"Budget" SSD's owning "premium" Samsung 850 EVO.

[Scoob]

Hey all,

Tech question to anyone interested:

I have two PCs, one with an ASUS Z68 mobo with 2x Intel SATA3 Ports with RAID Support, the other a Gigabyte Z68 mobo with 2x Intel SATA3 Ports with RAID Support.

The ASUS board houses my old system, a 2500k @ 4.6 with 2x GTX 680's - all water cooled. It has two cheap 120gb Kingston SSD Now V300 drives in RAID0

The Gigabyte board houses my main gaming build, a 2600k @ 4.4 with a single GTX 1070. It has two high-end Samsung 850 EVO 500gb SSD in RAID0.

Now, when running drive tests such as AS SSD and Crystal disk mark, the older ASUS board with the two cheap SSD's will show peak reads of about 1.4GB/s (compressible data) and about 850-900MB/s with NON-compressible data - so, I'm basically doubling the drives advertised 450MB/s read speeds via RAID0. Write speeds are a tad slower.

However, on the Gigabyte board - with the exact same Intel SATA3 controller - my super fast Samsung SSD's post a peak read of barely over 500MB/s - less than a SINGLE drive can do. Writes are over 900MB/s, which is slightly better than the other machine, and an improvement on one drive.

I've checked all settings (I'm fairly familiar with RAID setups, and it's the exact same RAID BIOS in each machine) and have all performance related options enabled, yet my pair of much newer and faster (on paper) drives, just fail to perform.

Note 2: in a prior incarnation, the Gigabyte mobo & 2600k also had a pair of Kingston 120's along with my old GTX 680. I recall these drives performing identically to the same drives in the ASUS - i.e. much faster than the 850 EVO's.

All machines using W10 Pro 64.

So, the question: Any idea why the "superior" Samsung drives would basically be totally thrashed by a pair of cheapies?

Note 3: I tried installing the "Samsung Magician" tools (latest vers) but it doesn't recognise my SSD's as Samsungs, so most features are disabled - might be linked to the RAID controller obscuring things - common issue apparently.

Oh, the system runs nicely and is responsive in Windows etc. it's just running at less than half the speed it should. Put it this way, load and transition times in games (FO4, Skyrim) can be DOUBLE that of on the "inferior" system...which irks me lol.

This is what I've been spending my (little) free time today trying to get to the bottom of...I did have other plans *sigh* lol

Scoob.

 

[r0dISK]

What is the driver (Intel RST) version for Asus and Gigabyte ?
It is possible to change the Gigabyte RAID 0 to RAID 1 re-test ?

 

[Scoob]

I have the latest Intel Rapid Storage bits installed - same as I had for the older array - these drives are just on a go slow.

As it's my OS drive, breaking the array to test individually isn't really an option, it'd basically mean an entire re-install of the OS and all my bits and pieces.

I'm going to keep digging a bit, but might have to accept that these particular drives do not play nice on my motherboard, despite cheaper drives having worked brilliantly.

It's funny, I was going to get a pair of 480gb Kingstons - basically a higher capacity version of what I had - but was swung by these new V-NAND drives an their supposed superiority...they were just a few £ more, so seemed like a decent option. Ah well!

Scoob.