Samsung SSD Upgrade

[Agent Orange]

I decided to upgrade my main/gaming machine storage this last week. I spent considerable time sorting out the what's what among the affordable SSD offerings. My idea was to move one my WD Velocirapter's down a notch to hold all of the videos, documents, pictures, emails, etc., and thereby freeing up the SSD to handle the boot duties and gaming. I decided on the Samsung 840EVO 250 GB SSD. All of the usual retail outlets had some sort of a deal ranging from about $156 to $178 - some included shipping others did not. I found a Canadian site, NCIX.COM, which is now has a warehouse in the US. They too wanted $156 but I stumbled onto one of those price search sites and got redirected back into NCIX.COM, where it was then offered for $144, shipping included. So I jumped on that one and it arrived UPS Friday afternoon.

The drive comes with an installation CD but no drive bay adapter (had one). The software is straight forward and consists of 2 parts; Samsung Magician and Samsung Migration. The SSD needs to be installed/cloned through a SATA port, as I found that when I tried to clone it though a USB it failed to include the boot tracks (everything else was there however). The Magician portion lets you customize just about every setting for the SSD. Upon installing the SSD as the 'C' drive, I then proceeded to move the WIN 8.1 libraries, email, and non-essential programs on down to the original WD Velociraptor. For now I like it - no heat, no noise. I'll see how it goes 3 or 4 months down the line.
:satisfie:

 

[Agent Orange]

Samsung SSD Upgrade Update

I wanted to update my WEI (Windows Experience Index). Yes, I know, you can take WEI with a grain of salt but it is a yard stick of sorts. The best I was ever to achieve from my HD's was about 5.8 or 5.9. Bare in mind that those HD's are WD 600 GB Velociraptors spinning at 10K rpm, and pretty much at the top of food chain as far gaming is concerned. What a shock to discover that Microsoft stripped the WEI out of Windows 8.1, well, sort of anyway. I found that it does exist but not in a GUI form, you must run it from a command line. Can you imagine that, a command line? Here's the link if think you can get to run (let me know if you do - I think the syntax is wrong in Windows PowerShell portion ): http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39...ndows-experience-index-scores-in-windows-8.1/

So, I went on line again and found that someone had written a free version of the WEI for W8.1. It downloaded without the usual attached baggage of junk and gives you approximately the same results as the Vista/W7/W8 version.



The 8.0 score for the SSD looks pretty good. The next step is to wring the hole machine out again on 3DMark and Heaven and see how much I gained in total FPS .

 

[SpidersWeb]

I finally got work to provide me with a 256Gb Corsair.
I can scan our entire code base in seconds now. Love it!

I'm still running mechanical at home (4 drives in RAID0 shortstroked, + RAID10 for storage+backup) - a single SSD will eat that setup for breakfast.

Hard drive speed shouldn't have much effect on FPS, but load times can be drastically improved.

 

[Agent Orange]

I finally got work to provide me with a 256Gb Corsair.
I can scan our entire code base in seconds now. Love it!

I'm still running mechanical at home (4 drives in RAID0 shortstroked, + RAID10 for storage+backup) - a single SSD will eat that setup for breakfast.

Hard drive speed shouldn't have much effect on FPS, but load times can be drastically improved.

You're right about the FPS. What I meant to convey was the load speed or memory transition when a file opens during the game. Ever notice those tiny little 'hitches' every once in a while? This SSD should smooth all that out.

 

[SpidersWeb]

Yep makes sense.
Pain with the new Grand Theft Auto on yesteryear's consoles, go too fast and you end up waiting for it to load the damn textures :/ The drastic end of that picture.

 

[Agent Orange]

Yep makes sense.
Pain with the new Grand Theft Auto on yesteryear's consoles, go too fast and you end up waiting for it to load the damn textures :/ The drastic end of that picture.

Everything is just seamless now. Don't know why I waited so long. Must have been what I doled out for those Velocipators a few years back. I was concerned that maybe 250 MB wasn't going to be enough room, but after clearing all the old junk out and moving the libraries, every thing seems to fit just fine. I've got my eye on the Samsung 840EVO 500 MB version and may snag it a little later in the year when the price comes down.

 

[SpidersWeb]

Does TRIM work on Intel RAID"s yet?
Because you could be sneaky and get another 250Gb, run in RAID0 for crazy-man-performance and 500Gb total. If one fails, it's all gone, so you need to backup on to another drive - but the upgrade would cost less and almost double throughput.

EDIT: whoops, big assumption there you were running an Intel board with RAID capability

 

[Agent Orange]

Does TRIM work on Intel RAID"s yet?
Because you could be sneaky and get another 250Gb, run in RAID0 for crazy-man-performance and 500Gb total. If one fails, it's all gone, so you need to backup on to another drive - but the upgrade would cost less and almost double throughput.

