I think the MB PCIe port is part of the problem. Even the MB is ony 3 years old, it's still using one PCI Express 1.0a slot and that's where the SATA III card is sitting. I think plugging the SSD into the MB SATA II controller will provide faster test results. We shall see tomorrow. At this point ,it's about finding out why the SSD performance is so low. Then worry about scratch performance.

and btw, you can't expect that windows experience to go up much just by replacing a disk.. that only works if the motherboard has a screaming chipset with tripple or quad memory channels like a core i7.. On slow chipsets, or limited memory channels you can add fast disks all you want, the bottle neck will be the chipset's main databus...

And the difference between the expensive SSD's and cheaper ones, there usually is a difference in type of memory chips used.. the more expensive ones have better chips for writing, and they are arranged for better writes as well.. But it still won't make em fly as a scratch disk on an old motherboard and/or sata controller.

Hmmm.....

"For others suffering from the same problem... miserable Write speeds with your SSD in Win7... simply go into the Device Manager and disable "Write caching" on the "Policies" tab for your SSD. "Write caching" is not needed with an SSD."

I'll have to look into this as well.

i predict you may get 50% increase over the values you posted, at most.

Either way, seems like a lot of people are having speed issues. Manufactures are showing high benchmarks and the public can't get anywhere near them.

if you want their benchmarks, you'll need a spanking brand new, top spec mobo and controller.

I don't expect their benchmarks, but I do expect better benchmarks than I am seeing on the current system. At the moment, the SSD is performing at the level of the Caviar 1 TB drive. That's not right. Okay, read was better on the SSD, but not that good.

that could mean the chipset of the mobo just can't do more.. that Caviar is prolly bottled necked as well

Tom's Hardware did some benchmarks on the Caviar and our tests were slightly better. He was at around 85 MB/s for both R/W.

My Intel 330 120GB SSD gets 250-300Mbps on an older Intel motherboard (DG43GT) with SATA II (not SATA III) controller on the board. Check that drive, something's wrong with it. I also use AHCI for the BIOS setting instead of "SATA" and that helps, too!

I doubt it is the drive, Art. As I mentioned above, the SATA card is in an older PCIe slot. I bet moving the card to a 2.0 slot will improve the times.

Dave,
Definitely hook up the drive to a SATA III port on the motherboard, if your board has them! Add-on boards will always be slower, in my experience. I'm using the Intel 330 SSD right now on my main pc, which is an Intel DG43GT board, 4GB of RAM and Q6600 CPU and GT-430 video card. The SSD has really made a huge improvement in my PC's performance!

The MB is just a bit too old to have SATA III. That's why the card. I'll be over at my parents in a bit and will continue to play. More later. :)

Believe me, I would not have gone for a controller card had there been SATA III on the MB.

Moved the sata card to a PCIe 2.0 slot, redid the speed test and there was a small improvement In r/w times, but still not what it should be 208/178. Plugged the SSD directly into the MB sata ii port, redid the test and ended up with identical numbers. Checked the bios and the onboard sata ports were in sata mode. Moved it AHCI rebooted and..... Had to leave for a family gathering. More in a few hours.

I installed an SSD after shooting with the d800 and while there was improvement, it was not that much.

More testing..

After AHCI was enabled and the SSD was plugged into the SATA II port on the MB, speed test reported R/W at 265/177. I noticed that the new SATA III card was plugged into a 2.0 PCIe port that was forced into 1.1 mode. Changed that in the bios and when I did the speed test again, it was 399/178. Write performance is still lacking, but read sure did jump.

Back to the PS tests and no real improvement. I was able to knock off 6 seconds from one filter, but the other times were the same.


I also turned off indexing for the SSD. In this case, it really isn't needed.

told ya... ssd&write performance = chitty for live action scratch disks
and old mobo's won't deliver the rest either.

Only way to make em deliver adequately for that kind of application is if you raid 0 em.

I'm getting excellent performance from my SSD's, one of which is running at SATA II (AHCI mode) and the other is in SATA III and AHCI mode. R/W scores in the 300's.

Stijn, that's just not quite right. Would you be saying the same thing if I had been talking about a platter drive that had similar performance specs to the SSD? As far as PS, what I left out, is that there is still a point where there is some serious platter disk activity, even though the scratch disk is pointing to the SSD. Our guess... PS needs to access a bunch of info during the use of these filters.

But why is the write performance so low in the other tests? I hooked up the SSD to my moms PC last night as well. Hers is a 2011 model and should have SATA III built in to the MB. Read results were a bit lower than I had expected, but the write time was exactly the same as my dads PC. Mom has an i5 proc, while dad has an i7, though two years older.

The only other real world test I did, I could not time. I tried opening a 50 meg psd file from the caviar drive, where his pix normally are stored and opening a copy from the SSD. In both cases, they opened in the blink of an eye. I could not hit start/stop fast enough on my timer to get accurate readings.