New Samsung 840 PRO 128gb SSD Questions

[DLCPhoto]

I have a somewhat old Dell 630i Desktop (4 years old) - QuadCore 2.4 GHz, 6gb RAM, NVidia GeForce 9800GT, Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit OS. I wanted to boost performance some (slow boot times), and enhance working on Canon Raw Files in Adobe Bridge, Camera Raw and Photoshop, and thought adding an SSD might be advantageous.

I settled on the Samsung 840 Pro 128gb SSD, even though I realized I might not get full benefit of its speed (but I can always use it down the road in another system):

As far as I was able to determine, my Motherboard (Dell 0PP150 A00) does not support SATA III; only SATA II, on its 4 SATA ports. Wanting to maximize my speeds, I bought a Rosewill RC-225 PCIe Adapter, which I have plugged into a PCIe-x16 slot. The SSD is plugged into the SATA port on this Adapter.

The SSD was recognized, after installing the included Marvell Drivers for the Adapter, Device Manager showed no problems, etc. Just had to initialize the Drive in Disk Management, Format it (NTFS), and I was good to go. I used Casper 7.0 to clone my OS onto it. I was then able to boot from it and so everything went smoothly.

Boot time seemed to drop by 50 to 75% as a 'guess-timate.' Photoshop/Bridge/Camera Raw load reasonably quickly, but I can't really say I'm seeing any less lag when I'm adjusting pictures in real-time.

I'm wanting to make sure I have everything configured properly to get the most out of my existing hardware. Samsung Magician showed:

Sequential Read: 208
Sequential Write: 148
Random Read: 7325
Random Write: 7261

From what I've learned, these numbers are not too impressive (although still better than my regular HD's by a good amount).

Samsung Magician shows AHCI Mode. I "Tuned" using the various OS Optimization recommendations. When I try to run Performance Optimization, it gives me an error message:

""magician cannot communicate with the selected samsung ssd"

even though it sees it, can run benchmarks, check for Firmware update (no update was needed), etc.

On boot-up, I can get into the Marvell BIOS for the Rosewill Adapter, and find this information:

BIOS Version 1.0.0.1033
Firmware Version 2.2.0.1124
PCIe Speed Rate 2.5 Gbps
Configuration SATA As AHCI Mode
Supported Mode RAID0 RAID1

For the SSD itself, this Marvell BIOS shows:

PORT ID 1
PD ID 1
Type SATA SSD
Status Unconfigured
Size 122104mb
Feature Support NCQTRIM 6G 48 Bits
Current Speed 6G

If I 'select' the SSD by hitting the enter key, it gives me the option to "erase RAID Config data" but I just escaped out of this - no other options or choices are readily available.


So what I'm asking is if I can do anything further to get the best possible performance out of this SSD, in terms of drivers, settings, plug the SSD directly into a SATA port on the motherboard rather than the PCIe adapter, etc.

I'm also puzzled why Samsung Magician is unable to "communicate" enough with the SSD to do the Performance Optimization.

I'm reasonably tech-savvy, but feel a little out of my depth at this level of hardware, so any advice would be appreciated.

Don

 

[Hellhammer]

Just plug it to the motherboard SATA port. These cheap PCIe SATA cards usually provide worse performance than native SATA 3Gbps ports anyway. I have two different ones (one with Marvell chipset, the other with ASMedia) and especially with the Marvell one speeds are fairly bad (I only bought them because I needed more SATA ports and wanted to test how bad they really are).

 

[DLCPhoto]

Just plug it to the motherboard SATA port. These cheap PCIe SATA cards usually provide worse performance than native SATA 3Gbps ports anyway. I have two different ones (one with Marvell chipset, the other with ASMedia) and especially with the Marvell one speeds are fairly bad (I only bought them because I needed more SATA ports and wanted to test how bad they really are).

I appreciate the reply and information.

I was kind of wondering about that. My motherboard SATA ports are actually full as well, which is also why I went the route of the PCIe adapter. But one of these ports is for an eSATA adapter that I use to connect an external HD for a weekly backup of my data drive, so I can transfer this to the Rosewill device (which actually has an eSATA port on it). A little slower speed there wouldn't be a big problem.

Any other thoughts?

Thanks again.

Don

 

[Hellhammer]

Any other thoughts?