EDIT: whoops, big assumption there you were running an Intel board with RAID capability

My first SSD was a small 60 GB X-18 Intel kludge marketed by Dane Electronics. Must have had something to do with the cross licensing agreement, as you couldn't update the firmware on the thing. No TRIM capabilities at all. I used it on a backup PC until I got 'intermittent' failures. The source of that was factory wave soldering job on the connector, it just literally fell apart. I thought about trying to re-solder the connector but my eyes aren't into it. I'm not sure I'd ever go back to RAID zero. I thought I had all bases covered for the backup when one of my HD's failed, but something wasn't right and I was forced to do a reinstall. I just don't think the overhead with the RAID 0 is worth the trouble anymore. There are probably a lot of big time gamers out there that think its worth it though. So, my board is an Asus Sabertooth 990FX with a FX-8350, 16 GB Crucial, 2 XFX 7970 Ghosts, Corsair H-100 cooling, 900 watt Antec (I'd buy another one), Razor keyboard, and MS mouse. Boot and system HD is now the new Samsung 840EVO 250 GB with both WD Velociraptors being shoved down a notch. Also, I recently upgraded the monitor to a QNIX QX2710 Evolution II 27" LED. Used to think this rig was pretty much 'state of the art', but it looks like its getting dated real fast, what with the mobo now in its 3rd revision, and new video cards coming out every other week it seems. BTW, my favorite game is Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. Do you have Far Cry and if so, do you find it a little hard to run/maintain? I hate Steam.

 

[Trixter]

The 8.0 score for the SSD looks pretty good. The next step is to wring the hole machine out again on 3DMark and Heaven and see how much I gained in total FPS .

Your FPS won't improve at all. But hopefully by now you've noticed that your Windows boot time has reduced to 1/2 to 1/10th from before you upgraded? When I switched from a 7200RPM modern drive to an SSD, my Windows 7 boot time went from 7 minutes ("windows logo" to "desktop finally usable") down to 50 seconds.

 

[Agent Orange]

Your FPS won't improve at all. But hopefully by now you've noticed that your Windows boot time has reduced to 1/2 to 1/10th from before you upgraded? When I switched from a 7200RPM modern drive to an SSD, my Windows 7 boot time went from 7 minutes ("windows logo" to "desktop finally usable") down to 50 seconds.

7 Minutes!?! Holy Toledo bat person, what the heck is up with that? From a cold start (push the button) to full desktop video in @ 17 seconds. Not too shabby. Get on any gaming site and you will see a lot of discussion on FPS and SSD. One of them even has a poll and about 70% say no increase IN FPS. SpidersWeb and I feel you will get a background boost in file handling which would be tantamount to a slight increase in FPS. The bottom line is that its definitively faster over all.

 

[Trixter]

7 Minutes!?! Holy Toledo bat person, what the heck is up with that? From a cold start (push the button) to full desktop video in @ 17 seconds.

I load quite a lot during my startup. Lots of desktop icons, background backup program, RAID manager, clock and CPU widgets, Steam, Dropbox, etc. etc. I know exactly where all of that time was going and I'm fine with that; it's just a lot of random access. It is great to watch it boot up now after SSD -- the CPU widget is showing nearly all cores 100% which is fantastic, it means the CPU is the bottleneck now instead of I/O.

 

[Agent Orange]

I load quite a lot during my startup. Lots of desktop icons, background backup program, RAID manager, clock and CPU widgets, Steam, Dropbox, etc. etc. I know exactly where all of that time was going and I'm fine with that; it's just a lot of random access. It is great to watch it boot up now after SSD -- the CPU widget is showing nearly all cores 100% which is fantastic, it means the CPU is the bottleneck now instead of I/O.

What's your CPU and video card(s)?

 

[Unknown_K]

People with laptops swear by SSD, makes even an older laptop speedy. The 1TB HD in my main work machine does 180MB/sec so its not too bad for a spinning disk. The only worry I would have with a SSD is they just crap out with no warning, spinning drives start to become erratic or noisy before they die so you have warning to backup.

 

[Agent Orange]

People with laptops swear by SSD, makes even an older laptop speedy. The 1TB HD in my main work machine does 180MB/sec so its not too bad for a spinning disk. The only worry I would have with a SSD is they just crap out with no warning, spinning drives start to become erratic or noisy before they die so you have warning to backup.

That's becoming less of a problem, the reliability is now pretty good. The Samsung 840EVO which I just bought come with a 3 year warranty. I still back-up and clone as always, however.

 

[Trixter]

What's your CPU and video card(s)?

2.6GHz Core i7-920 (overclocked sometimes to 3.2GHz if I'll be performing some blu-ray encodes) with a GTX 470. I will upgrade to a GTX 770 as soon as I am unhappy with a game's performance, but so far everything I've played at 1920x1080 has maintained 30fps+ on max detail or 60fps+ medium detail.

 

[Agent Orange]

2.6GHz Core i7-920 (overclocked sometimes to 3.2GHz if I'll be performing some blu-ray encodes) with a GTX 470. I will upgrade to a GTX 770 as soon as I am unhappy with a game's performance, but so far everything I've played at 1920x1080 has maintained 30fps+ on max detail or 60fps+ medium detail.

FWIW - you can get a new (open box) GTX 780 for about 50 bucks more at Newegg today.