SSD Suggestions Under £100 & Compatible With A (Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 (rev. 1.0) Motherboard)

ScottMC7000 · 12 Feb 2019 at 03:33

I've been doing a lot of video editing in the past 7 months which has incorporated lots of 3D animation that I've created in Cinema 4D. I've got the graphics card upgrad sorted with an AMD Sapphire RX570 8 Gig which arrived last week from overclockers and has been great since going from my old Nvidia Palit 1 Gig I got 9 years ago for my overclocked Core I7 920, 16 Gig ram system. Currently, I've been using Hitfilm for a big project, but it's still slow as hell to export a 1080P 10 minute film (almost 2 Hours, even with pre rendered proxies, timeline still sluggish also) and using my current 7200 RPM drives could well be the reason for the issue's, or perhaps it's that Hitfilm just sucks performance wise. In any case, the mobo is a first revision one, and with that, there was some issue's....

A quote I found on the net "All X58 chipset based motherboards use a Marvell controller for their SATA 3 (6Gb/s) ports.
The Marvell 9128 controller on your motherboard has a maximum data bandwidth of PCIe x1 at 5Gb/s (500MB/s)."

Due to cost per gigabyte of SSD's compared to what you get with traditional hard drives, I've never really felt the need to get an SSD, boot time... this hasn't been a big deal really either so I've sat without them for this long. I've not really kept track of the developments of them other than reading a few articles over the years... but I see there's PCI-E ones also... My mobo has an extra two of those with 3 way SLI slots on them..and then there are the ordinary ones you see.

Size wise, I'm looking at the largest I can get, my current operating system hard drive is 500 Gig Western Digital just for reference, and I have 2 Terabyte and One Terabyte drives for storage.

Danny75 · 12 Feb 2019 at 07:28

Well it's definitely a good time for cost-per-GB. Nearly seven years ago a 120GB SSD cost me £120. Couple years later a 250GB SSD cost me £70-ish. And two more years after that, picked up a 500GB for my dad at £100-ish. Now you can get decent 500GB SSDs for close to £50 and 1TBs for close to £100. No regets though, despite the limited storage size they have probably been the nicest things to have in general, for the overall snappiness they inject into the experience of using a computer. They affect much more than boot/load times. And if prices stay similar, next one I'll pick up will be 1TB minimum. Which is actually what I'd suggest to you. Bite the bullet and spend a bit extra for a £120 Crucial MX500 1TB for example.

As for PCIe and NVME, I don't really see a reliable solution for that motherboard, especially if you were to use a PCIe M.2 adapter (which you'd have to) and use the SSD as boot drive. People have mentioned it not being too reliable on old platforms especially. But someone who knows better might vouch for it.

I think mentioning which operating system you're on could also help those who know their NVME down to a tee as some OS may not play well with them without separate drivers.

BongoHunter · 12 Feb 2019 at 07:57

When you go into windows task manager or performance monitor during your export from hitfilm, is it definitely your disk IO that's maxed out and not the CPU? Would be good to confirm exactly where the bottleneck is before spending any money

ED209 · 12 Feb 2019 at 13:27

I have a x58 mobo and the marvel controller is crap. I have disabled this in the bios and use the Intel ones which give me a max read and write of 250mb. I could not max out the speeds of 550mb on the marvel controller as googling shows this to not be very good.

No problems at all using the Intel controller, I use the Samsung 850 Evo and a ocz Trion 100.

Also if you want a bit more grunt from the system get a Xeon 5650. There is a huge thread about this in the cpu section

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/1366-x58-xeon-5650.18618052/

Armageus · 12 Feb 2019 at 13:53

Something like the Asus U3S6 (That I believe OcUK used to sell) https://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboard-Accessories/U3S6/

Would give you both USB3 and 6GB SATA both the only things really lacking from the X58 platform:-
(although realistically I think most similar cards top out around 400Mb/s - but still faster than the Intel sata ports or any marvell ones).

Similar cards are available but I can't link to them, but searching for "usb3 and sata pcie card" would point you in the right direction.

ScottMC7000 · 12 Feb 2019 at 22:01

Thanks for the replies... right now I'm in the middle of clearing out over 100 gigs of data from my existing drives after noticing the one that was being read that contained the video files for the project had fallen down to just 343Kb's, whilst my main OS 'C' drive was down to 16 gigs :-O. I do also have an extra 1 Gig drive but that's used for Linux Mint 18 but that's not writable in Windows, just readable though a drive utility program. I'm running Windows 7 64 atm, and have been since the first installation of it on my current drive, of which it has only ever had one installation of. I'll probably need to defrag them after the clear out, well the main OS drive anyway which is a 500 Gig. I read the PCI slot based SSD's are not compatible with anything other than Windows 10, dunno if that would apply to Linux too though. So with that, I'll probably look at something more conventional SSD wise that will work well enough... I've got a few questions relating to some of your posts but I'll ask them later... cheers.