New SSD - fitted and flying!

[Giraffe]

Thought I'd start a new thread as my original one has some (v. useful) drift.
Got the Samsung 850 Pro delivered from Scan yesterday. Cloned my HGST 512GB SATA 3 Travelstar to 2 WD 512GB HDDs, just in case!
Fitted the 850 and used Macrium Reflect Free to clone the HGST to it. Didn't bother with Samsung's s/w as the purely graphical instructions showed the new drive attached to a lead.
After cloning was complete, done by intelligent sector copy and SSD optimisation, closed down, disconnected the HDD and rebooted.
OK - boot went from 2½ min. to about 35 sec. to be realistically useable!
Opening times for programs that took 'too long' are now around ¼ - ½ what they were, even when Superfetch was fully loaded (that took about 3 min.).

I'd already enabled AHCI, including editing a Reg. key before changing the BIOS:
http://www.helpwithwindows.com/Windo...ive-page2.html

Turned off Superfetch/Prefetch and cleared them, checked that TRIM was enabled and then ran some tests. I didn't save those results because I wanted to configure the SSD with Samsung Magician first.
Using Magician, I set it to Maximum Relatability then used Advanced mode to increase the Paging File from 200MB - 1GB up to 2GB and tweak the Power settings a bit.
I tried Rapid. It made the system unstable, had to reboot to turn it off as Magician went all zombie on me!
Over Provisioning: supposed to be about 10%; now, don't laugh, after 10 years on a 512GB drive I still have well over half of it unused! My OP on this SSD it 394.8GB! - that should allow a bit of leeway.

Results from CrystalDiskMark:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 5.2.0 (C) 2007-2016 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 541.682 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 520.884 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 273.449 MB/s [ 66760.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 114.969 MB/s [ 28068.6 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 492.474 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 466.840 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 36.016 MB/s [ 8793.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 110.254 MB/s [ 26917.5 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [C: 44.3% (18.7/42.2 GiB)] (x1) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2017/05/18 8:20:45
OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x86)

Thanks again for the advice - and the suggestion that I should have built this rig with an SSD originally was spot on! Still, I've learnt a lot in the last year or so.

[Jonj1611]

Awesome, always good news when a system speeds up

I have the 850 evo, your 4k read looks low and not sure whats going on with the write. Here's mine :-

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 5.2.1 x64 (C) 2007-2017 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 547.345 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 520.490 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 374.742 MB/s [ 91489.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 342.013 MB/s [ 83499.3 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 488.874 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 476.080 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 37.450 MB/s [ 9143.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 142.891 MB/s [ 34885.5 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [C: 33.3% (77.7/233.1 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2017/05/18 9:31:39
OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 15063] (x64)

Edit : Think its because the write cache is turned off if your using max reliability.

[spacein_vader]

Pleased it's worked out for you.

I've been building & upgrading PCs for over 20 years and installing an SSD boot drive is by far and away the biggest noticeable improvement a single component has made in all that time. EVERYTHING gets faster, often by an order of magnitude.

A (very,) distant second is my first 3D accelerator card. Things looked much prettier and ran at higher frame rates but only in 3D applications. The SSD improvement is system wide.

[Jonj1611]

A (very,) distant second is my first 3D accelerator card. Things looked much prettier and ran at higher frame rates but only in 3D applications. The SSD improvement is system wide.

Mine was a 2D accelerator, yes you read that right 2D !

[Phage]

A Matrox ? I had one of those

[Jonj1611]

It was a Matrox

[EndlessWaves]

Over Provisioning: supposed to be about 10%; now, don't laugh, after 10 years on a 512GB drive I still have well over half of it unused! My OP on this SSD it 394.8GB! - that should allow a bit of leeway.

Flash wears out from all writes, including temporary files, settings files and so on. In fact, SSDs must be often worn out by that sort of thing (writing to databases) rather than transferring files on and off it.

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 541.682 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 520.884 MB/s

You might want to drop down your queue depth to more realistic levels for benchmarking. QD1 is most common, with some QD2 and the occasional QD4. You may never hit QD32 in practice, that's a lot of queued commands.

[Giraffe]

@Jonj1611: the Write Cache is on; Buffer Flushing is off, as per Magician's settings. I would have expected the Pro to be a little bit faster than the EVO, so I must have something awry unless it's just a slower system than yours.

@EndlessWaves: just tied it with QD4 and 1 thread, as per CDM's original setting. Read has increased by 4; Write has decreased by 8!

BTW, just had delivered a Dynamode external HDD USB 3 caddy
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/35-d...e-usb-30-black
(not from Scan as it's pre-order)
cloned the SSD to HDD with Macrium, full forensic copy, and it took 21 min. That's far faster than I thought it would be.
I'll use that and the HGST for clones, with hot-plugging enabled, then use a distro of Linux (Mint, PC LinuxOS or Zorin) on the old PC - it's far too good to scrap.