What should I upgrade?

Hey everyone, just wanted to let you know I finally picked up an Ocz Vertex 4 128GB.

I have a quick question for you all—I was browsing some forums and saw people mentioning that you can squeeze out extra speed by installing a new firmware update. Is that actually legit, or should I just leave things exactly as they are?

Also, am I going to see a significant drop in performance since my motherboard only supports 3gb/s, while this SSD is rated for up to 6gb/s? Or is the difference just a few measly MB per second?

Download the OCZ toolbox and check if there are any updates available. The latest version should be 1.15. Samsung is also excellent since it really optimizes performance...

Did I mess this up? So, I just installed a fresh version of macOS on my Samsung drive yesterday. If I go ahead and flash the drive now, am I going to have to start the whole process over from scratch—meaning, will I lose everything? I've got a backup sitting on an external hard drive, but I'm wondering... am I going to have to reinstall macOS all over again?

You won't even have to deal with a reinstall.

Hey guys, just wanted to give you a heads-up—things didn't exactly go according to plan on my end.

I downloaded the toolbox and ran the upgrade, and everything seemed fine at first. It said the process finished successfully, and then gave me the prompt to restart my computer. I was just about to do that when the whole system completely froze up on me. I sat there for maybe two or three minutes hoping it would unfreeze so I wouldn't have to pull the plug, but eventually, I had no choice but to force a shutdown using the power button.

To make matters worse, the computer wouldn't even boot back up. I tried running the macOS repair tools, but nothing worked. In the end, I was stuck having to do a clean install of macOS from scratch. Does anyone know why this happened? Did I mess something up during the process?

I was messing around with Samsung Benchmark earlier, and honestly, the speeds aren't really hitting what I expected—are these numbers actually okay, especially since I'm seeing 3gb/s?

Also, it keeps throwing up this "pciide- BAD" error... does anyone know what that's actually about?

Here’s a screenshot so you can see what I'm looking at. http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/1535/ssdjj.jpg

EDIT: I did a little digging into that pciide thing, and it looks like there might be a setting I need to tweak. I'd rather get some advice from you guys first though—I don't want to go poking around and accidentally mess something up.

Wait, what?

Go ahead and run a benchmark with Atto, then let me know how it goes...
And grab Samsung

http://www.abelssoft.net/ssdfresh.php

You can find plenty of info on SSD optimization right here

http://forum.pcekspert.com/showthread.php?t=238109

I’ve been thinking—maybe there's a registry tweak somewhere that could bump up the speed? It might be worth looking into changing the PCI ID too, just to make sure everything is running at peak performance. Here’s a screenshot I grabbed from Atto to show you what I mean.

http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/397/ssd2j.jpg

Maybe you should've just gone with a different GPU.

🤣

Larry Ortiz5 said:I think some registry tweaks might be necessary to boost the speed and fix the PCI ID status. Here’s a screenshot from Atto.

http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/397/ssd2j.jpg

Those speeds are way too slow... I honestly have no idea what registry settings would even help. All I did was format the drive and install macOS, and my speeds are totally fine. After downloading the latest firmware, it runs smooth as silk—write: 540, read: 510...
Maybe the bottleneck is actually just bandwidth ☕

Man, what a joke this SSD situation is. If I’m only seeing a 200MB difference just because I’m stuck with a SATA2 interface, then honestly—what’s even the point? Why bother upgrading if the speed isn't actually noticeable? It feels like a total waste of time. Benjamin King2, I'm counting on you to help me make sense of this.

You'll need a SATA3 controller, because Atto is just going to show you the maximum speed possible for SATA2...

Something like this

It’s honestly driving me crazy dealing with this error. I ended up dropping a ton of cash on Bezvzez—I really should've just put that money toward a new GPU instead, even if it was only about 20% faster than what I'm running now.

I think I hit the nail on the head after doing some digging online—it looks like I can't actually hit those top speeds because my setup is capped at an older standard, basically limiting me to about 3Gbps.

Did you actually toggle the AHCI setting in the BIOS?

So, I just finished reinstalling Windows. I hopped into the BIOS, went under the advanced settings, and switched things from IDE over to SATA—saved those changes, exited, popped in my Windows 8 disc, and ran the full reinstall.Is it totally normal that the system tray keeps telling me I can safely remove hardware? Like, when I click on it, both my HDD and SSD show up there. Is that expected now that I’ve switched to SATA in the BIOS? It wasn't doing that yesterday when I was still running on IDE.

Alright, I just ran another benchmark and the speeds have actually gone up—plus, that annoying error is finally gone. Here’s what the results look like: http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/253/ssd3p.jpg

Now I'm just left wondering about that SATA info... any idea why it's showing up like that?

EDIT: http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/86/ssd4t.jpg

That’s totally expected since the controller supports hot-swapping—it’s built for it. Besides, those speeds are perfectly fine for a SATA III controller.

Honestly, it doesn't feel all that fast to me 😬 Since the SSD is capped at about 500MB/s for both reading and writing—which is basically half the speed I was hoping for—it's just not hitting those high marks.

I guess my only real move is to just pick up one of those adapters or maybe find a motherboard that actually supports SATA III.