Should I return my SSD?

[Altiris]

I bought a Samsung 840 pro 120gb SSD and I am not happy with it. One is thag after windows was installed I had about only 90gb usable, the second thing was that after installing a few games (CS 1.6, CSS, BO2) I have about 50gb left (also because of the hundreds of windows update). The SSD is basically "bottlenecking" me because I am not playing my favorite games due to low disk space.

I also haven't noticed that much performance from my SSD compared to my HDD (maybe my HDD was just one of the fast ones)? Booting is amazing, 15 seconds boot however opening programs is more or less about a 3 second difference. Games load the same in all 3 games that I have tested.

I wanted to get an SSD mainly so I could record to the HDD but I wanted some performance, however the performance is so minimal I'm thinking of returning the SSD and just buying another HDD. Can I still return it? (It hasn't been 30 days).

 

[zander1983]

So you want to return your SSD because you "expected" too much of it and filled it with all of your software etc? If your PC support it, get another 840 128GB Pro and use both in a RAID0 setup, if that sounds too difficult, get the 256GB+ 840 Pro SSD.

BTW, what is the specs of your PC? Might be your CPU doing the bottle-necking not being able to push the SSD.

 

[Altiris]

I don't have the money to buy another 128gb and if I did Im not spending more than $100 for something between 100-200gb of storage, considering the performance is so minimal. My CPU is a Core i5 2400, I have an MSI P67A-G45 (B3) and I set the mode to AHCI.

Will Samsung still let me return it? It came in about 2 weeks ago

 

[bryonhowley]

Do you have your SATA controller setup for AHCI or IDE mode in your BIOS? You really only get the speed gain if you have set AHCI if it set for IDE you will not get the full speed of a SSD. I can tell you my system boots Windows 7 and Windows 8 plus OS X 10.8.3 super fast with my SSD. Of course I have moved the Downloads Documents Music Movies folders to a 3tb hard drive and I do not install any of my games to it.

SSD are really only meant for the OS other than that they will not gain much but the OS will run more efficiently with a SSD. If you can't afford a standard HDD then you should try to return it and get a good size HDD instead.

 

[spentshells]

OP I feel the exact same way about the size of the SSD I bought exactly that SSD and after a while if you have a few games on the go and a few apps it starts getting a little silly that you have to uninstall things to simply make space.

Bring it back and get a 180GB they don't have quite the premium of the 256GB drives and offer room for about 7 or 8 more games. As for brand and read and write speeds (don't hang me here) you won't notice the difference in any way.
BUT if you go back to mechanical HD you will be sorely disappointed.

 

[envy14tpe]

I have a 120gb so I know how you feel. I decided to install my OS, all programs, and only BF3 on my SSD. Everything else goes on a HDD. Seems to be zippy and I have no problems.

I have found this to be a good thing. I made a disc image on my HDD so it is easy to back up and not too large.

However, a 240/256GB SSDs can be bought for $170 on sale so it makes it hard to suggest a $110-125 120/128GB SSD.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

I bought a Samsung 840 pro 120gb SSD and I am not happy with it. One is thag after windows was installed I had about only 90gb usable, the second thing was that after installing a few games (CS 1.6, CSS, BO2) I have about 50gb left (also because of the hundreds of windows update). The SSD is basically "bottlenecking" me because I am not playing my favorite games due to low disk space.

I also haven't noticed that much performance from my SSD compared to my HDD (maybe my HDD was just one of the fast ones)? Booting is amazing, 15 seconds boot however opening programs is more or less about a 3 second difference. Games load the same in all 3 games that I have tested.

Welcome to the real world. SSD's cut ya boot time by a third but other than "bragging rights" for benchmark performance, their use is very hard to justify on a cost basis unless you using applications that are very demanding on the storage subsystem. You are certainly not going to be able to make a financial case to your boss for getting one by saying your productivity will improve. This is my testing on a machine with a tier 1 SSD and Tier 1 HD

Boot to Windows HD - 21.2 seconds
Boot to Windows SSD - 15.6 seconds

Load MMO HD - 45 seconds
Load MMO HD - 45 seconds

Ya want the best of both worlds ? Grab a hybrid SSD/HD. We have two identical laptops, one with 128 GB Intel 520 and 750 GB, 7200 rpm HD; the other has the Momentus XT. The one with the hybrid boosts just 1 second slower than the one with the SSD ..... once in Windows, unless ya run a benchmark, no one can tell which is which ..... and the hybrid saves time as there's zero time spent managing what is on what.

