Show us your SSD performance

paulpicks21 said:

Ok so I have a new motherboard being delivered tomorrow as the current one is very cheap.

I know how to enable AHCI in windows now.

Apart from that , where is the best place to plug the SSD on the new mobo?

And I keep hearing about RAID , is this something I need to know about that will benefit the SSD?

Heres the ports on the new mobo -

5 xSATA 3 Gb/s ports
Intel® Matrix Storage Technology Support RAID 0,1,5,10
JMicron® JMB361 SATA & PATA controllers:
1 x Ultra DMA 133 / 100 / 66 for up to 2 PATA devices
1 x External SATA 3Gb/s port (SATA On-the-Go)
Silicon Image Sil5723 (Drive Xpert technology):
2 x SATA 3Gb/s ports

Thanks for the help guys

Paul.

I have seen some issues resulting from the OS HDD/SSD not being plugged into SATA 3 Gb/s port0, the first port.
It use to make a difference but, with newer motherboards it shouldn't matter.
I still use port0 for my OS SSD.

Use the standard motherboard controller, not the JMicron.

Agree with whs RAID is a lot of work for what you get. One SSD should be fast enough, two SSDs are more expensive for the noticeable performance.
It depends on what your doing. Normal usage I would go with one.

Before you install Win7, change your BIOS setting to AHCI. Then you won't have to do it afterwards.

+1. A single SSD is all you really need as it is the access time which is important and more doesn't equal quicker access.

Agree that Single SSD is almost always the best route to go. RAID really bumps those benchmarks of raw throughput...but unless you are using your SSD drives for storage then it's kinda a moot point. It's the microsecond access times that are the key factor as said above and that is why running an SSD is such a great performance gain when you upgrade to one.

As far as RAID 0 goes, with software RAID you will get diminishing returns after more than 3 drives are added to the array. With 4 drives you need a PCI-e RAID controller to get better numbers.

I've seen the tests and real world performance does get better as you add more drives. The PC mark Vantage results prove this beyond any shadow of a doubt. The downside is that with each added drive you increase the risk of data loss. Not to mention that trim won't work if you are using RAID.

paulpicks21 said:

...Sadly I have a new problem now though. Before I had the cpu clocked to 3.1ghz , totally stable ran for months like this.
With the new mobo I cannot seem to overclock it past 2.6ghz and even then its causing the pc to power down randomly which is not good so its back to stock for now.

Tried any voltage tweaks?

This before and after comparison of post 726 is really interesting. It looks like there was an improvement with AHCI - but for real life nothing has really changed. Let me explain: Since I assume that this is the OS disk, there are 2 things that count for the speed:

a) Access time
b) 4K reads

However, as you can see, with or without AHCI you get the same numbers. And that is why people are not really seeing a difference in real life.
It may be interesting to get all excited about the other numbers - and if that were a data disk it may have an impact - but for an OS disk all the other numbers are really irrelevant.