Any cheap way to speed up a SSD boot drive?

[InuNacho]

I have only now discovered the joys of TRIMing my SSD boot drive and am seeing results that I used to see when I bought my Samsung 840 new 5 years ago. My main drive is currently occupying where the optical drive used to be and I understand that the Sata connections might be limited there. Given the age and technology in my older drive, would I see any benefits from a PCIe adapter?

 

[StuAff]

Yes, you want a PCIe card for the best results. The onboard SATA ports are limited to about 300 MB/s, with the same drive on a card you should get at or near full speed, 500MB/s plus.

 

[AidenShaw]

I have only now discovered the joys of TRIMing my SSD boot drive and am seeing results that I used to see when I bought my Samsung 840 new 5 years ago. My main drive is currently occupying where the optical drive used to be and I understand that the Sata connections might be limited there. Given the age and technology in my older drive, would I see any benefits from a PCIe adapter?

You probably won't notice any improvement in boot times, or in typical application startup.

Large file reads and writes should improve - but booting and application startup usually involves reading and writing smaller files. If an application reads or writes large files during startup, you may see some improvement. (Note that many applications load code/data on demand, so even if an application has some large files it may not read much from them.)

 

[h9826790]

I have only now discovered the joys of TRIMing my SSD boot drive and am seeing results that I used to see when I bought my Samsung 840 new 5 years ago. My main drive is currently occupying where the optical drive used to be and I understand that the Sata connections might be limited there. Given the age and technology in my older drive, would I see any benefits from a PCIe adapter?

Since your title said "speed up a BOOT drive", I assume you means speed up the boot time. As AidenShaw said, it won't make any noticeable difference.

As you can see, there is virtually no improvement (in boot time) for a 840 Evo by moving from SATA II to SATA III connection. Even go for PCIe 2.0 won't make any difference.

Boot time is not affected by the sequential read speed, but the random read speed.

This chart explain a bit more. As you can see, the 4K random read speed (~35MB/s) on a SSD is nothing close to the SATA II limit (~250MB/s), but it's 30x faster than the traditional HDD. This is the real reason why the SSD can speed up the boot time. If sequential speed can affect the boot time, then a 10x HDD RAID 0 array can boot 5x faster than your current setup. However, it won't, because the 4K random read speed still slow for a 10x HDD RAID 0 array. Also, no matter the SSD is connected to a SATA II or SATA III port, the 4K random read speed still roughly 35MB/s, no noticeable improvement.

 

[AndreeOnline]

When Apple RAIDs two fast blades in the new iMac Pro and get read/write around 3000 MB/s, it sure looks pretty 'meh' to measure 270MB/s in our cMP bays.

No one would say no to those 3000 MB/s speeds, but it's important to realise what's being measured and when those operations come into effect. This has been explained and shown in previous posts.

I've opted for three internal tiers: blade PCIe, RAID SSD and RAID HDD. The middle SSD RAID (2 disks in RAID 0 in normal bays) still gives me 120 fps worth of playback in ProResHQ, 4K DCI.

 

[InuNacho]

Thanks for the insight everyone. Yea, I was and still am amazed by the 3000 MB/s offered by the iMac Pro but since that speed doesn't really affect boot times or launching applications, I'm quite content with my current speeds then. Thanks all.