 

[envy14tpe]

Who cares about boot time? Unless your system is extremely old I'm sure it boots ok. What's really important is the snap. A system that runs on a 7200rpm HDD is fast, but once you add a SSD with OS n programs you will immediately notice the impact a SSD has.

I recommend a 120GB or greater SSD with a formidable HDD.

 

[ericjohn004]

Personally I can't go without my SSD. It's just so fast. And I have the Samsung 840, not the Pro. 3 seconds is a MAJOR difference. If I had to wait 3 seconds more every time I opened something I might throw my laptop across the room. Another thing is, I reboot all the time. And the difference from my HDD to my SSD was 35 seconds on HDD, compared to 14 seconds on SSD. That's way less than half the time. When transferring data from my SSD to my portable SSD, it's BLAZING fast. I get like 3-400mb/s transferring games. Minimum 100mb/s for like music and pictures. So if you have a USB 3.0 flash drive or portable SSD, it's definitely worth having an SSD as transferring data is blazing fast.

With SSD's you gotta look at the whole picture: application loading, application shutdown, booting up, shutting down, transferring data, game level loading, and installations are all great benefits of an SSD. Another great benefit is if you need a super fast scratch disc. Basically anytime you do anything on your PC, your SSD will help you do it a lot faster

I also owned a Seagate Momentus XT hybrid hard drive. And it really impresses me everytime I use it. It takes a little while to see the performance benefit, but after a couple of days of using it, everything you normally do is almost as fast as an SSD. I actually benchmarks this thing using the same data everytime, and after the 5th pass, it's only a tiny bit slower than a real SSD. The only time it's slow is if you do something you normally wouldn't do, or do something for the 1st time. So it's not stored on the SSD part of it. I highly recommend the Momentus XT 750GB for your situation. It boots in about 19 seconds. Just 5 seconds slower than my SSD, and twice as fast as my HDD, and 5 times as fast when loading programs. The only thing it's not good at is transferring data. Because data transferred is normally too big to fit on the 8GB SSD this drive has, plus you normally don't transfer data more than once. And this drive normally takes between 3-5 passes to get the greatest performance impact.

And I noticed you said that you noticed no difference between loading games on an hdd compared to an ssd. Well, your not going to notice but maybe a couple seconds right there. IDK why, but I have the same experience. I think it mostly has to do with the game itself. What I DO notice that an SSD helps in, is that when your actually playing the game and you move from one section of a world to another(like in Skyrim) and it has to load the new section, it's a lot faster and has hardly any stuttering vs. doing the same thing on an HDD where your stuttering big time. So that's a big plus. But I keep my games on my HDD anyways, at least on my desktop I do. On my laptop I keep all my games on my 256GB m4. That's how I can tell you the differences, because I play on both my laptop with SSD and desktop with HDD for games and SSD for OS.

Use your 128GB 840pro for a week and then switch out to your normal HDD and you'll notice a great deal of difference. I doubt you'll ever want to go back. Now, if your using a 1TB Velociraptor for your HDD then you probably won't notice as big of a difference, like the above poster said. But you'll still notice a big difference nonetheless because of the SSD's access times. You'll definitely notice a big difference transferring data or installing software.

Oh, and having only 90GB of usable data isn't that big of a surprise to me. Although you can use the CD Samsung gave you with this SSD to get up to 10GB more space. THe only bad part about this is that you have less overprovisioning, meaning that once your nand starts dying off, you won't have a whole lot of nand to replace it with. And performance might suffer a bit. But you can get a lot more than what you are getting by using that CD Samsung sent to you with the SSD.

Another reason you might not be getting great performance is you might have too much data on your SSD. SSD's or HDD's aren't meant to be filled past the 75-80% mark. So if you have a 128GB SSD, then you will always want to have at least 32GB of space left over on your SSD. Anything past that and your going to start getting a slower SSD. I'd say leave 40GB just to be safe. I'd also say to leave at least 7GB for overprovisioning.

So don't return your SSD. You got the best one there is. If anything, just return it and get the Momentus XT. Personally I'd just keep it as I love the 840pros.