Not really. See what kind of speeds you get when connected to the motherboard SATA port and report back. You can also move any drive to the PCIe card, you won't have to change anything in the OS (boot order in BIOS is the only thing that you may have to check). I have my 2TB backup drive and the optical drive connected to one of my PCIe cards because performance isn't important with them.

 

[DLCPhoto]

Will do.

I'll keep that in mind, although the easiest is to just go ahead and use the eSATA port on the Rosewill device for my external HD.

My computer's BIOS doesn't allow me to select a particular HD in the boot order, so what I did was just unplug the data cable from my other drives, 'forcing' it to boot with the newly cloned SSD. Once that was done, I plugged the others back in, and it 'remembered' which HD it last booted from, and things went surprisingly smoothly.

I'll probably do that again when I switch to the motherboard SATA port for the SSD, just to make sure it doesn't boot from the original boot drive.

 

[Coup27]

Hellhammer is correct. I've seen many threads such as these where people such as yourself buy a 6Gbps SATA to PCI Express card and rightfully assume it will work to its potential, but the reality is very different.

These cards introduce a host of stability problems. Your "magician cannot communicate with the selected samsung ssd" is being caused by the add on card, I guarantee it. The sequential read is probably slower on the card than it would be on one of the 4 chipset (motherboard) ports.

It was not a total waste though, as if you are already using all 4 chipset ports then you could plug your optical drive into the PCI Express card and free up a chipset port for your SSD. The performance and features required by optical drives are so low that you won't have any problems putting them on the PCI Express card.

 

[aviator78]

Boot time seemed to drop by 50 to 75% as a 'guess-timate.' Photoshop/Bridge/Camera Raw load reasonably quickly, but I can't really say I'm seeing any less lag when I'm adjusting pictures in real-time.

The PCIe card slows down the boot process because it must be initialized by your computer. So just the loading of the OS will be faster, not the things before that.

You won't see less lag while editing images, bacause this process does not really depends on SSD/HDD speed. It just depends on RAM and CPU und their bus speeds.

If you want more performance you will need to upgrade your Mainboard to get native SATA6GBps ports or you need more RAM if you have less than 4GB.

 

[DLCPhoto]

Thanks for the additional confirmations of the problem. I'll be interested to see how much change there is in terms of both benchmarks and real-world performance when I plug directly into the mainboard.

I have 6gb of RAM now; it'll support up to 8gb, so another $60 or so will get me there, but it's unclear how much impact this would have. For what it's worth, my Windows Experience Index is 5.9 for everything except 5.0 for the Memory component.

Obviously you reach a point where it's not cost-effective to keep upgrading individual components, and you just need to bite the bullet and get a new system, but I don't think I'm quite there yet. The lag in Camera Raw is more than I would like, but it's still workable.

Don

 

[DLCPhoto]

OK, here's some follow-up:

I connected the Samsung SSD to a mainboard SATA port, routing the DVD cable to the Rosewill PCIe SATA Adapter. Ran Samsung Magician:

1. It comes up with:
"No Samsung Brand SSD Found In The System" some functions may not work. Still can't access Performance Optimization.

2. Going to OS Optimization, it still does show AHCI Mode (I checked in the main BIOS, and didn't find any settings one way or the other for the SSD).

3. Running Performance Benchmarks, I get:

Sequential Read: 124
Sequential Write: 102
Random Read: 395
Random Write 9333

These numbers are dramatically worse than when it was connected to the PCIe Adapter (with the exception of Random Write which is slightly higher)!!

Based on this, it looks like I'm better off connecting the SSD to the Rosewill PCIe Adapter!


Lastly, I don't know if it is coincidence or not, but during one re-boot, after everything was reconfigured properly, and I was going to check the BIOS settings for AHCI, etc., I got a BSOD!! Very unexpected:

"A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within the allotted time interval" with an associated STOP code (I can provide if necessary).
A reboot was fine after this BSOD, but it was a bit nerve-wracking!


So:

1. What do you think of the fact that the SSD seems to perform better when connected to the PCIe adapter?

2. Why do you think the SSD still isn't fully recognized by Magician when connected directly to the MB?

3. Is this BSOD connected to all of this, and/or a harbinger of problems to come??

Thanks!

