Just ordered my first SSD. What do you think?

[txus.palacios]

Ah. Now it makes sense. We call that "SWIMBO", meaning "she who must be obeyed".

Just to set you at ease, I went from a 10,000 RPM HDD to an early 128gb Crucial 300 series SSD, very "slow" by today's standards. Boot and loading times were of course VASTLY improved. Feeling the power, I then moved up to a 256gb 840 pro, hoping for another significant performance bump. To my surprise, my boot time was only about 1sec faster, and I couldn't notice the difference in load times. Enjoy the Samsung, you got great bang for the buck.

^This. I went from a back then amazing RAID 0 to an SSD. It was amazing. It is in fact what non-computer people (read "oh, what Pentium is that? It must be a Pentium IX at least!!!") notice and what differences a "meh" system to a fast one.

 

[Dlaw]

So, I got this thing up and running between today and yesterday, and I think I'm missing something. I did get faster boot and loading times, but not by a lot. Boot went from ~50 seconds to ~30 seconds. That's considerably less than most get with this drive. I haven't installed any games to test yet, but I installed Samsung's magician software, and it's reporting that everything is performing to spec except the random read, which is less than half of it's rated 86000 IOPS, running at 38312. Any ideas?

 

[ATMINSIDE]

Try CrystalDiskMark, let me know what speeds you get.

 

[Dlaw]

Here it is.

 

[ATMINSIDE]

Your speeds for the drive are spot on. How many programs do you have run at startup?

 

[Dlaw]

As of right now, this is a clean install of Win7 + startup programs for mouse/keyboard/video card/sound card and AVG, and Samsung Magician until I uninstall it. I timed the boot before I even installed my first driver though (which was the Etron USB 3.0 driver, so that I could get the rest of my data off the external).

If all is looking well, I'm not at all displeased or worried. Samsung's software said it wasn't performing at it's potential, but it's still super fast.

 

[ATMINSIDE]

Might be AVG. If you don't mind (out of curiosity's sake) give it a reboot with AVG uninstalled and see how it goes.

Past that, I'm not sure what it could be, but it definitely improved either way.

 

[Dlaw]

I think that I'm gonna leave it as is. 8 seconds of that boot time is waiting at the BIOS splash screen, so really booting from the drive only takes ~22 seconds. That's good enough for me.

 

[digiw0rx]

Mine doesn't take anywhere near that time to boot from what I've seen, AVG is terrible nowadays so bloated, I switched to avast a while back

 

[txus.palacios]

8 seconds POST? Wow.

 

[Dlaw]

Yea, I don't know what causes it. I've tried a bunch of different settings, the only one that shortens it is enabling fast boot, but sometimes it causes issues, so I disabled it. I have the SSD set as the first boot device, so that shouldn't be the problem. I dunno.

 

[Dlaw]

Well, I'm very happy with my purchase. Everything I have installed to it loads instantly. Just to compare, I had installed Magix Music Maker 17 Silver, which came with my motherboard, on my last installation. It took about 45 seconds to load. Now it takes 5.

My old hard disk got a 5.9 in WEI. This SSD gets a 7.9. Very pleased.

 

[ATMINSIDE]

There you go! If programs are loading that fast, I have 5 bucks on AVG slowing Windows boot down.

 

[briansun1]

Going from ~50 seconds to ~10 seconds is pretty much a "blink of an eye" in my book. And as far as games writing to disk, I'm going to try and put all of my personal folders on my 1TB drive, and link them. That way, I can hopefully avoid writing to the SSD, because of it's size. I want to try and limit any writing to installation. I know that is impossible, but if I try to minimize it, I'll need to wipe it and start fresh less often.

you might want to look at this then

 

[Dlaw]

That looks like a handy piece of software. I found a different way to get around Steam's inability to install to a different drive. I only use Steam if I can't get the game on Gamefly or physically, or if there's a deal that I just can't pass up. I personally dislike that I have to have my games installed by Steam if that's how I bought them. In my opinion, Gamefly is better in that respect, because you download what is basically the contents of the game disk (same as Steam), and then run basically the same installer that would be included on that disk. That means that you have access to all of those options that you won't have when installing a game from Steam. Gamefly will even give you the option to open a window displaying your game's CD Keys for installation.

 

[ATMINSIDE]

Steam can install to different drives though.

 

[Knufire]

Steam added the ability to choose where to install the game a few months ago.

 

[briansun1]

yes but that app can still be use full for other things