xchaotic

I turns out the culprit was windows built in unzip: Straight up copy is super fast: built in unzip is super slow for some reason: I installed 7-zip and that gives me about 100MB/s unrar speed, I will check zip some other time.

Yup I get instant unzip on the other drive, actually even the HDD is faster, I'll try and get some screenshots after the weekend.

In general 500GB is not a lot to divide - my current C: is almost 200GB full and that's just the OS and some apps that have crept up. I'd recommend partitioning in half or getting a second slower but bigger SSD or HDD for games. It's good to have a separate OS-only partition, but IMO 50GB is just not enough unless you want to fiddle a lot with Windows defaults - by defaults a lot of stuff is download to c: - temporary files, program files, downloads from the browser, temp files when you unzip etc etc. SO I'd really recommend having c: larger than 50GB and if you have space left, you can have some of your games installed on c: - it's realtively easy to move them back and forth, at least on Steam.

When I friend was looking for an SSD upgrade, I took advantage of it and sold my 'pedestrian' SATA SSD and replaced it with Samsung 950Pro connected via an adapter in a PCIEx16 slot. It took some wrangling but the drive is bootable on a Z87 board and is generally working fine. I ran some benchmark with Crystal DIsk Mark etc and they are more or less in line with reviews. However, when doing simple tasks, I'm not entirely impressed - for example I recently downloaded a zipped file - a compressed linux image. (650MB uncompressed) I wanted to unzip to the same folder and saw speed around 2-3MB/s, not exactly what I expected. The same goes for very small files - something that I'd expect to be instant. I check the activity monitor and CPU was hardly used, so clearly it is the SSD that's bottlenecking somehow? Finally I have 24GB RAM so I would expect Windows 10 to take advantage of that to cache recent files in RAM (such as the one I just downloaded)? Is there a way to investigate what's going on? I should probably add that while there is no radiator, the SSD is pretty well ventillated and running benchmark for longer indicates that there is no throttling even under have load for at least 10 minutes. The rest of the system: CPU i5 3.4GHz quad core 24GB DDR3 #1600Mhz c: - 256gb Samsung 950 Pro PCIE 3.0 x4 d: 4 way raid-0 - 4 x 500gb Sandisk Ultra II SATA SSD s: - 3TB backup HDD (nightly backups of d: and some folders on c: using CrashPlan - I temporarily turned it off, but no change) As you can see I have spare disks attached so I could create an image and perhaps reformat with a different stripe size perhaps?

I used to have 256gb 'boot' ssd + 2x3TB HDD Windows Storage spaces in parity mode. I deleted a Windows storage spaces virtual volume (was set to parity), took out one of the drives and partitioned the remaining drive with a simple ntfs volume. Now the drive keeps getting offline and the only way to reconnect is to use the command line diskpart tool or reboot. I suspect this is something to with the HDD still having the same ID as the old Windows Storage spaces had or something similar to that or a sign of an actual hardware issues (faulty hdd, faluty cable). How do I properly reset the HDD, do you also think that this may signal some sort of hardware issue with the drive as well. SMART seems to be ok, even when drive is offline.

The prices of older SATA SSD have really gone down now. I have a RAID-1 of 2x 3TB HDDs as scratch storage for Steam games, mp3s, ripped movies etc I am not even getting close to 1TB - lot's of games installed that I haven't played for a couple of years so I could go even lower, but 1TB is a convenient size where I won't have to worry about what to keep. I am really tempted to get 2 x 'cheap' 500GB drives and RAID-0 them. Currently 2 480/500/512GB drives are actually cheaper than a single 1TB one and you get better performance (and way better than HDDs) I'm not too worried about losing data as I can re download most of the data and for the rest it is backed up in 3 other places. Altogether it seem like a no-brainer to go ahead and do it. Any downsides to this? Obviously with m2 SSD already available this is not very future proof, but to get advantage of m2, I would need to change the motherboard and the CPU etc so not really feasible.

I played around with software based RAMDisk - much better than SSDs, but not close to theoretical limits

I would love to hear more and especially see some benchmarks / measurements of improvement of doing this. Fortunately or not 4096 bytes still has a lot of legacy in the software and even new hardware is optimised to deal with that, so I'm sticking to 4k for now.

In the end I got the m4 and I couldn't be more happy. The drive is pretty much twice as fast as my old SSD (and more than twice as big, formatted) and so far, very reliable. For now I keep a copy of my frequently used apps on it and I will be migrating my OS on it soon. For reference a CrystalDiskMark benchmark on a fresh drive, I'll do another run in a few weeks. It's clear that in sequential operations SATAII is bottlenecking the drive, but I don't mind.

As you can see in my other thread I am looking too, and while it's going to be in a PC, it's still SATAII (3gbit) for now. Having done some research that's up to date, it seems that with the latest firmware Crucial M4 is the most reliable and also the fastest in everyday scenarios (don't just look for max sequential speed, look at how are you going to use the drive) and should behave nicely on sataII (unlike say vertex3, which in my view is unreasonably slow on sata 2), finally the power usage is much smaller than sandforce ssds (ocz, corsair), which doesn't matter for me, but I guess it might matter to you...

What is the price of Crucial m4 in the US? On Amazon.co.uk the price has gone down to £145.00 for 120GB now so definitely going in the right direction and it seems like the most reliable of the recent generation drives, also best if one is still stuck with SATAII for now...

My thoughts exactly, especially since Vertex 3 is £175.00 and out of stock or £180+shipping, in stock. My most crucial data is already on the SSD, so it may be that I'll just skip my 5th SSD in the house for a while, but just looking at the options... Finally, my current SSD is 60GB Corsair Force F60 (34nm NAND) but it looks like getting another one is an incredible £99 for usable 51GB worth of storage, so a really bad deal. Kingston, like you said is a really good option, but it means I will have a very heterogenous system and really that is the only thing that I don't like about it...

I would most likely be buying from amazon.co.uk and: 96GB Kingston V+ is £85 Corsair Force 3 120GB (non GT) £129 Crucial M4 128 (?) GB is a stunning £162 today - doesn't make sense One more thing I should emphasize is I'm stuck with Intel P55 platform - so no sata 6gbit for for now, but plan to to upgrade as soon as Intel releases sth new. Another thing that I am loosely considering is Vertex 3, solely because I have another one currently running in my laptop and as I upgrade my laptop next year I could RAID-0 them in my PC later on?

Hi. I was really close to buying 120GB version of Corsair Force 3 or OCZ Agility 3, but it seems that reliability and firmware issues of those drives are just horrible. My situation is I already have a built PC with SATAII (3gbit) and a 60GB SSD boot drive that's 80% full and pretty fast, but importantly very reliable so far. I want to get another drive purely for data/frequently used apps etc and I guess ca 100GB at minimum and £130 at most. Corsair Force 3 or OCZ Agility 3 seemed perfect, even though I wouldn't be using SATA6gbit, but it seems even after iterations in firmware, these drives are just too much trouble. Now I am thinking of getting an older, but much cheaper Kingston V+ 96GB - given it's a second drive it doesn't really need to be ultra-fast - I just want it to be that much more responsive than my 2TB HDD that I currently use for 'slow' storage.. So to sum up I am after bang for the buck and price/performance ratio, rather than pure performance with this one... Are there any other option that I should consider?

It's for Macbook Air, so it turns out, I need a ZIF connector drive. I haven't noticed any Intels like that