Samsung 64GB 2.5" SATA-II MLC Solid State Hard Drive

Paul11 · 12 Mar 2009 at 18:01

apparently these are going up in price soon

[timko] · 12 Mar 2009 at 19:37

I've had a look through the "other forum" and no one has mentioned an increase. Did you hear/read it from somewhere different to where I was looking?

oggiet · 12 Mar 2009 at 19:39

Its def there mate, its gonna go up by about £15

[timko] · 12 Mar 2009 at 19:44

It was in a seperate thread. I was expecting it to be in the one where everyone was posting their results. Thanks for the headsup guys

dirtydog · 12 Mar 2009 at 20:02

Further to the write speed on these drives. I tried installing a large game demo which I have on my regular HDD, and timing how long it took.

Installing it from one part of the HDD to the other, even though it was on the same physical disk so the head would need to alternate between reading and writing, it was faster than reading from the HDD and writing to the SSD. So if I had two regular HDDs instead, the installation could be expected to be around twice as quick.

Just something to bear in mind for someone thinking of getting one of these drives; the write speeds ARE mediocre.

fergie128 · 12 Mar 2009 at 23:00

Getting about 192mb tops read spead from 2 of these in raid 0. Sound about right ?

[timko] · 12 Mar 2009 at 23:07

fergie128 said:
Getting about 192mb tops read spead from 2 of these in raid 0. Sound about right ?

Here's my two in RAID-0...

Get this ATTO benchmark program from...

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1137/ATTO_Disk_Benchmark_v2.34.html

...and leave all the settings at default (apart from the drive to bench!) and hit Start

fergie128 · 13 Mar 2009 at 00:03

Tried to use ATTO, keeps giving me a weird error when I hit start, a missing .$$$ file. Using another program however. This was just an initial check on things, ill have a go again once ive changed some of the various settings to help it perform better

On another note, ive put in a PCI card with 2 extra sata ports, as im running out now. With this in though, its as if my onboard sata ports dont show up in the bios, and i only get the choice of booting from the drive connected to the PCI card, or an external usb drive.

Any suggestions on that front ?

marscay · 13 Mar 2009 at 08:32

i'm going to try my 2 samsungs under Server 2008 today and see what performance difference there is to Vista, through IOmeter/ATTO/CrystalDisk.

everything else is faster so it wouldn't surprise if these got a boost also.

[timko] · 13 Mar 2009 at 09:09

fergie128

If you're running Vista then you might need to run Atto as Admin (right click the short cut, run as Administrator). I don't use Vista myself so I don't know if this will fix the error you are experiencing.

As for the expansion card. If it really is just PCI and not PCI-Express then you might find yourself saturating the lower maximum bandwidth in comparison to PCI-E and as such your performance will be severely limited. You would be better off with the onboard RAID (which are PCI-E) if that is the case

dirtydog · 13 Mar 2009 at 09:19

Are application loading times quicker when you RAID these drives? That isn't as silly a question as it sounds.

DanF · 13 Mar 2009 at 09:47

dirtydog said:
Are application loading times quicker when you RAID these drives? That isn't as silly a question as it sounds.

Well you get double the read and write speeds, I was using 2 seagate 250gb single platter HD's in raid 0 before, they hit about 200mb/s read speeds. The new 2 x samsungs in raid 0 are faster in every way for me in actual real world usage.

dirtydog · 13 Mar 2009 at 09:53

DanF said:
Well you get double the read and write speeds, I was using 2 seagate 250gb single platter HD's in raid 0 before, they hit about 200mb/s read speeds. The new 2 x samsungs in raid 0 are faster in every way for me in actual real world usage.

RAID 0 with regular HDDs can be little or no quicker at booting Windows or loading applications than a single drive, as these benches show... so I am wondering if SSD is different.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2969&p=8

http://techreport.com/articles.x/9124/6

dirtydog · 13 Mar 2009 at 09:55

I ran the PCMark05 HDD tests on a single drive, it scored 14,874.

DanF · 13 Mar 2009 at 12:10

Can you do the hdd test on the free version? if you can I'll give it a go tonight, by the looks of it 1 drive is like 50% faster than raid 0 150gb raptors from your first link

Yeah the raid 0 with std HDD's was probably slower on boot as it had to do the raid initialisation, but it was nice at un-raring large downloads etc

dirtydog · 13 Mar 2009 at 12:15

You can't on the free version unfortunately. It isn't hard to activate PCMark05 fully but forum rules mean I can't say how

VortexA1 · 13 Mar 2009 at 12:32

oggiet said:
Thanks for that info , will come usefull when get mine going.
Reagding your keyboard, have you got USB one.....i had same problem before and had to change a setting so it would work when enter F8 boot options

Ok thank you.

I changed a setting in bios and then could get onto the raid configuration.

I still don't get keyboard access when I run a dos prompt from a boot cd fir updating bios however I get one after putting in the vista disk and booting from that ; then clicking on repair then cmd prompt once I've changed the dir to the 'cd bios update' drive and then doing the relevant dos cmds...

Is it ok to update bios there ??

oggiet · 13 Mar 2009 at 18:01

VortexA1 said:
Ok thank you. I changed a setting in bios and then could get onto the raid configuration.

I still don't get keyboard access when I run a dos prompt from a boot cd fir updating bios however I get one after putting in the vista disk and booting from that ; then clicking on repair then cmd prompt once I've changed the dir to the 'cd bios update' drive and then doing the relevant dos cmds...

Is it ok to update bios there ??

No probs mate

Glad you getting somewhere.....just come home and mine was waiting outside my door.
Whats you mean update bios....mobo one ??

VortexA1 · 13 Mar 2009 at 18:24

well that's good then I'm pleased for you.

.

Yeah the mobo bios ..I run a dos prompt off a boot cd but I can't type anything lol - just the flashing cursor. Even though I can now use the keyboard more..etc intel matrix raid screen.

I want to upgrade the bios ideally cos I ran raid 0 and it was a nightmare..

The ssd even though the write are probs slow.. I say probs cos I'm not aware of it I love the silence of it and it's very quick loading things up - Windows is so much nippier. A great purchase I'm sure you won't be disappointed m8.

I now hate the sound of the normal hard drive lol!

Let me know how you get on with it. It is in a nice metal case - looks well made and

lol

(To an earlier poster - yeah I got firefox 3 moved and did it the easier way .Thank you.)

VortexA1 · 13 Mar 2009 at 18:28

dirtydog said:
RAID 0 with regular HDDs can be little or no quicker at booting Windows or loading applications than a single drive, as these benches show... so I am wondering if SSD is different.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2969&p=8

http://techreport.com/articles.x/9124/6

From what I've been reading - SSDs are different