheldon]

Thank you for all your input. I'm really glad to hear that Rollback works with SSD without problems.

By the way, I use a Ramdisk (Gavotte Software) and have put the Windows temp files and cache of my browser there to reduce writing on my SSD

[sheldon]

@Mr. Patrick
I've just learned the 'hard way'. I had tested another programm the last few weeks (Rebit) and had activated weekly Trim in Intel SSD Toolbox. When installing Rollback again this week, I forgot to unable Trim and just had a terrible crash. No way to start system again, no way to start from a previous snapshot. (I'm writing on my netbook now, Image is currently written back to my PC).

What I am really angry about is that Horizon does NOT mention this on their homepage under 'Will it work'. It's you, the users in this forum which mention it.

Meanwhile my system is back working again, thanks Acronis. Never ever use Rollback without an image. I'm currently using Rollback for more than a year and it's a great piece of software, I feel naked without. BUT you have to be careful and in my opinion only for experienced pc users.

Another question: Intel SSD's are known that they will not loose performance even without TRIM. Should it be recommended for Rollback users only to buy Intel SSD???

[Mr.Patrick]

i'm sorry to hear that sheldon
firstly you should not be angry at rollback specificly, all similar software products on the market has this problem, no developer that i'm aware of will flag trim enabled ssd's as unusable "maybe they should"

trim is enabled by default on windows7 pc's set in ahci by using the default driver that supports trim, to disable trim you must disable this via registry or install an unsupported driver to not post this command (unconventional methods).. but don't sheldon, intel did not come up with trim for no reason
it does extend the life of your ssd, trim makes sure your ssd does not fill up thus keeping speed in pristine shape, why would you not want to use trim?

for now any conventional product to backup your sectors will do fine for ssd using trim, but i to would like a snapshotting util to be used for my ssd and preferrably that would be rollback

i'm guessing most are looking into this right now because anyone who doesn't will loose a great market share.
it will change sheldon, by posting experiences like this will quicken the process

[sheldon]

@Mr. Patrick
Thanks for your info. I feel really sad that Rollback and Comodo as well do have problems with SSD, trim ...

Do I understand you correctly? Your advise is NOT to use Rollback until Horizon has solved the problem with the SSD? Which software do you use actually?

I really love this kind of snapshot software, but really hate all the restrictions about taking images, changing partitions, ramdisk, Trim ....

Are you familiar with the Rebit software? It's a file-to-file backup which is kind of imaging tool, rollback and single file backup. The wrong point for me is that it only takes one restore point daily and you can't force a manual one. Otherwise it would be perfect.