I've seen this one on Scan and it seems quite cheap. Is it any good/worth the money? http://www.scan.co.uk/products/960g...24mb-cache-read-560mb-s-write-540mb-s-100k-38
From what i can quickly establish, it'll be a *very* low end offering. Well, the OCZ Trion 100, which all the info about it strongly suggests is also a TLC nand Phison S10 controller but with a custom Toshiba firmware, tested quite appallingly... ...& Patriot don't write their own firmware so it won't have been optimised. ignoring much older drives & the shonky Kingston things, the only current model that i can see that's worse is the new BX200 - Crucial's attempt at a TLC drive. Yeah, thus far, the only decent TLC drives have been the 840 Evo (accepting that there were f/w issues), the SanDisk Ultra II (which is roughly on a par with the 840 Evo) & the 850 Evo... ...so, *if* price (rather than performance) were the key metric, as you can pick up the significantly better 960GB SanDisk Ultra II for the same price as this thing... ...whilst the 1TB 850 Evo would cost you ~£40 more & obviously is much faster again.
Now the Evo can be gotten for ~£264 - http://www.ebuyer.com/695894-samsung-850-evo-1tb-2-5inch-ssd-mz-75e1t0bw - so it's not quite as large a cost differential. That said, clearly what i'd written was kind of confusing - as i wasn't actually intending to recommend the SanDisk at all. instead it was simply about saying that it's only Samsung & SanDisk who, thus far, have gotten any reasonable performance out of TLC nand within a released product - & indicating that the Patriot was vastly overpriced; given what it's performance sensibly will be (& i'm 99.999% certain on this). As to which SSD you should buy, if you're after a cheap drive to stick bunches of games on then, unless you're competitive gaming where the first to load a level gets an advantage, there's no real reason not to save the money & go for something like the Crucial BX100 (~£235 from eBuyer) - which is a faster drive than the Sandisk... ...whereas you're going to be doing more practical stuff where speed matters then, without heading into prosumer territory & vastly increasing the price, get the 850 Evo. (the Samsung also has a lower power usage if battery life matters) Now personally i would get the Samsung either which way - as my experience is that they're great reliable drives... (so i still have 2x 256GB 830s, 2x 256GB 840 Pros, 1x 250GB 840 Evo & 1x 500GB 850 Evo - plus a Plextor drive that was gotten for a very specific usage that'd be irrelevant to you) ...but other people have found the Crucials to be decent.
Well I went to Scan today and bought the Samsung, but at the higher price as I've only just seen your post. I'll be sticking it into my laptop tomorrow and hoping to speed it up somewhat. Thanks for your help. I might be back if I have any installation issues.
Sorry to hear that you missed out a little on pricing, but there was no sense in your original post that you were looking to buy instantly & so i hadn't seen any reason to link to anything... ...well, whilst i didn't see it at a purely hypothetical post, it seemed more likely that you were contemplating the economics of it all &, as most people have, would have come back with a 'what would be the best compromise if...?' type question. On the positive sides, at least you'd not completely misconstrued & bought the pretty average SanDisk one though // &, whilst you could have saved a few quid, you've certainly bought the better option for a laptop d.t the lower power usage.
It was one of those days where I bought things on a whim. One OLED tv, an ssd, 8TB hdd for back ups, and a couple of other things. Cost me a bleeding fortune. lol.
Well it ain't going well. It took over 7 hours to clone my Hdd onto the SSD using the supplied Samsung software and I have sequential read speeds of 12MB/s and write speeds of a whopping 73MB/s. The performance is absolutely dire. Any ideas. I've done all the optimisations in the Samsung software.
