So I've had an SSD for a while, which is an M500, I read reviews on it before buying sounded fine since it was on sale, but it hasn't been that much faster than my mechanical, which is a WD black, only boots about 5 seconds faster, and photoshop/vegas only open a few seconds faster as well, Is this how well the average SSD works? I feel as though I've wasted my money when I could have just nabbed another TB of storage. its in an AM1 system at the moment, tried it in my FM2 system. did all the optimizations for it. I just don't see the big deal behind SSDs.
What's the capacity? If it's the 120 GB version it's very slow because it has few NAND dies, which means less parallelism.
Here, some benchmarks:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6884/crucial-micron-m500-review-960gb-480gb-240gb-120gb/7
make sure you're in achi mode not ide mode (which is a thing for sata controllers)
1. Sometimes the SSD is not the (only) bottleneck in the system. AM1 platform has low power CPUs, single channel DDR etc.
2. Dependind on the capacity of the NAND chips, they will use more/less channels to the controller and because of interleaving the performance will be worse on those that use less channels (small capacity SSDs or bigger NAND chips). And there are different types of NAND: async, sync, toggle NAND.
3. AMD systems are known to boot slower even with a SSD. My i5 ultrabook with a 256 GB Samsung 840PRO boots to desktop (Win 8) in 11 sec., while my AMD Phenom II 555 desktop with 240 GB Hyperx 3k, in 26 sec.
thats the one, guess I'm screwed