M6600 Owners Thread

Some SSDs have overprovisioning, some don't. The amount of free space you leave on the SSD is dependent on what you do with it. For a normal user, a SSD with no overprovisioning at 80% capacity should still perform close to specs. For someone writing heavily in a sustained way (think server style workload), leaving 50% free is a good idea in order to give the controller enough free NAND cells so it can do it's garbage collection while still having "empty" NAND available. GC will occur even in the unallocated space, the controller is keeping track of what NAND blocks/pages were written to and will use all NAND available regardless of what the OS sees as part of wear leveling.

Samsung SSDs offer the option to define the amount of overprovisioning manually in their SSD Magician software for example. Enterprise level SSDs also have a lot more overprovisioning than their consumer counterparts to minimize wear as well as cope with sustained heavy writes.

As for finite elements, the stuff i do right now doesn't require a lot of RAM so i haven't installed 32GB yet, but i did hit the page file when i tried to see if i could simulate something in turbulent flow and things did slow to a crawl after the equations for the model were compiled even with the swap file on a SSD once i finally get the back order mSATA drive i order i'll be able to test having the swap file on a separate drive.

 

I hope not. Seems like they are trying to cut costs. I would of bought some Samsung memory instead.

I have a Samsung 830 Series SSD and Samsung mSata SSD...both have never given me one problem. But the Kingston Ram has failed after 5 months.

 

I looked around for that magician software and couldn't find it for the OEM PM830. Some users said that OEM SSD couldn't use it.
I've found lots of downloads everywhere else except samsung - I'm reluctant to try them.

 

Yeah, i don't think it works for OEM drives. That said, pretty much no one needs to mess with increasing overprovisioning on their SSDs and those that need to usually know they need it like people who know they need a lot of RAM. Gonna have to increase mine to 32GB pretty soon and then i'll probably end up with the can I haz 64GB problem, but at that point, my friend desktop may come to the rescue.

 

Ok, found something:
Says all versions of 830 SSD, I'll read about all that OP, GC etc.

Magician Manual: http://downloadcenter.samsung.com/c.../Magician_Software_User_Manual_Ver.3.1_EN.pdf

.Exe Download page, go to Manuals/Downloads tab, Software: Support - Solid State Drives MZ-7PC256N | Samsung Memory & Storage

 

One thing to note about the SSD magician software, if you use the optimization feature, it will disable superfetch and indexing which is something i wouldn't do. Indexing is actually pretty useful, if you disable it you will loose some functionality when using the windows search as for superfetch, definitely leave it on if you have at least one standard HDD in the computer (it will help speed up program startup time for those that are on the HDD).

The magician software allows you to run TRIM on demand though which is pretty awesome. The feature is built into windows 8, but absent of Windows 7 (hopefully, MS will bring it to 7).

Regarding GC, i don't know all of the inner workings of garbage collection so i can't explain everything in detail unfortunately.

 

Sorry to cut in on this conversation, especially with a newbie type question....but can you actually run third HD in or off the optical port?

I haven't taken the optical drive out and look at the set up yet.

 

Yes you can, bringing the total number of drives you can use in the M6600 to 4 including the mSATA.

 

Is some sort of adapter need to house the HD?

 

A housing and face plate. And it is a SATA II 3Gb/s port.

If you can filter for all Scott_RC-TEK's posts I think I saw it in here somewhere.