Snowman

reply 2

Same type of disk. Slightly different stats:



Haven't done any tweaking of any kind.

Three months later:

Well...got my new one.... 4 times as big, 4 times as fast and half the price of the 60gig  OCZ Summit....went for it cos it was half the price of what I was looking at.

Got a Sandisk Extreme 240gig....AUD $180.

Next step will be to do the hand-me-down process and end up with the OCZ in my laptop.

2 system images to sort out...

Well I'm not going the way of a bigger SSD to boost my capacity, as was originally planned with an OCZ Vertex 3 240gb. What I'm doing is adding an identical 120gb to my existing one and creating a RAID 0 array, which will not only increase my capacity to 240gb, but my performance gets a boost as well. 

I wasn't supposed to be spending on PC parts after the last major upgrade, but selling off a few parts I no longer needed provided the cash to get the SSD, plus some items to finish building a rig for my mother, who recently returned from the UK to reside here permanently.  I just figured a decent desktop PC would serve her needs better than the piddly netbook she came back with. The parts have been ordered and paid for and should arrive tomorrow or Friday, so mother will have her machine at the weekend. 

Oh yeah, the SSD cost me only $95.90, so my upgrade to 240gb was quite economical, really.  In fact, I have a few more parts I'm selling off, so perhaps I'll be able to afford to add a third or fourth SSD to the Raid 0 array to boost capacity and performance even more, what with Alex telling me this particular SSD will drop another 10% - 15% over the next few weeks to boot.

I've picked up quite a few bargains on line recently - like a Gigabyte GT460 for $29.90, and a $54.00 set of Gigabyte USB speakers for $19.00 for mum's machine - so with such prices on the internet I doubt I'll shop in a brick and mortar store anytime soon, given they rarely, if ever match those online prices.

Well...

The Sandisk is up and running ....image went OK so the only obvious difference is my Sysmetrix HD gauge for the 'C' drive looks a lot emptier/healthier...

My WEI changed a bit....

Before....

Processor - 7.5

Ram - 7.5

Graphics - 7.9

Gaming - 7.9

HD - 5.9

Overall - 5.9

After.....

Processor - 7.5

Ram - 7.5

Graphics - 7.9

Gaming - 7.9

HD - 7.4

Overall - 7.4

Nice upgrade Jafo.

I find it odd that the previous SSD showed no increase in WEI rating over a platter drive though.

Possibly because it's old tech....2.5 years old [that's how long it'd been running] AND was typically over 90% full.

It's now over 3/4 ths empty ...

And therein was probably the reason for the lower score.  For optimum performance it is recommended that drives become only 80% filled to allow for freer file management/movement.

Seeing your WEI scores reminded me that I hadn't done mine in a while [well not since my last upgrade] so thought I'd run it just to see.  Despite running a better CPU and SSD since then, I thought my scores would have been a little better in those areas, but anyway....

Now I'm curious to see what my WEI is in Win 8, seeing as the ratings have changed again.

Well I got my other SSD today and it's installed awaiting the RAID 0 setup to be performed... but that'll be later this arvo, given it's now 3.40am and I'm knackered.  It has been a long 'day'... started a bit before midnight yesterday, and I've pretty much been on the go ever since.  I did some cleaning around the place and got mum's rig mostly finished, so in the next few moments I'm off to the land o' nod.

So nighty night all, in the early hours of the morning [here]

Well so much for sleeping... tried and gave up after a couple of hours of tossing and turning  Damned insomnia, I'm as tired as hell but... where the frack is that rubber mallet!!!!  Some happy pills that'd make me feel like I'm on cloud nine would be more pleasant, though, not to mention less likely to cause a worse headache.

I'm going to give it another shot soon, sleep, that is... just waiting for some painkillers to kick in to perhaps give it a better chance.  In the interim, though, I've been giving some consideration to this setting up my 2 SSD's in the RAID 0 array.  I've never done it before, but I've got some pretty good instructions on the BIOS changes and stuff from the makers of my mobo, Gigabyte, and the entire process doesn't look too complicated, though perhaps I should wait until I've had some sleep prior to attempting it.

