Final Piece for my gaming PC: An SSD

dexterz

Journeyman
^^That was the exact solution given in tomshardware link I posted earlier but it was posted in 2014!!
indeed. only thing was both intel and asmedia ports support ahci and show up as sata3 6.0gbps on the magician which caused some confusion why the speeds were low. after installing IRST it showed only the 6ports which led me to look at bios to see where i connected it.
 

Nerevarine

Incarnate
We bought at the right time guys, see the new price now
Samsung 2.5'' 850 EVO 250 GB Sata-III(MZ-75E250BW)Internal SSD-Samsung I Product | eBay
 
OP
Vyom

Vyom

The Power of x480
Staff member
Admin
Yes, prices of SSD are HIGH now... here's the article from my blog, of my experience of upgrading to an SSD, including benchmarks:

UPGRADING TO AN SSD: The Experience

It took me years to catch up to the PC Master race when I first started upgrading my PC around 4 years ago. With the recent upgrade to RX 480 GPU my PC stepped into an uncharted territory. But there was still a final piece of puzzle that wasn't in it's place but which had the potential to make my PCMR journey to it's final conclusion. Combine this with the fact that India was about to see a revolution in terms of economy with the new implementation of taxation, that is GST (Goods and Services Tax), I had to act fast. So I finally decided to bite the bullet and finally buy the last piece of the puzzle, an SSD!

I did my research on the forums. I studied the technologies provided by different companies, benchmarks and various kinds of SSD that was available. I studied the price to performance metrics, and price per GB of disk. I watched various youtube videos on YT, including the all too popular channel Linus Tech Tips. All that R&D pointed to me a very clear choice: Samsung Evo 850 250 GB.

*i.imgur.com/odgFCKy.png
Here's the spreadsheet link: Mission SSD

This SSD was one of the most technology superior SSD only below the Pro series of SSDs by Samsung. Unlike the Pro series though, Evo series was way better in terms of Price to performance ratio. But what sold me to finally go with Samsung Evo was the fact that it came with the software Samsung Magician. It has a feature which they call Rapid Mode, which when turned on, uses a portion of RAM (about 1 GB at the moment) as an SSD cache to better utilize the resources that we have, and also to increase the longivity of the SSD which is already very good than other competing drive. No this is not a promoted post, rather I am genuinely impressed by the features of Samsung's Evo SSD.

I choose 250 GB since I needed to install two OS on the drive: Windows 10 and Ubuntu. I needed ample space on Windows 10 to install various big editing tools like Premiere and development IDEs like Visual Studio. With a 250 GB drive (which actually means 232 GB of usable space) I could use both OSes and even leave 20% of the drive empty (which is recommended to have the drive function optimally).

I waited for few days to see if the price of Samsung Evo 250 GB could go down (from Rs 7599), but eventually bought the drive from eBay where I managed to get the same for around Rs 6700. I think it was a great deal considering the fact that GST was about to kick in, and prices could go high soon.

The day I got my SSD, my happiness knew no bounds. I was surprized by the fact that the drive was so tiny and so light that it was baffling to imagine the power it actually hold. I installed the SSD as soon as I could reach home from my workplace and started to install the operating systems. I didn't have any spare SATA cables lying around so I just borrowed the SATA cable of my optical drive. (At this moment, I was glad I had an optical drive, and didn't fall in the suggestion from my online friend to do away with it when I was building my PC).

I faced numerious problems making my PC dual boot with Windows 10 and Ubuntu. I could manage to install both the OS on it, but the Ubuntu bootloader (GRUB) didn't work. After various trial and error, I realized I accidently made my SSD an MBR disk (when I first launched the Disk Management in windows). So I turned the SSD into a GPT drive (from Disk Management) and this time around after I installed both the OSes, the GRUB menu worked perfectly. I also did have to make a change in the BIOS boot meny, to allow the GRUB to take priority over Windows Boot Manager.

I ended up making following partitions on the SSD:

  • /sda1 (150 GB for Windows 10)
  • /sda2 (30 GB for Ubuntu)
  • /sda3 (NTFS drive without assigning a drive letter and configured later to have Over Provisioning explained below).
And of course there are other partitions made by Windows which it creates before installing.

Over Provisioning is a feature which you can set using Samsung Magician and which allows to set aside a portion of the SSD which will be kept free, since SSDs work best when there is less data on it. After installing the OSes on SSD, setting up over provisioning and running the standard benchmark I was all set to compare some application launch times. Following table shows the comparison of time taken by various activities on my PC before and after installing the SSD.

*i.imgur.com/HzXzwfq.png

Here is the Crystal Disk Mark report of the SSD:

*i.imgur.com/xQjwZw9.png

In comparison following are the result of the benchmark on my HDD (WD 1 TB Blue):

*i.imgur.com/Y2eEhE9.png

After I enabled the Rapid mode, the results showed around 5X improvements:

*i.imgur.com/hAdFxbF.png

This experience of upgrading to SSD has been really fruitful. Not only I was able to give my PC a big boost in disk performance, but also managed to beat the GST (applicable in India from July 1) due to which (or coincidentally) prices of SSD is now Rs 8295 (up from Rs 7500) on Amazon.in and even better, on eBay.in, from where the original listings have ended and now lowest price is Rs 7699. Oops..no. Now its Rs 7775 xD

All I now need is a new monitor to make a dual monitor setup, a 1 TB HDD to make a RAID array of disk, another GPU to Crossfire for mining cryptocurrency... Oh, the need never ends. ;)
 

billubakra

Conversation Architect
Price of every computer component has been increased atleast by Rs. 500. The GST is being charged separately.
 
OP
Vyom

Vyom

The Power of x480
Staff member
Admin
Price of every computer component has been increased atleast by Rs. 500. The GST is being charged separately.
I wish our forum had a dislike button. :p
Seriously tho, that's bad. But I think after few months, prices will cool off, and will be lower than what it was before GST.
 

billubakra

Conversation Architect
I wish our forum had a dislike button.
Seriously tho, that's bad. But I think after few months, prices will cool off, and will be lower than what it was before GST.
Nope. They will never lower the prices now, thanks to Gabbar Singh Tax.
 
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