SSD Questions

Yeah, I have been treating my solid state drives like hard drives for the most part, and they're still fine even after daily use after almost 5 years now.

I've readjusted my settings again. I'm not really concerned with the life of the SSD, I'm sure, as you said that it will be fine for quite some time. I'm striving for performance here. Right now I have a 1 GB Page File on the SSD and a system managed one on my HDD. Indexing and Search are enabled. I re-enabled Prefetch/Superfetch since once again, I'm not as concerned with the lifetime of the drive as I am performance. I adjusted the Write Cache Buffer and Write-Cache Buffer Flushing as esenbe suggested. The program worded it in a confusing way. Having things set the way you advised seems to make the most sense. Also, even if I do lose some data due to power loss, I have all of my user folders on my HDD. I also have system restore set to 5% (11 or so GB) and 23.8 GB allocated for Over Provisioning. I still have plenty of space on the drive, so I can adjust things if I ever need more space. Thanks for all the help guys.

Well with everyone's help I have doubled the performance of the drive (according to Samsung Magician at least) as you can see in the images below (unfortunately I forgot to take an image of what the stats were before this so the images only show what the SSD speeds are now). The results used to be halved for each category. I opened up my case and adjusted my setup a little bit. I have an ASUS Z77 Motherboard by the way. My original SATA port setup had my Seagate HDD in port 1, my ASUS Blu ray drive in port 2, and the Hotswap Bay on the top of my case (Antec DF-85) plugged into E1 (I did this without realizing that ports E1 and E2 aren't Intel ports, but AsMedia ports. I just saw that it was 6 Gb/s and plugged it in, since I'd rather have it in a 6 Gb/s port rather than a 3 Gb/s one).

I changed the setup once I got the SSD. The SSD had to be mounted at the bottom of my case because I don't have any 2.5" bays, plenty of 3.5" though. Luckily the case had a place to mount 2.5" drives at the bottom. I had meant to go to Microcenter really quickly and get an adapter so the drive wouldn't be sitting at the bottom where all the dust collects, but I never got around to it (Still haven't ). So I plugged it in anyway. Since the drive is almost touching the bottom of the case, the angled side of the SATA cable couldn't be plugged into it, so the angled side had to be plugged into the Motherboard. It couldn't be plugged into port 1 because it would block port 2. The angled side didn't quite fit right in port 2 because of the case. So what ended up happening was it being plugged into port E2 (I still hadn't notice that it wasn't an intel port). I only had 2 SATA 6 Gb/s cables and I left the one I had been using for the HDD and took the one I was using for the optical drive and used it for the SSD, leaving the optical drive with a 3 Gb/s cable. The HDD remained in port 1, the optical drive got moved to port 3 (since it now has a 3 Gb/s cable), the Hotswap bay remained in port E1 and the SSD got plugged into E2.

Just now, I opened the case. I moved the HDD to port 4 and moved the SSD to port 1. Everything else is the same.

I'm ordering a drive bay adapter now and I'll be able to plug both the SSD and HDD into ports 1 and 2.

As a result of this, my HDD speed has dipped a little, but the SSD Speeds have doubled.

tl;dr: My SSD is faster now.

Thanks for all the help again guys.

bobafetthotmail said:

A quick tip from a ghetto PC assembler. Double-coated tape (adhesive on both sides) can keep the SSD wherever you want it to at a very low price.

I thought about that, but the adapters are only about 5 USD and I found one with a fan for 10 USD so I'll just order one from Newegg: Rosewill RDRD-11003 HDD Accessory - Newegg.com

Britton30 said:

There are also SATA cables straight on both ends. Dust won't harm a SSD.

Yeah I know. I'll just mount it with the rest of the drive bays anyway, plus I get the extra fan. It's still a bit of a tight fit for the non-angled connector anyway.