I installed 3 Samsung 850 Evo 500 GB drives. The OS drive looks spectacular in Magician software benching results. 100% in read/write, 85-90% in randoms. Awesome.
 
But the 2 samples drives are at best 60ish% in their read/50ish% writes, and as low as 37% in randoms. Is this typical for non-OS drives to be this poor performing? Both are set as SATA 3. ACHI mode activated (I think that's default). Only 2/3 of each drive free.  I was in hopes the sample drives would BLAZE streaming samples in SPLAT... Overprovisioning the sample drives provided no performance boost while ating up almost 50GB of space. There is a rapid mode that can be set for 1 drive only. Should that be the samples drive I use the most or the OS?
Advice necessary and appreciated - thanks!
 
 

Also posted this on a pc forum. No responses. Is this normal behavior in sample streaming drives?
 

Not Samsungs so I don't know if the make makes a difference and I haven't tested them in a while, but my Intels benchmark the same whether used as OS or data disks.
 
Generally speaking SSDs have very fast access times compared to electro-mechanical drives which ought to pay off on a drive containing lots of samples, assuming the sample files are small.
 
Benchmarking doesn't always relate to real world performance, and different test software can give very different results. Even if SSDs didn't beat HDDs for speed there'd still be an argument for using them in DAWS - they're silent and use very little power, which means a lower-rated psu can be used (including finless ones) which in turn means less noise emitted by the PC.

What motherboard? I wonder if there is a difference between the SATA ports the different SSDs are connected to? I wonder if it is worth trying swapping SATA cables and ports to eliminate that possibility?
 
Cheers, Peter.
 

All SATA ports are SAT 3. Would there be a difference within them then? MOBO is Asus P8P67 pro rev 3.1

http://event.asus.com/2011/mb/Identify_B3_Motherboards/
 
Is yours the B3 revision? If not, there seems to be an issue with SATA ports on the original version. Although that page says you can use B3 BIOS and drivers, it's not clear if that fixes the problem. This might all be a red herring, but worth eliminating.
 
Cheers, Peter.
 

On further reading, I suspect your Rev 3.1 is B3.
 

One more thing (then I need to go to work). It looks like that mobo has two SATA 6 ports (one dark blue and one white one - not sure why they are different colors), and two SATA 3 ports (light blue). Is it possible that the OS SSD is connected to a SATA 6 port, and the other SSDs are on the light blue SATA 3 ports?
 

Apparently the DL site is down. I don't see Win 10 drivers for the rev 3.1 even. 8.1 is most recent. Makes me wonder if that is in play...

It has 4 3 gb sata 3 light blue ports. Nothing but dvd plugged into them.2 gray 6gb. I have my os in one. I had Barracuda in the other. I swapped it with one of the ssds to see if it would run faster. OS still in same port. PC won't load windows. Right up to the spinning icon on the windows screen, but screen goes black. I took all drives but OS out, it does the same thing. Why is this?