Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsToshiba OCZ RD400 Series SSD
Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2016
I installed this super -fast OCZ RD400 solid state drive (SSD) which I inserted in a slot on the motherboard of a Windows 10 desktop PC that I want to use as a gateway to access remotely from my laptop.
Copying files, downloading software and loading audio and video are tasks that are slow and tie up my laptop so my plan is to off-load them to a fast remote machine which is where this hard drive comes into play. For details of installation read below, but the end result is this SSD exceeded my requirements for a much faster drive.
This device comes mounted on a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) card. Unlike a SATA solid state drive, this unit is plugged directly into the system bus through the motherboard. This avoids bottlenecks inherent with the SATA interface.
Installation consists of simply inserting the card into place. I tried to install Windows 10 from a DVD onto the SSD as un-allocated space. The installation went smoothly at first then failed when it tried to re-boot. Microsoft can be glitchy, so I repeated the process several times but had the same result.
After searching the internet I found a site (tinker try dot com) that suggested the problem was caused by the fact that many SSD drives, like this one, use a newer way of organizing their storage space called GPT (GUID Partition Table -- which stands for Globally Unique Identifier).
GPT is superior to the old MBR (master boot record) but it presents some compatibility issues, particularly in older machines. Drives with GPT partitions can be used with most modern 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems, but can only be used as a boot drive in computers with 64-bit operating systems that also support UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface).
The Windows installation process recognizes the SSD and automatically sets it up using GPT but then after re-booting it doesn’t recognize it. The site referenced above provided the solution which is to create a USB installation drive that is also partitioned using GPT.
After creating the USB installer using the free tool recommended on the site noted above, I booted and then Windows 10 installed in a little over twenty minutes without incident. Afterwards a re-start took only 32 seconds instead of the one minute twelve seconds from the original spinning drive.
So now that Windows is installed a Microsoft driver automatically is loaded to access the SSD. But, the instructions that were enclosed with the SSD suggest using the Toshiba driver because it is faster. So, I went to the site (OCZ) noted in the instructions and downloaded and installed the Toshiba driver and it went smoothly.
Then I downloaded the SSD utility from the same site and ran it to ensure that the Toshiba driver replaced the Microsoft driver, which it did. As a real world test of the speed of the new drive against the original I created and formatted a 100 GB NTFS partition that took four minutes. Then I created the same size partition on the original drive, and it took 35 minutes to finish.
As another test I copied a 1 GB file from a location on to another on the spinning drive and it took 3.43 seconds. Copying the same file from the spinning drive to the SSD took 2.1 seconds. Copying that file from one location to another on the SSD took 1.42 seconds.
The benchmark from the SSD utility downloaded from the OCZ site shows sequential read of 1.7 GB/s and sequential write of 721.4 MB/s which is faster than the SATA SSD drive I am using on another computer.
Since the manufacturer claims the PCIe interface is much faster than the SATA, I further compared this drive with the SATA by running a free diagnostic tool against both drives. The new SSD got a score of 2411.14 MB/s and the SATA SSD scored 261.3 MB/s.
Although I am not using this machine for gaming I loaded Microsoft Flight Simulator X is a pig. It is disk and CPU intensive but it loaded in ten seconds. It took two minutes and forty-five seconds on my computer with the SATA SSD but never played without getting hung-up. With the new drive Missions completed smoothly without the dreaded buffering.
For my remote gateway use the improvement in speed has increased the usability of my network.
