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SSD Upgrade Advice - from X25M G2 w/o SATA3 Mobo

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Hi All,

As the title suggests I'm a G2 user in search of an upgrade. I've had this 80GB drive for almost 2 years and am pretty happy with how it has served me, but at this point I'm starting to run out of space where I have to install apps on my secondary drive and just figured perhaps its time for an upgrade 🙂

When I was in market for this G2 I was up-to-date on reviews and understood the differences between the choices I had then. Its been quite some time and it seems like the market has a lot more players on the scene besides just Intel & OCZ with drives that almost double the speed of my G2.

Here's some info on my usage scenario:

- drive will be OS/App drive
- heavy multitasking, Photoshop, Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc.
- looking for larger capacity in area of ~200GB +
- performance-wise something that would be noticeably faster then my current drive
- SATA3 - here's the tricky part. My board only has SATA2 (Asus in sig), but I have PCI-E slots open for a SATA3 card. Does it make sense to go that route or will there be a performance hit from going through controller card vs. on-board? Assuming running one of the newer drives in SATA2 would be a waste as they come close to maxing out.

I would appreciate an upgrade advice in my situation (I know this perhaps is a common thread here)

thanks!
 
You will see the biggest performance gain from using chipset SATA 6Gbps versus an add-in PCIe card. For read speeds there isn't much faster than your current drives, perhaps a Samsung 470 or an older Sandforce 1200 based drive. For write speeds, you can get some decent gains with the two I mentioned.

You can also get any of the SATA 6Gbps drives (Sandforce 2200 based, Marvell based, Samsung 830) that are currently on the market, but as those drives are faster than your controller, their performance will be held back. I think the max throughput (due to some overhead) is around 285Mbps, not too much more than the 250Mbps read speeds of your current drive.

Of course going to a larger drive where all of your software can fit would be a speed boost in itself due to no software running off HDDs.

Any plans for a platform upgrade in the near future? Sandy Bridge E was just released today as well as socket 2011. Alternately since you are using a single graphics card, socket 1155 would be a nice upgrade in processor speed as well as "new" features such as USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps.

I used to have an Asus P6T (vanilla) BITD. Upgraded from it when Sandy Bridge (B3 revision chipsets) came out and haven't looked back.
 
will there be a performance hit from going through controller card vs. on-board?
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I have yet to see an under 500.00 add-in SATA3 card that equals the Intel chipset.

I've run 2X80GB Intel G2s in RAID0 on your (and mine) MB and got great results.
 
Have you tried using windirstat? It makes it really easy to see (and get rid of) files and folders that are sucking up lots of space. Using windirstat, and a bit of common sense, you can easily make an 80GB boot drive work for you.

Here's an example of what windirstat shows:

http://ttcshelbyville.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/windirstat.jpg

In that case I would look at those big blue blocks and see if I could delete them or move them to my media drive.

I have a computer with windows 7 installed on a 30GB ocz vertex. It has office 2010, nero 10, quickbooks pro, sims 3 (with 4 extra gb of downloaded content/spam I might add), league of legends, and a pagefile. And 4GB of free space.
 
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If you remain on SATA 3Gbps there is no point upgrading your SSD from a performance perspective. My 80GB G2 has 4k reads of 25mb/sec which beats most peoples M4's and I've seen it only be 3mb/sec slower than 3xC300 in RAID0. Seq read also is in the top end of what SATA will allow.

If you need more fast space, you could always buy a 6Gbps SSD and eventually when you upgrade, swap the SSDs around so your 6Gbps becomes your primary w/ OS and the G2 becomes storage.
 
In a similar boat, but have basically decided to wait until I upgrade. The G2, while getting old, is still good. The read speed is (IIRC) about 200MB/s so near the top end of sata 2. some new ones can read at 275, but that is not going to be noticable.

Write speeds can be improved from the firmware limited 80MB/s, but little gain with some newer ones as the sandforce controllers compress data on write for their advertised speed. Using uncompressable data (videos ect), then the write speed is less than 200MB/s IIRC. Unless writing and editing a lot of uncompressable files, no improvement on that side.

Going to sata 3 can given a higher read speed that might be noticable in some situations, it still will not be a knock your socks off increase (as was getting the G2 in the first place).

In terms of multitasking and similar, SSDs have not improved greatly enough to say go for it. The issue being the access times are still so short that unless you have a high load from something like a web hosting, you will not likly see any improvement in that area. The average user will not notice it being faster comparied to a G2 / other SSDs.

As to size, the 200-240GB is in a affordable price range (espically for someone that could afford a G2 at release). Down side is that if you want larger, you have to pay for it (more per GB).

