I just replaced a two (or so) year-old Crucial 128GB SDD with a new Crucial 256GB SSD. I know it’s an imperfect benchmark, but my Windows *HOW *Much Did I Spend-O-Meter[sup]TM[/sup] jumped from 5.9 to 7.0, all as a result of swapping the drive (it was the lowest-ranked component).
Is this the result of new technology that’s come out in the past two years? Or could the old drive have become degraded over time? It’s just a boot and application drive, so there shouldn’t be that much activity on it.
Or is it a Windows thing and I should have done X, Y, or Z to either tweak settings for speed or not bogged it down. FWIU, Windows recognizes SSDs automatically and turns defrag and whatnot off. Anything else I can/should do manually?
Perhaps it’s just the raw, sustained transfer speed? It’s conceivable that your old SSD was limited by 150 mb/s SATA, or an inferior controller that couldn’t saturate 300 mb/s SATA. Your new hard drive (an M4?) might have a 600 mb/s interface that it can damn near saturate.
The windows-spend-o-meter-index would have then measured the real-world sequential read speed on your old drive at maybe 100 mb/s, vs maybe 500 mb/s on the new drive. Of course, while that’s certainly a nice increase, it’s probably not as noticeable or dramatic as the upgrade from low-seek-speed mechanical hard drives to your first SSD…
going from a previous-gen SSD to an M4 can be part of it. Also, AFAIK SSDs are faster when they have more capacity due to the controller being able to “stripe” data across more chips. Though I think the largest difference is in write speeds.
Fast drives for the O/S make a huge difference in overall performance. Every on demand windows service that may or may not be loaded into ram at any given time live on that drive and not having to wait a couple thousandths of a second per file x 27 files being fetched will make a perceptible difference. Windows can waste alot of time waiting for storage devices to cough up data.
Oh, right. I meant I wasn’t constantly filling it up and removing user data. I can’t imagine going back to a regular drive for startup. I just convinced Mrs. Devil to let me in her Mac to swap out her 4GB of RAM and Apple drive for 8GB and an SSD. Tremendous speed difference in bootup and file access and working with programs (she’s the design side of things). Amazing.
An M4 should get 7.9 in WEI. Like above, make sure you have AHCI enabled. Before you change it, though, you’ll need to change a registry value (do a search on AHCI registry hack) or your machine will blue screen when you re enter Windows.
My 128GB M4 gets 7.9 (my slowest component is my processor, an i5 at 4.3 GHz, which gets 7.6). You may have lower if you you only have 3Gbps SATA, as an M4 will use the extra bandwidth from a 6Gbps port. It’s also likely that the 5.9 score was Windows measuring your HD instead of your SSD, which happens sometimes (WEI sucks), as 5.9 is the highest a regular HDD can score.
Do I need to check other drives on the system to see if they’ll work with AHCI? One of the ‘regular’ drives is somewhat old; it’s a 360GB WD Caviar back when that size was considered fairly large. There are also DVD drives (one BluRay).
Any idea if I’ll need to do anything in Virtualbox? I have Ubuntu 11.10 on there. Taking a look at VB settings, it looks like it defaulted to AHCI.
Lastly, the motherboard has two JMicron controllers. The JMB363 controller has all six drives on it. I connected the JMB322 (top, source I think) port to the case’s e-SATA external port. I turned that on in BIOS when I made the change. It was in a different part of BIOS setup. I can’t imagine it having any kind of impact, but I thought to says something just in case.