Re-Imaging question

[skitron]

I have a Phoenix Pro 60 (#1) with poor write performance. I also have a new PP60 (#2) that has excellent performance.

So I used Paragon Disk Mgmt v11 to backup an image of #1 to HDD and then restored it to #2. Paragon supports auto alignment for the restore to SSD.

However, #2 peformed poorly like #1 upon imaging it.

After I did secure erase to #2 it performs as new again.

It seems as if the image includes whatever garbage is slowing the drive down.

Is there a way to re-image and also restore performance?

Or is the only option to secure erase and then reload OS and software (and save this 'clean' image for future need)?

[G.SKILL]

Hi,

if your SSD were using heavy usage, it will cause the performance decrease as your case, however, there's no other way to restore the performance except secure erase.

[skitron]

Success!

I was able to successfully restore performance of the Phoenix Pro 60 without reloading OS and all of the software. There are probably other tools that can accomplish the same thing but these are the ones I used and how I was able to do it:

1) Use Paragon Disk Manager Suite v11 (PDMS) to migrate an image of the slow SSD to another drive (i.e. not a backup but a true migration). The other drive does not need to be SSD.

2) Next use Parted Magic to secure erase the SSD (note that PM disk is slow to boot). The latest Parted Magic does not seem to have separate options to do secure erase and apparently does it when deleting all partitions from the drive. Leave drive unpartitioned.

3) Next use PDMS to migrate the image back to the SSD from the other drive. Use the 'Migrate to SSD' option since it will create properly aligned partition and apparently copy just the sector 'real' data as opposed to literal cloning of all bytes on drive.

4) This step should probably not be necessary but I had to do it for my dual boot system. If the drive will not boot (saying corrupt winload.exe) it can be fixed using Vista Boot Pro. Simply delete the boot manager entry for the SSD and re-enter it (so the missing OS drive will show up in the BCD entries). Also, you might need to temporarily reset bios for IDE instead of AHCI if system won't boot, then change it back after first boot into OS.

And that is it. 4K write went from 50K to 164K, 4K read went from 100K to 136K and OS and all programs working perfectly with no reinstall of any software required.