Hi :-). I only recently decided to settle down as a farmer and join Chia for the release the pooling protocol. After a lot of reading in this forum, I went from parallel plotting to madmax (stotiks). There I started off with speeds around 31 mins (3960x / 128 GB RAM / 2x2TB MP600 Pro) to 23.7 mins when I understood that my RAM was running only at 2133 MHz. Now it’s at 3600 MHz - which had a much bigger effect than any other parameters (Buckets, threads etc.). And if I knew about the ramdrive-option I would not have bought two SSD, but well… 
Now to the point: The 23.7 min is only for the first plot, then speeds are dropping to 25 min, 27 min and are stable around 27-28 min. I understand that this is also related to the fact that plots have to be copied etc. but is there any way I could have more sustainable speeds? My settings are: -r 24, -u 256, -v 256, -t (MP600 Pro 2TB) -2 (Ramdrive 111GB). The system is cooled well… Thanks in advance!
Are you using trim on your ssd?
I don’t really know how to use that. If I look at ChrystalDiskInfo TRIM is listed. Do I need to enable that in Windows or BIOS?
I just ran the tool trim check. It seems to be working…
TRIM check v0.7 - Written by Vladimir Panteleev
Loading continuation data from G:\trimcheck-cont.json…
Drive path : \.\G:
Offset : 185683009536
Random data : C2 60 89 28 ED 35 D2 AD CE 03 8D 19 28 6F BF 75…
Reading raw volume data…
Opening \.\G:…
Seeking to position 185683009536…
Reading 16384 bytes…
First 16 bytes: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00…
Data is empty (filled with 0x00 bytes).
CONCLUSION: TRIM appears to be WORKING!
Press Enter to exit…
Maybe I could reduce the amount of threads to 16? I wonder if there is a shortage of ram since there is a lot reserved for ramdrive…
It’s normally automatic but worth checking.
Also, if you look at your drives under your drive properties, uncheck " allow contents on this drive to have contents indexed…"
And do a disk cleanup.
Look at your bin on desktop and deactivate the bin on your plotting drives.
Thank you, I’ll try that!
" allow contents on this drive to have contents indexed…" was checked and the bin was activated. let’s see what happens now after the changes…
Sometimes mine still slows slightly, 1st line in phase 1 moves from apx 18 sec to 21 then stabilises, I have to restart pc to get back to 18.
But those changes should hopefully help a little.
After the changes you suggested and the reduction to 16 threads it’s around 25.0 - 25.5 minutes per plot for now. Rising very slowly. Definitely more stable speeds… I will try again with more threads, to see if it will remain fast when I have the cores at 100%. If I have a sustained speed around 25 mins it’s probably what there is to get with my setup?
I can’t say as each setup is different.
I can say with high probability linux would be faster.