Solid state drives can deliver exceptional performance, but they're not necessarily fire-and-forget upgrades. You'll only really get the best possible experience from them if you pay attention to details like TRIM support and available firmware updates.
The SSD vendors’ marketing divisions simply do not tire of citing insanely high MB/s throughput numbers and sky-high IOPS. While these figures aren't inaccurate, per se, they don't necessarily reflect the truth either. Everyday operation does not equal the hygienic test conditions laid out carefully to maximize numbers. In the end, this means that the mentioned performance specifications can, in fact, be reached, but it takes some optimization.
I’ve got one of the best SSDs, what do I care?
The fact alone that a brand new SSD is known for being fast and furious does not mean that it really is. Are you using the latest SATA storage drivers? Have you ever checked if AHCI mode is enabled in your BIOS? Would you be sure that the TRIM feature is actually working? Could it be that there is a newer firmware version for your solid state drive? Might a recent configuration change have impaired your storage performance? If you've recently spent as much on storage as other folks spend on an entire netbook, it’s legit to spend some time investigating the bang for your buck.
We’ve seen both extremely great and incredibly poor performance results on SSDs, and the reasons behind a negative performance experience can vary. First of all, it is important to use a decent product. While it used to be easy to judge hard drive performance, the characteristics of solid state drives depend on many variables. Most of the consumer SSD products available today are based on several channels of MLC NAND flash memory and one of the popular controller architectures. Intel’s X25 family has been very strong, with specific weaknesses when it comes to write throughput. The Indilinx hardware contributed to the breakthrough of SSDs by maximizing throughput. Crucial’s RealSSD C300 is still the king when it comes to raw bandwidth, thanks in part to a 6 Gb/s interface, but it was Sandforce’s SF-1200 controller that first showed us that high throughput and stellar I/O performance go hand in hand. The most recent SSD contender Samsung’s 470-series SSD, which we used for this performance evaluation.
We've already mentioned a few factors that can influence performance, and we found that it is important to check all of them. In this article, we’ll be looking at a recent firmware update, and then check performance levels with and without the TRIM feature enabled.
- Maximizing SSD Performance
- Required, Needed, And Wanted
- Test Setup
- Test Procedure: A Torture Test
- Benchmark Results: PCMark Vantage App Loading, Gaming, Video Editing
- Benchmark Results: PCMark Vantage Windows Defender, Media Center, Media Player
- Benchmark Results: PCMark Vantage Photo Gallery, Vista Startup, Overall Score
- Conclusion
That said, on one side it's pretty obvious that you can get "the best out of your SSD with modern HW", on the other side I totally disagree on your comment about "using it on older hardware not being interesting".
All the fuzz about "maximum performance" is pretty nice to run benchmarks and so on, but it has only a very mitigated effect on real life. My experience is actually quite opposite to what your statement intended:
- Put an SSD on a nice recent rig (I did) and you'll be pleased with the performance, but that's about it.
- Put an SSD on an old subpair computer you were about to throw away and you'll be amazed of how fast it became, literally making you believe you can use it for some extra years more without problems (I did). Indeed, an SSD is the killer update for any old HW you may have, and you'll notice much more than any CPU/Memory/GPU whatever you may try.
Back to real life, most people can't tell the difference between "the fastest SSD" and a "normal SSD" if not after running some benchmarks or I/O performance specific tool.
PS: Makers such as Intel offer "clean-up utilities" that don't need AHCI nor TRIM to be effective and can be easily programed to automatically run once a week or so.
PS2: No coincidence on what I said the fact that for example in Japan you can find a subpair/expensive SSD on the top10 selling list, simply because it's the only one available with IDE ! (which tells you people are actively using it to resuscitate old HW).
Good article guys, but Why not before recommend enable or disable TRIM, tell to users how verify if this is enable or not?
Also would be great test more that one SSD, Samsung is the newest one, but not the faster one.
Also, a commons scenario is to clone an OS HDD partition onto a new SSD, and it generally leaves physical and logical sectors misaligned. So, it is important to remark that missalineation negatively impacts performance.
4K parameters.
+10
This is my Exact, Real Life, experience too.
It does not need TRIM, as there is Intel SSD toolbox which "TRIM's" your Intel SSD as scheduled (once a week/day/hour however you config it)
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@superflykicks03 why do you assume everyone reading this article would be a "power user" who already does this? There's a plethora of people out there who will read this and who aren't anal about checking for firmware and driver updates. Therefore, useful article is useful.
umm the author was speaking about G1 intel drives which doesn't support trim and you cannot use the intel toolbox on those drives!
You have to make a very concerted effort in Windows 7 (and the current build of Linux, if my understanding is correct) to disable TRIM.
I run my games and docs from a 5900rpm HDD, and my apps and Win7 from my basic Kingston Value SSD (128gb). My rig is pretty basic, too - Intel quad-core Q9550, 8 gigs of DDR3, on an Asus P5E3 Workstation mobo. Not "ancient", but by no means blazing fast.