New SSD User - Advice?

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Bisectors Fore

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 24, 2008
Messages
480
I recently purchased my first SSD, the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB as an upgrade to my now 4-year-old gaming PC. Installation went fine; the OS definitely seems to start up faster, although I was hoping to see more of a before/after difference in the load times for games coming from an older Western Digital 7200rpm drive.

Additionally, when running the benchmarking software that came with the SSD, I get ~270MB/s sequential read and ~256 sequential write. This is definitely an improvement over my mechanical hard drives, but also significantly lower than the advertised 540/520MB/s read/write speeds for the SSD. I know that these speeds are going to be limited in my case because my (X58) motherboard only has SATA II ports and not SATA III, but I'm not sure to what extent that would be a factor.

I've searched around a bit on the web looking for info on installing/optimizing performance with SSDs, but there doesn't seem to be anything obvious that jumps out at me. I'm hoping some of the more experienced SSD users on here can weigh in as to whether or not those numbers seem normal for my situation, and also if there are any other hardware or software tweaks that might improve them. System specs below FWIW. Many thanks!

CPU: i7 920 @2.66Ghz

Mobo: Asus P6T Deluxe (v1)

RAM: 12GB DDR3 1333
 
Your speeds being reduced by half could be explained by your motherboard not having any Sata 6GB/s ports like you have mentioned. Your SSD is plugged into a Sata II port which is 3Gb/s. The only fix is to upgrade your computer I believe.
 
For best performance:

1. Make sure you are using the Intel SATA II ports
2. Set them in AHCI mode

or

buy a lga1155 system.

Remember that it is the 4K reads and writes that make the most improvement over a spinner (not the large sequential reads and writes that look good in benchmarks) and that in those 4K reads / writes a SATA II port will not decrease performance unless you have a very high queue depth (unlikely for a desktop system - that is unless you are running many applications at the same time that all need to access the drive).
 
For sequential speeds you are maxing out SATA II bandwidth.

Note that for game loads there are also the tasks of decompressing the images and loading textures into video RAM. My experience is that game loads aren't significantly improved with SSDs.
 
Thanks guys. It sounds like short of upgrading the motherboard (I plan to hang onto it for a few more years) the main thing is to make sure the SSD is connected to an Intel SATA port rather than Marvell. The system BIOS says it is connected to SATA port 1, which according to Asus' information should be an Intel port (The Marvell ones are also color-coded differently I believe).

One other thing that occurred to me is that I don't currently have any SATA driver installed other than whatever Windows loads automatically. I check the Asus website but it wasn't obvious which of the multiple drivers offered would be the right one, so I just left it for the time being. Is that something that could have a noticeable impact on performance?
 
Bisectors Fore said:
One other thing that occurred to me is that I don't currently have any SATA driver installed other than whatever Windows loads automatically. I check the Asus website but it wasn't obvious which of the multiple drivers offered would be the right one, so I just left it for the time being. Is that something that could have a noticeable impact on performance?
Click to expand...

Noticeable impact? I don't think so. I've seen higher random read and write performance from the most recent Intel drivers. But will you actually notice? I doubt it. Me being me I'd prefer the highest performing drivers. Please post results from a benchmark that displays random read and write performance.

The Windows 7 non-SP1 msahci driver has an annoying bug seen when using large hard drives, but that's been fixed in SP1.
 
Gotcha. I have Win7 SP1 installed so that bug shouldn't be an issue. Below are random read/write benchmarks. Sorry, just hadn't included them in my first post:

Random Read - 46119 IOPS
Random Write - 38213 IOPS

An earlier test I ran using the same Samsung benchmarking utility returned 52390 IOPS for random read. Not sure what would have caused the difference; random write speeds were about the same for both times.

Currently searching for the proper drivers from Intel. Would Intel Rapid Storage be the correct one in this situation?
 
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