 

[ericjohn004]

I bought a Samsung 840 pro 120gb SSD and I am not happy with it. One is thag after windows was installed I had about only 90gb usable, the second thing was that after installing a few games (CS 1.6, CSS, BO2) I have about 50gb left (also because of the hundreds of windows update). The SSD is basically "bottlenecking" me because I am not playing my favorite games due to low disk space.

I also haven't noticed that much performance from my SSD compared to my HDD (maybe my HDD was just one of the fast ones)? Booting is amazing, 15 seconds boot however opening programs is more or less about a 3 second difference. Games load the same in all 3 games that I have tested.

Welcome to the real world. SSD's cut ya boot time by a third but other than "bragging rights" for benchmark performance, their use is very hard to justify on a cost basis unless you using applications that are very demanding on the storage subsystem. You are certainly not going to be able to make a financial case to your boss for getting one by saying your productivity will improve. This is my testing on a machine with a tier 1 SSD and Tier 1 HD

Boot to Windows HD - 21.2 seconds
Boot to Windows SSD - 15.6 seconds

Load MMO HD - 45 seconds
Load MMO HD - 45 seconds

Ya want the best of both worlds ? Grab a hybrid SSD/HD. We have two identical laptops, one with 128 GB Intel 520 and 750 GB, 7200 rpm HD; the other has the Momentus XT. The one with the hybrid boosts just 1 second slower than the one with the SSD ..... once in Windows, unless ya run a benchmark, no one can tell which is which ..... and the hybrid saves time as there's zero time spent managing what is on what.

I think your way underselling how fast SSD's actually are. I imagine your comparing an SSD to a Velociraptor right? The truth is, most people aren't upgrading to an SSD from a Raptor. And a Raptor costs well over 200$ for a 1TB and over 100$ for a 250GB. You can get a 250GB SSD for 169.99, why would you want to spend 125$ on a Raptor?. Most people are upgrading from a 7200rpm drive anyways. I shaved way more than a third off of my boot times. And application loading will always be fastest on an SSD because of the access times. Not to mention 4kb qd32 reads(like opening programs) on a raptor are like 2mb/s compared to 350mb/s on an 840pro. So yeah, you will notice a difference loading programs. Also, try transferring data to and from that raptor compared to an 840pro. With the 840pro you'll get 500mb/s whereas the Raptor will get less than 200mb/s. And that's if it's sequential reads/writes. If it's 4k, the raptor will get 1-2mb/s.

So for the price the Raptor is, it should actually perform better than it does. But it still doesn't even come close to an SSD. Tom's Hardware did a review comparing the Raptor to an SSD, and even in real world tests the SSD killed it.

 

[Altiris]

I'm comparing the SSD to a Seagate 1TB 7200prpm SATA 6 HDD
(Exact model number will be placed in a few)

Everyone keeps saying how SSDs go on sale on a regular basis yet I spent $170.(because of tax on newegg) for 120gb (really 90gb) and you guys purchased 180gb for $170 or something like that. Should I return it and wait for them to go on sale, how long would I have to wait? I sort of dont want to return it just because I already removed a crap load of cables and even my graphics card to get it fitting in the floppy disc slot (didnt work in my HDD area and I bought an adapter). I will mostly install BF3 and see how well the SSD runs that (I remember on my HDD it took a good while). Would this be bad to instal BF3 as it will be writing lot?

 

[zander1983]

I'm comparing the SSD to a Seagate 1TB 7200prpm SATA 6 HDD
(Exact model number will be placed in a few)

Everyone keeps saying how SSDs go on sale on a regular basis yet I spent $170.(because of tax on newegg) for 120gb (really 90gb) and you guys purchased 180gb for $170 or something like that. Should I return it and wait for them to go on sale, how long would I have to wait? I sort of dont want to return it just because I already removed a crap load of cables and even my graphics card to get it fitting in the floppy disc slot (didnt work in my HDD area and I bought an adapter). I will mostly install BF3 and see how well the SSD runs that (I remember on my HDD it took a good while). Would this be bad to instal BF3 as it will be writing lot?

BF3 load times will be a few seconds faster, but that is about it, no improvment in game performance. On a 128GB drive , yes you don't have access to all 128GB because some of it is used for the drive itself (file allocation table), on a 1TB drive you will "lose" around 200GB.

I'll give you $50 + shipping for your SSD because I doubt the reseller will take it back because it doesn't have enough space or something else in your system is bottlenecking the SSD