 

[Coup27]

There are clearly some problems on the system which need rooting out. I've looked at the Dell 630i and it uses a nVidia nForce 650i SLI chipset. This won't be as good as an Intel chipset, but the spec sheet says it supports SATA 3Gbps so it should be performing better than it is.

Are you working with clones or are you doing a fresh install?

Would it be possible to do the following?

1. Download the latest drivers for your computer from Dell's website and save them on a USB stick. Particularly we need the nVidia chipset and your LAN driver. See if there is anything else to do with storage by nVidia while you're there. I did check myself but I could not find the 630i system. Your service tag will help here.

2. Use the Samsung Magician to create a secure erase USB stick or CD. If you use the USB option you'll need a different stick.

3. Boot said item and secure erase your SSD.

4. Unplug all drives from the system except your SSD and the optical drive and remove the SATA to PCI Express card. Plug the SSD into the first SATA port and the optical drive into the second port on the motherboard.

5. Boot the Windows Vista x64 installation media and do a fresh install using your OEM licence key. This will ensure we have a clean system with aligned partitions.

6. Install your required drivers and fully update Windows.

7. Re-attempt with the SSD Magician and also run a CrystalDiskMark benchmark and post the scores.

I understand this may sound like a lot but there is only a few hours work here and it will totally kill everything anything non-essential as a fault. If you are still experiencing the same problems after the above you may be out of luck with a poor nVidia chipset.

 

[DLCPhoto]

Coup27:

First, thank you so much for your time and thoughts. Way beyond the call of duty!

Yes, I am working from a cloned OS. I know this is not ideal, but everything is running quite well, no significant issues, and I would really like to avoid the very time consuming task of reinstalling and reconfiguring everything - I've got a lot of different stuff on this computer!

Regarding drivers, I put my service tag into Dell's site, and took a look at the list of recommended driver and software updates - it's *huge*. I created a PDF of this list which can be found here:

Dell 630i Analysis

Edit: the list is not as large as I had originally thought - Windows XP came up as the default OS, and I hadn't changed it to Vista 64-bit when I first generated the list. I reuploaded the file, and it is now correct.


I understand where you're going with your recommendations, and have no doubt this would provide a definitive answer to the question, but I'm reluctant to go there. I've done stuff like this in the past, "just to make sure," and have often ended up in the same place I was to begin with, with nothing to show for the time invested. As you indicate, I could be well be "out of luck" regardless of what I do.


The simplest thing seems to be to go back to the original configuration, with the SSD plugged into the Rosewill PCIe Adapter. Would say those original performance benchmarks I posted are abysmal, completely unacceptable, or reasonable given my situation? The question is how much better I might be able to do, and whether or not this will be of practical benefit.

Your thoughts on this, based on the above?

Finally - do you have any reason to think the BSOD (which I virtually never encounter on this system) I describe above is related to any of this, hints at any more serious problem, or is otherwise worrisome?

 

[Coup27]

I've had a look on the Dell website with your service tag and there are no nVidia chipset or storage drivers for Windows Vista x64. If you change the OS to XP, there are offered drivers. This means that you are going to have to rely on Microsoft default storage and chipset drivers. Essential functionality will be there but advanced features of more sophisticated chipsets will be missing. Unfortunately Dell have done you a bit there. They should not be offering Vista x64 on a system without a complete set of supported drivers. You maybe able to find the nVidia chipset driver elsewhere on the internet. If you change your OS to XP, it's called "nVidia SM Bus" or something under the chipset tab.

If you are working with cloned OS's, then this gives us some options. Firstly, as you already know, any issues with your current installation you are carrying over into your SSD "testing" scenario. This is not ideal at all as it makes fault finding very difficult. However what it does mean is you can try my steps above and if you end up back at square one, you can restore your clone and get everything back with minimal effort. You may find that if a fresh install solves all of your problems and unlocks all of the SSDs potential and the additional time to reinstall everything would be worth it in the long run.

On the BSOD, it's very rare OEM machines give a BSOD due to hardware. I learned many years ago that its often much quicker to try a fresh install (as per above) and see if that eradicates the fault than it is individually fault finding a system. If the fault persists after that, your debugging route just got a lot shorter.

My recommendation to you would be to try my steps above and see what it yields. If it does draw a blank you can restore your clone and know for sure you have a poor chipset or lacking the correct chipset driver which could fix it.

