ChristopherNls
asked on
Upgrade laptop to SATA 3-capable
Hello, Experts:
I just installed a new 750 GB SSD, (Samsung 840 EVO) on my Dell laptop, and the performance improvement is significant compared to the old 500 GB conventional 2.5" hard drive. However, the "Samsung Magician" drive interface says: "SATA 6Gb/s (SATA 3) Not Available," so although the improvement in performance is very good, the message says that the drive is not capable of its maximum performance because of the lack of the SATA 3 capability.
I was wondering if this is something that can be remedied on a laptop. I have a Dell Studio 1737, running Windows 7 Ultimate, 64 bit. It has 8 GB of RAM. The processor is an Intel dual-core T6500 @ 2.10 GHz. The Dell Bios is version A09.
The Studio 1737 has an additional hard drive bay with connections available.
I can furnish any other descriptions of the system as needed to help answer this question, even provide a complete print-out of the system configuration if needed.
Now that I've spent a small fortune on the SSD, I'd like to maximize its performance as much as possible.
As always, thanks in advance for your help.
ChristopherNls
I just installed a new 750 GB SSD, (Samsung 840 EVO) on my Dell laptop, and the performance improvement is significant compared to the old 500 GB conventional 2.5" hard drive. However, the "Samsung Magician" drive interface says: "SATA 6Gb/s (SATA 3) Not Available," so although the improvement in performance is very good, the message says that the drive is not capable of its maximum performance because of the lack of the SATA 3 capability.
I was wondering if this is something that can be remedied on a laptop. I have a Dell Studio 1737, running Windows 7 Ultimate, 64 bit. It has 8 GB of RAM. The processor is an Intel dual-core T6500 @ 2.10 GHz. The Dell Bios is version A09.
The Studio 1737 has an additional hard drive bay with connections available.
I can furnish any other descriptions of the system as needed to help answer this question, even provide a complete print-out of the system configuration if needed.
Now that I've spent a small fortune on the SSD, I'd like to maximize its performance as much as possible.
As always, thanks in advance for your help.
ChristopherNls
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ASKER
Garycase:
I had a suspicion that there was no practical way to upgrade the laptop to SATA-III. Even if there were, I only would have considered doing it if it were inexpensive, having already spent a small fortune on the SSD drive itself. :-}
Samsung provides an app with the new drive called the “Samsung Magician” that allows you to optimize an SSD for the user's particular machine, and provide a performance benchmark. (See attached screenshots.)
After using the recommended settings- which included Over-Provisioning, I was able to improve the performance both numerically the benchmark page and noticeably to me as well. The sequential read and write measurements displayed as close to the top possible with this particular drive. The random read and write numbers are nowhere near the maximum, but seem to be much better than what a Wikipedia claimed were normal for mechanical hard drives, even with SATA-III. http://goo.gl/C7WX4D
I also use the "Performance Optimization" every couple of days, which seems to help.
I used the Magician app for Over Provisioning to set aside the recommended partition space for it, (see the 2nd screenshot.) I normally use a 2nd partition for data I don’t want to lose should something drastic happen to the OS. So now the chart shows 3 partitions- fine.
But a note on the screen says “OP settings for drive D.” Does that mean the Over Provisioning is active for D only, or do you think this is just a quirk in how the app interprets and labels what it sees- since the OP partition comes after D on the drive. I looked on the Samsung website but didn’t find anything on the subject the first time through.
If the OP worked for only one out of two partitions, would I then have to combine C and D into one in order to gain its benefit for the operating system. I could do this and no longer worry about losing my documents if I use the nonstop backup feature of Acronis 2014. My guess is that with the SSD in use, I wouldn't notice any hit on performance from using it.
Please take a look at the screenshots and tell me what you think.
Thanks,
ChristopherNls
Samsung-Magician.jpg
Samsung-Overprovisioning.jpg
I had a suspicion that there was no practical way to upgrade the laptop to SATA-III. Even if there were, I only would have considered doing it if it were inexpensive, having already spent a small fortune on the SSD drive itself. :-}
Samsung provides an app with the new drive called the “Samsung Magician” that allows you to optimize an SSD for the user's particular machine, and provide a performance benchmark. (See attached screenshots.)
After using the recommended settings- which included Over-Provisioning, I was able to improve the performance both numerically the benchmark page and noticeably to me as well. The sequential read and write measurements displayed as close to the top possible with this particular drive. The random read and write numbers are nowhere near the maximum, but seem to be much better than what a Wikipedia claimed were normal for mechanical hard drives, even with SATA-III. http://goo.gl/C7WX4D
I also use the "Performance Optimization" every couple of days, which seems to help.
I used the Magician app for Over Provisioning to set aside the recommended partition space for it, (see the 2nd screenshot.) I normally use a 2nd partition for data I don’t want to lose should something drastic happen to the OS. So now the chart shows 3 partitions- fine.
But a note on the screen says “OP settings for drive D.” Does that mean the Over Provisioning is active for D only, or do you think this is just a quirk in how the app interprets and labels what it sees- since the OP partition comes after D on the drive. I looked on the Samsung website but didn’t find anything on the subject the first time through.
If the OP worked for only one out of two partitions, would I then have to combine C and D into one in order to gain its benefit for the operating system. I could do this and no longer worry about losing my documents if I use the nonstop backup feature of Acronis 2014. My guess is that with the SSD in use, I wouldn't notice any hit on performance from using it.
Please take a look at the screenshots and tell me what you think.
Thanks,
ChristopherNls
Samsung-Magician.jpg
Samsung-Overprovisioning.jpg
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The specs for your 750GB SSD show maximum performance of 540MB/s reads, 520MB/s writes => so the 300MB/s SATA-II interface is definitely a "bottleneck".
But there's nothing you can do about that.
The good news is that for most operations it's unlikely you'd notice the difference anyway :-)
Benchmarks would clearly show the difference; but a user is not generally going to be able to tell. I've experimented a bit with this by using both SATA-II and SATA-III ports for a SATA-III SSD -- and noticed virtually no difference in boot times; program loads; etc.