SSD help (that means you bit)

[Captain]

Hokay so, I picked up a Crucial M4 256GB SATA3 SSD so that I could transfer my entire C drive (Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB) to it and improve system performance. The motherboard is an ASUS Sabertooth X58. My basic drive layout:

SATA3-1: Crucial M4 SSD
SATA3-2: WD Caviar Black 1TB SATA3 (D drive)
SATA2: WD Caviar Black 1TB SATA2 (formerly system drive)
SATA2: WD Caviar Black 500MB SATA2 (movies)

First, I installed the SSD and formatted it as a new simple volume with MBR and left it without a drive letter. Back to the BIOS Storage Configuration, I changed "Configure Sata as IDE" to AHCI. The Marvell 9128 Controller is set to AHCI Mode. Then I used EaseUS Todo Backup Workstation 4.5 Trial to copy the entire drive over to the SSD. I rebooted, set the SSD drive to boot first, and everything is fine. Windows booted up within seconds and all seems well.

Here's my AS SSD benchmark score:



Compared to others with the same drive, my write speed is a bit slow and my 4K-64Thrd scores seem too low. I'm still a noob with SSDs, so I need some help with figuring out what the numbers mean and how I can possibly improve performance or if I should just let it be. The only reason I'm concerned is because my benchmark says 4 K - OK under the msahci controller, while others have 6-digit numbers. I checked my Partition Starting Offset in MsInfo32.exe and it's 4,096—which seems to indicate my alignment is correct. Disk Defragment is automatically disabled for the SSD and I enabled TRIM with -fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify through the command prompt. I also installed the Intel Rapid Storage driver but it looks like Windows is still using the default drivers (msahci).

So based on all that verbal diarrhea, does it look like my SSD transfer went without a hitch or can I still squeeze some better performance out of the drive?

[bitWISE]

That software gave me incredibly awful ratings (like, half of what you got and I'm running a Corsair Force 3) but the other software I ran before rated me much higher.



I don't really know to be honest. I bought one that sounded fast and plugged it in. Maybe update your firmware?

This forum has some pretty helpful posts.
http://forum.corsair.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=188

[obsidian]

That's pretty much it, I plugged in my SSD, set BIOS to AHCI, updated SSD firmware, installed Windows, done. Why fuss over the little marginal performance tweaks which might give you a 5% increase in performance in certain situations and a 2% decrease in others? Benchmarks are all theoretical anyway. The only useful benchmark comparison is if you are testing two computers with the exact same hardware and software configurations.

[SoM]

why fuss over the little marginal performance

e-penis

[Captain]

I'm not fussing over anything, I just wasn't sure if the speeds were normal. I'm happy with it, Windows boots in seconds and my Adobe CS5.5 apps are blazing fast.

BTW what's the best way to keep a backup of the C drive in case the SSD dies and I need to send it off? Looking for a way to just set the boot order to the backup drive and keep going like nothing happened.

[obsidian]

You'll need some sort of cloning software like Norton Ghost.

[AmIdYfReAk]

Acronis Home is good for backups and drive cloning.

[Deathshroud]

I'm sure you could always throw a Linux distro on a USB stick, boot off it, and use something to clone the HDD. Its worth a google.

[dghost77]

I use Drive Image XML, free for personnal edition when I want to make a single backup of a complete drive (no need to reboot also!). Great for making backup of a hard drive and save it as a single file (or split it if you want). But in the case that I want to make a disk to disk image and repartitioning it, I use Acronis, much easier. You need a backup of your drive before it fails, of course! I used Ghost a lot in the past, but since Norton has taken over, the software is not efficient as it was before.

In any case, if the downtime is a big concern for you in case of a failure, I recommend using raid 1 (mirror) also with that. Raid1 is not a backup solution, it only saves you time when an HD fail, you simply replace it in less than 10 minutes. No need to re-install everything or restore some backup. It's preemptive care instead of reacting in case of an HD failure. That's what I'm using and I've got backup also. I think that I will keep that settings for a long time since I can't afford to have my main computer for working, not working...

Last week I received the new HD I bought for my PS3, my original 120 Gigs HD in it was always full and after shopping online I went with this new hybrid drive from Seagate :

http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-dr ... xt-hybrid/

It's a normal SATA3 drive (for laptop), 500 Gigs and 7.2K RPM but it also has a 4 Gigs SSD memory onboard. The onboard controller looks at the most used files and copy them to the SSD memory for faster access. In most online reviews/test the drive is performing faster than a 10K RPM drive. I installed it in my PS3 and I've noticed a, barely, improved performance (PS3 is SATA1 compliant only!). I would be curious to see this drive perform in a laptop, but I have no need for that, yet. And the drive is cheap, I found it @ 100$ on tiger direct. I will definitively buy more of it in the future when needed, the ratio for performance, space and price is one of the best I've seen so far.

[shaft]

Is this good? I can't tell.

[obsidian]

I dunno, seems like a lot of arbitrary numbers. I wish we had something to compare it to.