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Samsung 470 or Lion?

A

AppleGoat

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 14, 2010
655
8
My Crucial M4 on Snow Leopard opened the Adobe Creative Suite Programs in half, or sometimes a third, of the time it takes my Samsung 470 on Lion. The other light apps on Lion, browsers & iWork applications and such, open instantly on the 470 running Lion. Does anyone else notice this with Lion? Or is there, in fact, a discernible difference between SATA II and III in everyday use?

My 470 is great and I can endorse it to anyone, but perhaps I should have returned it and waited for the 830 when I had the chance. Samsung has a history of launching issue-less drives.

A few seconds slower may sound trivial, but remember the difference between a mechanical and solid state is measured in seconds too. You settle for smaller capacities at higher prices to shave off a few seconds here and there. My 470 on Lion has been kinda splitting the difference between the mechanical stock drive and the M4 on SL in opening these CS apps. Any thoughts?
 
I am still running Snow leopard. I am guessing it is a Lion thing.

Application startup is here (Windows) not impacted by a noticeable margin whether you got SATA 2 or 3 drives.

http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...nd-ocz-vertex-3/6/#abschnitt_anwendungsstarts
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...orsair-force-gt/6/#abschnitt_anwendungsstarts
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...l-vs.-sandforce/7/#abschnitt_anwendungsstarts

It is a 10-15% improvement that is a far cry from 100-200% you claim.
 
dusk007 said:
I am still running Snow leopard. I am guessing it is a Lion thing.

Application startup is here (Windows) not impacted by a noticeable margin whether you got SATA 2 or 3 drives.

http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...nd-ocz-vertex-3/6/#abschnitt_anwendungsstarts
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...orsair-force-gt/6/#abschnitt_anwendungsstarts
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...l-vs.-sandforce/7/#abschnitt_anwendungsstarts

It is a 10-15% improvement that is a far cry from 100-200% you claim.
Click to expand...

Thanks! I could imagine if they kept going with the photoshop tests up to a Gigabyte, there'd be quite a profound difference, but I was referring to just opening the application.

I got a Optical Drive caddy off eBay and its just been sitting on the desk in my apartment. Still ever tempted to have a two SSD rig. The Samsung 830 in the main bay, 470 in the ODD, would be quite the setup.
 
1 GB would look very different.

If you can live with the limited space of an all SSD setup.

I personally think my 170GB SSD + 1 TB HDD setup is almost perfect. I don't do much creative work. I launch stuff such as Eclipse, VMs, or GIMP for photos. I wouldn't get much out of higher bandwidth except for some rar extraction tasks. Latency matters much more. I just lack the RAW image stuff or movie editing that might benefit from all the bandwidth.
Pretty much all the stuff I store on the HDD doesn't need much speed. Mostly movies and backups. The SSD fits OS, app and all the working data which is mostly a lot of small files for me.

I practically never use my DVD drive and taking the external on the very few occasions I might need one is definitely worth all the built in storage space.
 
So "latency" presumably "low latency(?)" is inherently the same to most, if not all, modern SATA II & III SSDs on the market?
 
Last edited:
AppleGoat said:
So "latency" presumably "low latency(?)" is inherently the same to most, if not all, modern SATA II & III SSDs on the market?
Click to expand...
Essentially yes.
There are some differences between the different controllers and drives but none that matter compared to HDD latency. On average Sandforce and Intel are in the 0.05 ms range. Most others are a bit higher but they all are fairly close. A notebook HDD with usually some 16+ ms is just unbelievably slow compared.
At really high throughput like server workload high I/O may also matter but on notebooks it doesn't.
The biggest benefit over HDD is the great latency and random read speed which annihilated an HDD. 50 to a few hundred times faster is just a lot of difference.
Sata 2 vs 3 SSDs only has the bandwidth advantage and newer controllers usually more I/O but that is practically irrelevant for non server but normal computer use. Some of the SATA 3 SSDs are only in max throughput faster but the random read and stuff didn't increase at all. Samsung 830 is actually worse on random 4k read than the 470.

Unless you often read big chunks of sequential data into memory or write them form memory a SATA 3 SSD doesn't get you anything. For anything where the RAM isn't touched like file copy to another drive it doesn't help at all obviously since all HDDs are still way slower and on Macs all but Thunderbolt controllers cannot handle the speed.
 
dusk007 said:
The biggest benefit over HDD is the great latency and random read speed which annihilated an HDD. 50 to a few hundred times faster is just a lot of difference.
Sata 2 vs 3 SSDs only has the bandwidth advantage and newer controllers usually more I/O but that is practically irrelevant for non server but normal computer use. Some of the SATA 3 SSDs are only in max throughput faster but the random read and stuff didn't increase at all. Samsung 830 is actually worse on random 4k read than the 470.
Click to expand...

Wow, I thought the 830 will have some of the fastest random 4k read times of any drive.
 
I looked at the Anandtech benches when I wrote it. Maybe the storagereview stuff isn't 4k aligned although the 4K at the end of the laben would imply it.
You cannot really talk of annihilation here though they are all just about equal except for the 470 which does quite poorly in this test.

Storagereview benches seem of a more mature Sammy 830, since their power consumption looks good, on Anandtech it looks like it has still some issues. Even if 512GB use more power than a 256GB Version it shouldn't be that big a difference. That might be why they didn't put the results into the bench database.

They both are IOMeter Benches no clue what is the difference between those numbers. Maybe Anandtech just uses a more powerful CPU in the testing rig or it is some setting they don't care to mention.

In general I have to agree going with the Storagereview findings I would put a Samsung 830 into a new Notebook. Mostly because it is definitely on the top of the pack and the idle power consumption looks really good. I think I wouldn't feel much of a difference if I exchanged my SSD for an 830 now though (even if I had an SATA 3 port). CPU is too slow anyway to really make anything out of this whole IO monster.
My current bottleneck is the CPU and it always gets you the most to fix the bottlenecks and not overpay where you won't gain much. Like some who think paying for 1600Mhz DDR3 gets them anything.
 
dusk007 said:
I looked at the Anandtech benches when I wrote it. Maybe the storagereview stuff isn't 4k aligned although the 4K at the end of the laben would imply it.
You cannot really talk of annihilation here though they are all just about equal except for the 470 which does quite poorly in this test.

Storagereview benches seem of a more mature Sammy 830, since their power consumption looks good, on Anandtech it looks like it has still some issues. Even if 512GB use more power than a 256GB Version it shouldn't be that big a difference. That might be why they didn't put the results into the bench database.

They both are IOMeter Benches no clue what is the difference between those numbers. Maybe Anandtech just uses a more powerful CPU in the testing rig or it is some setting they don't care to mention.

In general I have to agree going with the Storagereview findings I would put a Samsung 830 into a new Notebook. Mostly because it is definitely on the top of the pack and the idle power consumption looks really good. I think I wouldn't feel much of a difference if I exchanged my SSD for an 830 now though (even if I had an SATA 3 port). CPU is too slow anyway to really make anything out of this whole IO monster.
My current bottleneck is the CPU and it always gets you the most to fix the bottlenecks and not overpay where you won't gain much. Like some who think paying for 1600Mhz DDR3 gets them anything.
Click to expand...

Thanks, so my Sandy Bridge i5 would be a bottleneck to any SATA III drive?
 
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