 

[DLCPhoto]

I've had a look on the Dell website with your service tag and there are no nVidia chipset or storage drivers for Windows Vista x64. If you change the OS to XP, there are offered drivers. This means that you are going to have to rely on Microsoft default storage and chipset drivers. Essential functionality will be there but advanced features of more sophisticated chipsets will be missing. Unfortunately Dell have done you a bit there. They should not be offering Vista x64 on a system without a complete set of supported drivers. You maybe able to find the nVidia chipset driver elsewhere on the internet. If you change your OS to XP, it's called "nVidia SM Bus" or something under the chipset tab.

If you are working with cloned OS's, then this gives us some options. Firstly, as you already know, any issues with your current installation you are carrying over into your SSD "testing" scenario. This is not ideal at all as it makes fault finding very difficult. However what it does mean is you can try my steps above and if you end up back at square one, you can restore your clone and get everything back with minimal effort. You may find that if a fresh install solves all of your problems and unlocks all of the SSDs potential and the additional time to reinstall everything would be worth it in the long run.

On the BSOD, it's very rare OEM machines give a BSOD due to hardware. I learned many years ago that its often much quicker to try a fresh install (as per above) and see if that eradicates the fault than it is individually fault finding a system. If the fault persists after that, your debugging route just got a lot shorter.

My recommendation to you would be to try my steps above and see what it yields. If it does draw a blank you can restore your clone and know for sure you have a poor chipset or lacking the correct chipset driver which could fix it.

Thanks again Coup27.

Reinforced by your additional driver observations above, my 'gut' feeling is that I'm not likely to gain any better performance than I had initially, as there are hardware (and possibly driver) limitations that are acting as the 'weakest link.' That said, you're correct - having my OS cloned does give me the option of checking out other options.

But to be honest, I'm not sure I have the time or patience right now to do this, but won't rule it out for the future. And hopefully that BSOD was just a random fluke that won't rear its ugly head again.

I really thought connecting the SSD directly to the MB would work better, but it appears not, and would require a disproportionate amount of time/effort to resolve, for questionable potential practical yield.

Will re-post if other issues/questions arise, but would like to thank everyone who has been so generous with their time and experience in helping me work through this.

Any other thoughts/ideas always welcome.

 

[yefi]

You maybe able to find the nVidia chipset driver elsewhere on the internet. If you change your OS to XP, it's called "nVidia SM Bus" or something under the chipset tab.

You can just download them from Nvidia's main driver page. If it uses the 650i SLI, the latest drivers are here: http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/nforce-vista-win7-64bit-15.57-driver-uk.html

 

[DLCPhoto]

You can just download them from Nvidia's main driver page. If it uses the 650i SLI, the latest drivers are here: http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/nforce-vista-win7-64bit-15.57-driver-uk.html

Thanks for this. I'm trying to confirm that my motherboard has the 650i SLI chipset, but haven't been able to find this information anywhere.

Coup27 - where did you find this? I can't find this identified in any information at the Dell site, Belarc Adviser doesn't show it, etc.

This seems like a fairly simple thing to try, if this is the correct driver for my hardware. What potential pitfalls might I encounter, and how easy would it be to reverse the process if it creates problems, rather than solving them?

Don

 

[Coup27]

I got it from here - http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/xps630i/en/OM/HTML/specs.htm

If you have a clone of your system then it is very easy to restore back. If installing your chipset drivers introduces problems elsewhere then you definately have issues on your system you really need to root out.

Now a full chipset driver package has been found, it's certainly worth a fresh attempt with the correct drivers to see what the difference is.

 

[DLCPhoto]

Yeah, I really should give this a try. I'm not sure I can do this right away, but will put it on my 'to do' list.

Thanks again for the help to all of you!

 

[tweakboy]

Just plug it to the motherboard SATA port. These cheap PCIe SATA cards usually provide worse performance than native SATA 3Gbps ports anyway. I have two different ones (one with Marvell chipset, the other with ASMedia) and especially with the Marvell one speeds are fairly bad (I only bought them because I needed more SATA ports and wanted to test how bad they really are).

Exactly, Ive had issue like this too. Those PCIe cards are junk.