Options as I see it are the M4 based SSD, not effected by the sandforce bug (which is ment to be fixed now) and performance is better than inital release after a firmware update several months back. Next is one of the Sandforce devices, but if you want the best write speed, best look at one of the more expencive units like the MAX IOP or similar range from other manufactures (more chips, more writing possible at the lower levels). down side is, looking at my local store, the MAX IOP sort of drives is about 50% more then the M4 for the same size. The "standard" sandforce ones are about in the middle.

Of course, their are cheaper ones, but performance on those would not be great enough to be worth talking about vs your G2. You could go for a Sandforce 1200 series controller, but while cheaper, are still Sata2 (but a better write than the G2). Not a earth moving change though in "real world" reponsiveness. One of the articals a while back was about the newer sata3 drives. At sata 2 speeds, the performance was near identical to their older sata 2 SSD models, so getting sata 3 and running on sata 2 had no point/gains (besides being ready to upgrade, but price are getting cheaper over the long run, so running sata 3 on sata 2 is only useful if planing on upgrading soon).

Lastly, the PCI-E slot on your board, unless it is a x4 electrical or better, the speed of it will be only up to running a single sata 2 from it uneffected (ignoring responce delays that is vs a in-chipset controller).

Hope that helps somewhat.
 
Zap said:
Any plans for a platform upgrade in the near future? Sandy Bridge E was just released today as well as socket 2011. Alternately since you are using a single graphics card, socket 1155 would be a nice upgrade in processor speed as well as "new" features such as USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps.
Click to expand...

I did give it a thought but i7 920 meets my needs, this thing is a beast and I actually never ended up overclocking because I'm never in a situation where I'm wishing for more performance and its almost 2 years old, def a good investment. Kinda hard to justify a new board/cpu..
 
sm625 said:
Have you tried using windirstat? It makes it really easy to see (and get rid of) files and folders that are sucking up lots of space. Using windirstat, and a bit of common sense, you can easily make an 80GB boot drive work for you.
Click to expand...

Yep, I'm quite familiar with WinDirStat - great tool and easy to use. In my case the space is eaten up by apps, I got Adobe CS, Visual Studio/SQL Mgr, and a whole bunch of additional development stuff that benefits from sitting on SSD. Storage, games & downloads are on separate mechanical drives.
 
stick to tried and true - most ssd can't even sustain sata-2 speeds in random iops on uncompressed data. I was really letdown that SAS was not included in sandy bridge E - sas is far far far superior to sata (hello full duplex) - but quite honestly if a pair of drives in raid-0 lets me upgrade to double the storage and 70% more speed in less than an hour that's far better than re-installing the o/s and all apps. that sucks.
 
greenhawk said:
Lastly, the PCI-E slot on your board, unless it is a x4 electrical or better, the speed of it will be only up to running a single sata 2 from it uneffected (ignoring responce delays that is vs a in-chipset controller).
Click to expand...

Well my P6T has 3 PCI-E slots which I can run @ 16/16/1 or 16/8/8 and I don't really plan on running SLI/Xfire anytime soon - would that help?

How much of a performance hit would I experience using a card? Doesn't OCZ have a PCI-E SSD drive that gets amazing speeds? Would my spare PCI-E x16 help?
 
The add-in cards' controllers are the problem.

Been there, done that with your board.

It's 500.00 to get into a decent SATA6 ballgame that will outperform an Intel controller.
 
avp2306 said:
Well my P6T has 3 PCI-E slots which I can run @ 16/16/1 or 16/8/8

How much of a performance hit would I experience using a card? Doesn't OCZ have a PCI-E SSD drive that gets amazing speeds? Would my spare PCI-E x16 help?
Click to expand...


Just as long as you are not looking to use PCI-E x1. That is the more common slot and pointless for 6Gb/s sata.

Performance hit (if the PCI-E is not a issue) is more in terms of access times than in raw speed. Raw speed should be fine with enough PCI-E lanes in use. Finding a controller that uses more than PCI-E x1 to connect is the issue as most of those are decent raid cards so start at a few $100.

As to the PCI-E SSD, IIRC it is PCI-E x4 and performs well. Just about a 50% price increase over a similarly sized SSD. Down side is the fastest ones, the x2 range, are Raid 0 on a card, so not 100% sure trim works on them in the long run. The standard ones (including the newer #3) are still good. Only down side is that I think (could be wrong) they are based on a version of the Sandforce chipset so could be effected by the issues those have been having.

So the card ones are faster, but at the cost of being more expencive and less flexable for future use. Might also cause issues being a bootable card if you were to add in any other bootable addon card in the future (like a raid card or external sata ports ect).
 
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