SATA2 vs SATA3 on a Samsung SSD 830?

[etherealfocus]

I finally downloaded Samsung Magician 4 today and discovered the reason for not-as-good-as-I-hoped performance on the SSD in my sig... apparently my brand spanking new Ivy Bridge laptop is still SATA2 for some insane reason.

1. WTF? Why on earth would a 6x or 7x chipset mobo be using SATA2? I didn't even bother to check that before buying... I mean, I didn't check to see if the HD was SATA or PATA either.

2. Performance results from Magician-
Sequential Read: 276/520 MBps
Sequential Write: 263/320 MBps
Random Read: 47600/80k IOPS
Random Write: 28258/30k IOPS

So I'm getting about half my rated read performance and 3/4 my rated write performance. My workload is mostly read-centic... biggest time waster in my workload is app load times, and especially level load times in SC2.

Would SATA3 actually nearly double my read performance, or is the difference less than the benchmark would lead me to think? I'm not going to buy a new laptop just to fix this annoyance, but would like to know how much it's actually hurting my performance.

 

[Hellhammer]

Intel's 7-series chipsets feature two SATA 6Gbps and four SATA 3Gbps ports. Have you checked that the SSD is connected to a SATA 6Gbps port instead of 3Gbps? The ports are usually differentiated by different colors but you can check the motherboard's manual for more accurate information.

EDIT: Oh, this was a laptop. Nevermind then.

 

[nanaki333]

According to the specs of your laptop, you only have a SATA2 controller, you don't have SATA3:

http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/laptops/NP300E5C-A03US-specs

 

[corkyg]

I installed my Sammy 830 knowing it was going into my SATA2 Thinkpad 510. It still performs AOK for me. I was not expecting to set records.

 

[LoveMachine]

Real world usage would likely not be terribly more impressive on SATA3. Load times might be slightly quicker, but otherwise all other metrics outside benchmarks would not be perceptibly different. Regardless, 48k IOPs vs. 80k is still orders of magnitude better than any spinning platter would give you.

 

[serpretetsky]

random reads and writes at que depth 1 on ssd's do not surpass SATA2 speeds, and usually not even surpass SATA1 speeds. You will see no difference in terms of how responsive your system, general OS bootup, and launching programs.

You will see a decrease in sequential processes like transferring files larger than 1MB or recording a video to the drive etc.

 

[etherealfocus]

My write IOPS are running at only slightly better than half peak capacity too, which I'd think would affect program and level load times since those are collections of small files. If SATA2 isn't cutting my IOPS in half, what is?

 

[nanaki333]

My write IOPS are running at only slightly better than half peak capacity too, which I'd think would affect program and level load times since those are collections of small files. If SATA2 isn't cutting my IOPS in half, what is?

you set to AHCI in the BIOS?

 

[etherealfocus]

Yep. Used performance settings in Magician, manually disabled the pagefile since my 8GB RAM is plenty for my purposes, and confirmed AHCI mode.

 

[etherealfocus]

BTW, is there any difference between over-provisioning and just leaving a chunk of the drive empty? I'm using 83GB and currently have 11% OP, but could obviously increase it if there's a reason to do so.