The other thing I've been thinking about is the 5 bins and 3 x 4 sets of drawers full of PC junk I've accumulated over the years that I figured would come in useful one day.... but that's another story, as the happy pills begin to take effect and my mind starts to wander a little more than usual.  I won't say normal because that's not a state I'm familiar with.

Okay, so my RAID0 array is up and running, now all I have to do is load Win 7 back on it and I'm up, up and away.  It's amazing what a little sleep will do for you.  I got a li'l bit Saturday and some yesterday... about 14 hours of it here and there, so today [Monday morning here now] I'm feeling somewhat chirpier than I did on Friday.

Anyhow, like a nut I've been up all night again, so I sorted the spare rig and got it running, pretty near finished my mother's machine [needs a cable I can't find] and set up my Raid array.  While that was relatively easy, it was still a pain in the arse.  Why?  Cos the bloke who wrote the article didn't detail it too well in places... I'd get so far and bugger all.  So I got in touch with Percy Verance and we worked it out together.  Orright, I worked it out, 

It seems the author of the article missed one crucial point [don't ya just f**ken hate that]... to enable the drives by using the up/down keys to highlight each one, then hitting the space bar to make it active.  Oh well, all's well that ends well.  It's working!

Right, then, back to it, gotta install the OS now.  Bye!

Looking forward to see the perf change because I'm thinking of doing this too.

Putting that replaced OCZ 60 into my $180 Travelmate bumped its WEI for the drive from 5.0 to 6.8 .... not bad for a hand-me-down process.

The onboard graphics of 3.5 is still the limiter, though....

Just spotted this so am posting a before & after WEI to show there is a performance increase.  I just wish I'd thought to do a before and after CrystaDiscMark performance test to provide a better indicator.... I shall have to invest in that program for future situations

The Before....

The After...

There is a difference of .2 in the disc data transfer rate, but what I find interesting is that my memory calculations dropped by .2 and my CPU calculations rose by .1  [I ran the test a second time just to be sure I wasn't seeing thing and it was identical]

Here is the current  CrystalDiskMark test....

As I do not have a before to compare to I cannot be sure just how much performance I gained, but going by other results from others with SSD's it would seem quite a bit.  Thing is, do I detect any noticeable performance increase?  Yes, I believe my machine is somewhat faster in operation than before, whereby programs install, load and perform more quickly.

It also shuts down more quickly.  However, there has been one small drawback with enabling RAID0, my machine takes a little while longer to boot, not by a lot, but it is noticeable by about 4 to 5 seconds.  The reason for this I think is there is an additional screen during the boot sequence that provides opportunity for the user to make adjustments to the RAID array if required.  Still, my machine boots in under 40 seconds so it is no major setback.

Am I happy with the 2 SSD's on a RAID0 array?  Yes, I am, and would recommend it to anyone who wishes to get a performance hit and has 2 identical drives to spare.... yes, the same principal applies to platter drives.  Moreover, it is relatively easy to do and most modern motherboards come equipped with on-board RAID controllers, so it is an inexpensive way to upgrade your rig's performance.  The one thing you MUST do is install the relevant RAID drivers during the Windows installation, otherwise Windows will not start... "boot mngr is missing" is the message you'll get.

*NOTE*  The above results were achieved without tweaking the SSD with TweakSSD [which is a handy little utility] or installing any SSD firmware.  It's an as is installation and improvements may be possible with tweaking and firmware.... which I may do later.  I also read that the Microsoft RAID drivers performed better than the AMD, Intel and Marvell ones, but I am yet to find and test those to tell.

You can get it free as a Portable App Is there a paid version as well?

I cannot understand it, while 'supposedly tweaking' improved some scores minimally, 3 scores are down quite significantly.  At first I thought t was a mistake, so an the test again but still came up somewhat short of the mark in the 512k read and write....

The Sequential write is also down and I'm thinking WTF  I used TweakSSD [free] as I have done before and got good results, but this time I am somewhat disappointed.  There is a paid version that supports Trim, but I don't know that I want to spend money on a program that may or MAY not improve my performance.  Worse still, I uninstalled the program and did a system restore to see if I could recover the previous scores, but no go.  And no, the original figures were not a fluke or in error, I ran the test twice and got the same results... over 200's in the Sequential Write and both 512k scores.

So, the question is, for those with more PC nous than I have, what would cause those score to drop dramatically, and what do I do to restore them?