Performance of Crucial m500 SSD

[Kistel]

A few days ago my first ever SSD (Crucial m500 240GB) arrived to replace my older Samsung Spinpoint HDD as my boot drive. I am using it for Windows, program files and games and I am not seeing the huge boost in performance over my HDD that so many people like to claim.

My AS SSD benchmarks are within the advertised range (220 MB/sec write and 260 MB/sec read), the drive is running in AHCI mode and I have disabled windows7 hibernation and drive indexing. Despite this, most applications don't startup or run that much faster - the biggest difference is with starting Windows and a few high-end simulation games (DCS A-10C, Armed Assault 2, MS Flight Simulator -and even then the programs don't start "instantly"). Aside from that all other applications and games don't seem to startup and run any faster and my system does not feel any "snappier" with the SSD.

So for those who have had any experience making the jump from a HDD to a SSD, is this the most I should expect from my SSD or did you notice a bigger impact on system performance when you upgraded?

Because the Crucial m500 is one of the slower models available, would I see a bigger performance increase if I exchanged my Crucial SSD for a faster drive such as the 250GB Samsung 840 EVO?

Thanks in advance!

 

[erocker]

I've definitely noticed a difference, even with older systems. Perhaps your Samsung HDD was just fast already? Going with a different SSD isn't going to make a difference since you're already maxing out the bandwidth on your SATA 2.0 motherboard. Also since you didn't mention it, turn of auto defrag on it if you haven't yet.

If you just transferred your O/S from your HDD to your SSD, doing a fresh install may help things seem faster.

Making a smaller difference, but a difference none the less, is your RAM. If you're running 1333Mhz with higher timings, that may not be very optimal.

 

[Hood]

My first SSD was a Vertex 4 128GB, and it seemed pretty snappy, but as you say, the difference isn't earth-shattering, especially if your system is a recent quad core. It died after 15 days, and I replaced it with a slower, more reliable Crucial M4 128GB, which I now use to install all my games. My boot drive is now a Samsung 840 Pro 128Gb, which is faster than almost any other 128GB SSD (but 256/512 drives have faster write speeds). What SSDs really do is reduce latency,
there's no seek time involved like with spinning disks and moving read/write heads. Sure, you can transfer large files between some SSDs at ungodly speeds (500MB/s +), but that's not their common use. The best ones have fast I/O speeds (60k-100k iops) reading and writing small files (4K), which is what Windows and programs mostly do. So the answer is yes, you'll notice slightly faster load times with a top-rated SSD, and in general your system will feel a bit more responsive. I'm happy with the Sammy, I now have speed AND reliability.
EDIT - I didn't read your system specs, so didn't address the SATA II issue - you will only get half the benefit from SSD speed, as SATA II limits it to about 200 MB/s

 

[Kistel]

I was under the impression that RAM frequency didn't have a very significant impact on system performance as long as you had memory from a reliable vendor in a sufficient quantity. Would it make a noticeable difference if I went from 1333 to 1600 DDR3?

And I did actually do a fresh install of Windows 7 on the SSD. Thanks for the tip on disabling defrag. My old HDD was fairly quick.

I plan on upgrading my motherboard and processor in six to nine months, at which point my system will be able to fully take advantage of the SSDs bandwidth. Given that, would it be better to exchange my Crucial SSD for the faster Samsung 840EVO - would there be a noticeable performance increase on both my current setup and in my future SATA3 motherboard?

These are the results I get from AS SSD:


Uploaded with ImageShack.us

 

[kniaugaudiskis]

A few days ago I bought myself a Samsung 840 EVO 120GB SSD to run my apps and OS on. I can say that compared to a my 1500GB 7200RMP Seagate HDD I used to run Windows on, the SSD blows the latter out of the water in terms of speed, even though I'm limited to SATA2 speeds on my SSD. Application loading has become much much faster now thanks to the SSD's quick access times.

 

[Kistel]

kniaugaudiskis, since you are using SATA2, would you mind benchmarking your 840 Pro with AS SSD and uploading a screenshot of the results? I am wondering if the Crucial is just that much slower than the Samsung 840 series because I am not seeing that amazing speed with my SSD.

 

[kniaugaudiskis]

Sure, here you go:



And this is with Samsung Rapid enabled (assigns 1GB of RAM as SSD cache):



Although Rapid really shines in benchmarks, I haven't yet noticed such a huge performance boost in real life. With Rapid or without, this SSD is really fast.

 

[AsRock]

Once you have a pretty good one you wont notice any thing different.. I tried that with my intel drives and OCZ Solid 3 and no different in windows loading.


Only thing i did find is that my Z68 board boots 1-2 second faster than my Z77 even after reinstalling the OS 4 times ( twice for each system ) swapping the drives around nothing just that 1-2 second difference.

 

[Kistel]

kniaugaudiskis, thanks for the benchmark and upload.

It looks like my SSD score is about where it should be on a SATA2 board... but despite this GIMP still takes about 27 seconds to start on my SSD. While this is a slight improvement from starting it on my HDD (about 38 seconds), it is a far cry from the "instant startup" advertised by SSD manufacturers and hardware review sites. Battlefield 3 games still take about 30 seconds to load (they might have taken a little bit longer to load on my HDD, but the difference is so negligible I can't even tell). Is there any other BIOS or system setting I need to configure to see the a significant improvement in loading times?

 

[erocker]

Do you have any programs/apps that start up with Windows?

 

[Kistel]

Drivers for my video card, sound card and mouse; anti-virus software and the Windows update service.

Is there any good free utility for checking the health of your SSD aside from AS SSD and HD Tune (HD tune wont display the SMART diagnostics for my SSD)?

If there are no issues with the drive, I am starting to think I was expecting too much from the SSD and that is in fact working optimally for a SATA2 system.