• There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • Server side Maintenance is done. We still have an update to the forum software to run but that one will have to wait for a better time.

SSD drives

PRB

PRB

Administrator
Staff member
Bought a Samsung 500 GB solid state drive to replace the mechanical 2TB drive I had as the primary (boot) drive on my FS box. Installation was easy:

1. Connect the new SSD via USB.
2. Run the clone software (provided) to clone the existing C: drive.
3. Turn off computer, remove old c: drive, replace with SSD unit.
4. Turn on computer. Done.

The big mechanical 2TB drive is now installed as a data drive.

The computer boots much faster than it used to, but I think I was expecting a more dramatic improvement of boot speed. Our IT guy at work is replacing the drives in the graphic artists machines with SSD units, and he seemed very much impressed with the boot-up speed, thus “hyping” my expectations!

FS boots faster too, but again, I didn't have quite as many exclamation points floating above my head as our IT guy lead me to expect.

Overall very happy. I've always liked having a small system drive with a separate data drive anyway, but I was trying to save money when I bought this FS box, so went with a single 2TB monster as the single drive.
 
Of course the SSD can't speed up the POST process but I find
that the OS loads in a few seconds thereafter.
 
fsxar177 said:
What was the cost of that unit, if you don't mind?

- Joseph
Click to expand...

Ordered it from Amazon. Samsung 850 EVO. With shipping, was a smidgen under 200. Went to a local BestBuy, but they didn't have any 500 GB units. 480 GBs, and then 1 TB and above. Our IT guy said he was getting 500 GB units for 150, but I couldn't find any deals like that.
 
heywooood said:
make sure to obtain and run Samsung 'Magician' to optimize that SSD - and also remember - Never run Defrag on it
Click to expand...

Paul it has been a year now that I did just as you describe with the 500 GB SSD. Love the speed that Windows 7 64 bit works. My old 2 TB mechanical drive handles data very nicely.

heywooood is giving good advice about running Samsung Magician and never running defrag on it. :untroubled:
 
Have the Samsung "Magician" installed, but didn't see that it was doing anything useful. Will take a second look. Thanks for the defrag tip...
 
I'm surprised that it;s really that easy to transfer a system drive.. I guess if one wanted, that would free up another storage drive!

- J
 
Paul,

I was looking at the specs for your motherboard and see that it has both SATA 2 and SATA 3 connectors.

Make sure the SSD is plugged into a SATA 3 connector or you will not see it's max read/write speeds.

cheers,
Lane
 
Lane Street said:
Paul,

I was looking at the specs for your motherboard and see that it has both SATA 2 and SATA 3 connectors.

Make sure the SSD is plugged into a SATA 3 connector or you will not see it's max read/write speeds.

cheers,
Lane
Click to expand...

Rgr. Knew it had both, and assumed "drive 0" was connected to a SATA 3 connector when it arrived last year or so. Will confirm.
 
that should be correct - I have the same setup on my Mobo...

also - with an SSD - they get faster after several boots - and - if you run FSX a lot more than most other programs, you will see better loading times after several start ups...typical of all RAM style memory...it holds the most accessed files up out of the soup for faster...errmm..access
 
ryanbatc said:
With that drive you should get like 500MB/sec read times etc...

Just use this freeware read speed tester to verify it's working fine

http://www.techspot.com/downloads/6712-ssd-read-speed-tester.html

edit: Oh yeah the magician should have a quick bench too... that will tell you if everything is ok. If you do the performance optimization run the advanced version... takes a while longer.
Click to expand...

I was curious re the tester and gave it a go with my drive....came out with an average of 870 MB/sec .....;)

Edit...
Tried the Magician [doesn't recognise an M.2] but gave read/writes of 1252/822.
 
Last edited:
Just ran the optimization tools and I'm getting 449/513 MB/s ( sequential read/write) And it is connected to a SATA 3, as was the original HDD, as expected.
 
Did some Googling on the issue of defragging SS drives. It seems there are differing opinions on this (what a surprise!) Best I can tell, the common wisdom of not defragging them was "more true" when the first SS drives came out, but that with the newer ones, it is "less true". Apparently Windows 7 and above knows all about SSDs, and does defrag them, and that defragging is useful after all. As to the issue of defragging shortening the life of the drive, I suppose that's true of mechanical drives too.
 
My Samsung SSD only holds my Operating system programs, with all my other stuff running on a HDD. Yes, not the fastest way for loading etc but also using Samsung Magician it does prioritise (if thats the correct phrase) & set the SSD so that its not continually written to & read from, which seems to be a SSD killer.
My old SSD which had a nervous breakdown due to write/rewrite limit, did recover after reformatting & is now used as a back up device.
HTH
Keith
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top