512Gb SSD

Carl_Bennetts · 17 Dec 2012 at 21:56

Hi, I'm looking for my first SSD and I want to go for a 512Gb size. I'm not sure I will get the speed boost from the new Samsung 840 Pro due to my motherboard although I could be wrong?

The M4 looks good but then what about the Samsung 840 500Gb model?

Mainly games/browsing. Spec me one please?

Merry christmas

wazza300 · 17 Dec 2012 at 22:06

youll only get sata2 speeds with that board 260-270 mbps rather than the rated 550mbps

if you have marvell sata3 ports they wont be as fast either,not as fast as intel sata3

samsung is the better out of the two

kedge · 18 Dec 2012 at 07:02

Carl_Bennetts said:
The M4 looks good but then what about the Samsung 840 500Gb model?

I should imagine any ssd is ok to be honest, as long as the price is right and there is plenty of storage, remember you wont get the full 512GB of space, up to 9GB is reserved for my Crucial M4 128GB model and 5GB for the M4 64GB. I use the asus p7p55d-e with a Crucial M4 64GB and 128GB, both run at sata2 speeds because of mobo limitations and enabling sata6Gb/s on the p7p55d-e will reduce the x16 PCI-E to x8, and, i tested the marvell 6GB/s controller on the motherboard and got approx 300MBs read speeds which was slightly faster than the intel sata2 speeds but i prefer to run the x16 PCI-E at x16 rather than x8. I also like the auto firmware updater that Crucial provide.

Carl_Bennetts · 18 Dec 2012 at 18:38

Thanks for the advice. Will I see a difference running x8 pice speed? Just wondering if the marvel controller might give me a speed boost although I know it's less stable than intel sata2

kedge · 20 Dec 2012 at 09:02

Carl_Bennetts said:
Thanks for the advice. Will I see a difference running x8 pice speed? Just wondering if the marvel controller might give me a speed boost although I know it's less stable than intel sata2

I did a couple of runs with the marvell controller enabled at sata 6GB/s and noticed that the heaven benchmark showed a higher minimum framerate but the maximum framerate dropped by several frames. My testing was not fully conclusive though and for what ever reason i had a blue screen crash or bsod. Benchmarks for sata 6GB/s shows improvements but for me, day to day computing and maybe a tad gaming i could not tell the difference. The only time i have noticed something running faster was on an AMD system, their sata ports were all native sata6GB/s, so my Crucial M4 64GB was running at its max read and write at that time, what i noticed was in ArmA 2 the textures loaded much quicker in the editor.