Without knowing the answer to Harlequin's question (though as it's a laptop then it's the detailed model info that's needed as you're unlikely to be able to find the motherboard's model), the immediate things that spring to mind are - a - you've got an old machine with only 1.5Gb/s SATA speeds. b - the machine can do >1.5Gb/s speeds, but you can add more than one drive &, for example, you've put it into a ODD bay which uses a slower controller than the main one. c - the partitions are misaligned - which can happen with cloning & (esp) older OSes as alignment isn't as critical with HDDs. d - &/or you did a full format at some point, not a quick format, making all of the cells dirty - which would sort over time. it's unlikely that only one of these will be the case, as the speeds are too slow for that - but it could potentially be a combination of them. Now, i would personally *never* clone a HDD to a SSD with an OS on, as there's far too many odd things that can go awry; so - 1. i'd check the specs of your laptop to see if you've unwittingly done something that's limiting the speeds &/or if there's something inherent that will limit them. 2. if you really want to, you can check the alignment in Windows with, in command prompt & in order - diskpart list disk select disk X (change X to the number of your SSD) list partition - & then see if the number given is divisible by 1024. 3. & then, having corrected what you can with how the drive's connected up, do a clean installation - remembering to only quick format, never full format, SSDs.
It's a Samsung I7 (3610?) Ivybridge laptop. sata3. It was in the primary drive bay when going slow. There a 2nd hdd bay as well as an optical drive. I don't have access to it at the moment to give any more specifics. I've only done a quick format so far. Was going to try a secure erase in the Samsung software but it tells me the ssd is in frozen mode and won't do it. I'll have another look tomorrow.
Okay, so that almost certainly writes off the potential that the controller's shonky, as there's effectively no chance that Samsung wouldn't have used the intel controller... ...&, whilst the 3610 almost certainly is the 3610QM processor, rather than the laptop model, the actual model isn't sensibly not going to be useful - though, as a rough guess, it's probably something like a 550P5C or 550P7C (with a couple of numbers at the end)... ...which would be a HM76 Express chipset. if you're going to be doing a clean install, there is no inherent need to secure erase the thing first. Well, the difference between that & just quick formatting during the install process is that the cells in the over provisioned & any non-partitioned user area won't all be set to 111 (it's TLC & so there's 3 bits per cell - & SSDs have a erased state of 1, 11 or 111 for SLC, MLC & TLC, vs the 0 state for HDDs) - but GC will automatically sort that out for you with an hour or two of powered on idle time... ...so personally i never bother. Just remember to delete all of the current partitions - that way if there is an alignment issue it'll be corrected - - & then use the advanced options to quick format the new partition(s) once you've recreated whatever you need.
Update. There was a 24GB partition that I couldn't delete, but I realised it was the OS recovery partition from the cloning, so I tried it and I'm now most of the way through a reinstall. Just copying the last few files over now and reinstalling some software. SSD speeds are up to normal (just copying from drive to drive is slow at 28MB/s) and with speed boost on my sequential read speed was 543.9MB/s and write speed was 3319MB/s. I guess the Samsung software screwed the drive speeds up during the clone somehow. Anyway, thanks for all your help people.
There's a lack of clarity as to where you're at with the speeds now. Well, a 28MB/s drive to drive copy 'could' be reasonable if you had the old HDD connected via a USB2 connection... ...&, very separately, the 543.9MB/s would be very slow *if* this is testing with rapid - but it's not 100% clear what you're using as a cache as you've called something "speed boost", which doesn't come up with anything obvious with a google search. As an aside, did you manage to delete the 24GB partition? Simply that if not & there was an alignment problem, this would persist onto any following partitions.
Sorry, speed boost should have been rapid mode. Crystal mark speeds now are (read/write) seq q32t1 1752/3770. 4k q32t1 488/261. seq 1717/3950. 4K 90/266. Both disks were on sata connections inside the same laptop. I did think that was slow too. I couldn't delete the partition, but at the moment things seem OK.
No worries - just making sure that we were talking about the same thing; as it's not that i know of every piece of s/w out there. Mmmmm... That still seems low - though naturally memory speed & quantity (vs the test sizes) will affect it with rapid enabled. The better way to verify is without rapid, to see if you're getting ~500MB/s for sequential r/ws - rather than either being significantly lower. if not, it's then checking the alignment, if you've not done so already... ...&, if there's no way at all to delete the first partition for a clean install (you did try the advanced options when installing windows, yes?)... ...it's then secure erasing (SEing) the thing. 'An' option to SE the thing, if you've issues with Magician running from the HDD, would be to use the USB or CD version of http://partedmagic.com/ - instructions are on the website. Now 'if' you can't work around the drive lock with the sleep option in the s/w, an alt is to initially boot with the SSD disconnected - & attach it during the boot process, just before it starts loading from the stick/CD.
