Recently, I assembled a new computer for personal use. With a top-notch CPU and video card installed, and reasonably fast RAM, the hard disk is now the main bottleneck in the system. The 3TB seagate drive, running 7200rpm, is easily brought to 100% workload when stressing the system, and seems to be keeping other components back.
I'm looking to replace this hard disk with a better solution (SSD), but I have no idea how to best do this. I would like to use a PCIe device, due to their speed ratings, but read a lot about people having trouble booting from those. Is it, generally, possible to use a PCIe SSD as windows system drive?
I have 3 PCIe slots on my MB (x16/x8/x16). However, I also have a high end video card (Radeon HD 7990) running. Will the MB PCIe bus be able to handle both the video card AND SSD?
What would be the other problems I need to be aware of?
I visited Asrock's website for my board, but found no clues as to whether it allows PCIe booting.
Roundup of my system hardware
- ASRock X79 Extreme4-M motherboard socket 2011
- 3rd generation intel i7-3930k
- Radeon HD 7990 video card, 6GB GDDR-5 dual GPU
- Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB 7200rpm SATA-600 HDD
- 16GB Corsair vengeance RAM 1600MHz DDR-3
- 730W power source
The SSD I had my eye on is the OCZ Revodrive 3 X2. Unfortunately, I read one buyer review of someone who was unable to use it as boot device. If that is the card or his MB, I don't know.
Best Answer
It really depends on what you are doing. For games the initial load speed and possible level changing can be increased significantly. BUt you don't need PCIe to do that.
Your motherboard supports SATA3 600MB/s. A normal hard drive does about 50~80mbs.
Most medium SSD's perform around 300MB's so you not even getting half the bandwidth. It seems you got enough dosh to splash out so you can read this comparision and realise that the fastest on there only goes up to 550MB/s (but it is linear read not random)
So that is already up to 12 times faster than your traditional hard drive.
Fine. PCIExpress gives you 1Terabye/s because they use RAID and special techniques to increase linearly read.Like a Revo Drive.
I would suggest use a normal SATA SSD for your OS, then load all your games, applications and intensive stuff onto the PCIexpress card. With 16GB ram that should be a cracking PC (You could put your swap on the PCI Express)
PS- You can put your PC into sleep mode instead of booting each time. Windows 7 and 8 is built for that. Press button, Windows is active in 1 seconds. No need to boot each time.