You will get at least 260mbps if you connect directly to motherboard and its sata 2.0. The SSD will perform the same as far as boot up times, app launch times, and data. With sata 3.0 That read will go to 500mbps that is only good for bulk loads or writes. Your good to go, you shouldn''t have bought that cheap card. Just connect to onboard SATA run benchmark that 208mbps will or should be 260mbps and a snappier SSD. gl

 

[DLCPhoto]

Exactly, Ive had issue like this too. Those PCIe cards are junk.

You will get at least 260mbps if you connect directly to motherboard and its sata 2.0. The SSD will perform the same as far as boot up times, app launch times, and data. With sata 3.0 That read will go to 500mbps that is only good for bulk loads or writes. Your good to go, you shouldn''t have bought that cheap card. Just connect to onboard SATA run benchmark that 208mbps will or should be 260mbps and a snappier SSD. gl

Thanks for the reply. A couple of things:

See one of my posts above (#9), where I did just that. My Benchmarks ended up plummeting in 3 out of 4 of the parameters. The posts following that one attempt to identify why this would be the case. Perhaps the drivers for the chipset might resolve this.

Secondly, the 4 onboard SATA ports are already occupied, so I needed to add something to be able to connect the SSD in the first place.

If you have any other ideas on why SSD performance went down went down when attached directly to the MB, I would be interested.

Thanks.

Don

 

[DLCPhoto]

A follow-up question.

Just to be 100% sure, I found CPU-Z and installed it - verified that I have the NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI chipset. I downloaded the file for the drivers, and did a little looking before running the .exe file.

I found a recommendation to uninstall the current nvidia drivers, through Control Panel, reboot, and then run the .exe file to install the most current drivers:

http://www.playtool.com/pages/chipsetdrivers/chipset.html

Looking there, I have the option to uninstall all drivers, including display, or excluding the display.

What is the safest way to proceed here?

 

[tweakboy]

What video card do you have ? If its nVidia, you don't have to even uninstall the old ones, it does that for you automatically. I hardly doubt your card is the issue. So even connecting to mobo SATA 2.0 you get 208mbps ? That is not right at all should be like 260mbps at least. Im scratching my head. Can you do this for me and well find out more. Download Crystaldiskinfo ... and it will tell you at what percent your SSD is and it will tell you if the life or wear tear went down or even your 100 percent is now 97 percent, like my dads cheap a-data. He used to be 375mbps sata 3.0 now hes 300mbps. So please DL Crystaldiskinfo and well take it from there. Post a screenshot of it if you can. gl

 

[DLCPhoto]

As specified in my first post, NVidia GeForce 9800 GT. I don't think the GPU is relevant either; just pointed out that I had the option of uninstalling those in the same section as the other NVidia drivers via Add/Remove Programs.

As per post #9, with the SSD connected directly to the MB SATA port, Sequential Read dropped from 208 to 124.

SSD is brand-new. Here is the Crystal Disk report:

 

[Coup27]

DLCPhoto you have probably realised by now that tweakboy hasn't read the whole thread or what has been attempted so far and has taken you off in avenues completely unrelated to the actual problem. Unfortunately this is standard procedure and incredibly frustrating for people like me who actually read everything and try and provide proper advice.

I don't believe you will have to uninstall chipset drivers first. You don't have to do this with an Intel chipset. Just install those drivers over the top and see what the result is.

 

[DLCPhoto]

Thanks Coup27. The link to the Playtool site (Post #20) indicated that NVidia required uninstalling the current drivers, indicating that this was different from Intel and other products:

NForce drivers are a little different from most other chipset drivers in that you are supposed to uninstall the old drivers before installing the new ones. You do that just like uninstalling any regular program. Go to the Windows Control Panel. In Windows XP and earlier open the "Add/Remove Programs" window. In Vista it's called "Programs and Features". Uninstall the "NVIDIA Windows nForce Drivers" and reboot. Now execute the new driver you downloaded and reboot again.

That's why I posed the question.

I need to bring a drive home from my office to clone the new SSD OS (it won't fit on the prior OS partition of my current HD's), so it'll be a few days before I can test it out.

 

[Coup27]

It's no big drama to uninstall them first. If you wanted to play it safe, download the latest graphics drivers too and then uninstall the lot. After you have rebooted, install the chipset first and reboot and then the graphics.