Slow read on Kingston 40GB SSD

Lanz

Lanz

Lanz

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According to crystaldiskmark, my new Kingston 40GB SSD is only reading at about 120MB/s - all the reviews have it at 170ish.

Is the reason for this because it's installed on a Atom netbook, (ICH7) or is there something I need to do to get more performance?

Its a fresh install of 7, I've installed latest intel SATA drivers etc.
 
ATTO gives me about 130MB/s reads.

It feels like it might be running at SATA1, but it says SATA2 in HDTune info.
 
A lot of netbooks and laptops are BIOS locked to SATA I mode even when the controller can do SATA II 3Gbit. Apparently it's to increase battery life. Drivers won't override the BIOS in this case so you're stuck in SATA I mode.

My Dell laptop does this and it's annoying, but the performance impact isn't that great.
 
Ah, thanks for that.

Does TRIM also need SATA2 to function properly, as according to CystalDiskInfo, TRIM is not supported when it should be.
 
Do you need to have AHCI mode enabled to get Trim working.. I believe so. IDE emulation mode wont cut it. To be honest you wont really notice 120 v 170 sequential access most of the time, random access is more important, and random 4k write, which the kingston 40 and intel 80/160 drives excel at, So overall its performance should feel great even if you cant get Sata2 performance from it.
 
Lanz said:
Does TRIM also need SATA2 to function properly, as according to CystalDiskInfo, TRIM is not supported when it should be.
Click to expand...
The drive doesn't have TRIM support. Kingston were supposed to be producing a firmware update to enable TRIM, but since the drive is now discontinued I doubt we'll ever see it.
 
It does support trim as it has the latest firmware that the Intel G2's have, but alas my netbook doesnt support AHCI, so that's where my problem lies.

Thanks
 
There's no TRIM support on the Kingston, or at least there isn't on mine and as far as I know they only ever shipped with one firmware revision (which reports the same version as the Intel drives, but has no TRIM).
 
I have 4 from the batch that were imported/delivered the week leading up to Christmas and they support TRIM.
 
Can you run crystaldiskinfo and post a screeny of one of your kingstons, as the one I bought last week doesnt support it. (2CV102GHA firmware)
 
Is there anyway to update the firmware on these yet? If there's a firmware with trim enabled why don't they release it?
 
Unfortunately I now have them in RAID0 so I can't do anything with them individually.

The write speed isn't that special considering the read speed though;

raid1.jpg
 
booyaka said:
thanks - will check later - got one 40gb Kingston as a boot drive and was just wondering as i only got it last week so hopefully it's already supported.
Click to expand...

I have no doubt that if your disk is capable of TRIM support CrystalDiskInfo will tell you that your drive supports TRIM but it will not tell you, as far as I know, whether TRIM is active.

As demonstrated by the below CrystalDiskInfo screenshot of my Crucial M225 64GB - you can see TRIM is highlighted, but the fact is that I have to manually run a program (Crucial Wiper Tool) to initiate a TRIM-like garbage collection function. I think my point is that TRIM being highlighted in CrystalDiskInfo is not a guarantee of TRIM running automatically, just that the drive supports TRIM

crystaldiskinfo.png


EDIT: Looking at this review of the drives it seems that you will have to wait until Kingston release a firmware update to enable TRIM. As the review says, it should only be a matter of time considering Intel have just recently released theirs?
 
Last edited:
ejr22 said:
EDIT: Looking at this review of the drives it seems that you will have to wait until Kingston release a firmware update to enable TRIM. As the review says, it should only be a matter of time considering Intel have just recently released theirs?
Click to expand...

Not so sure, as my new Kingston 40GB has the same firmware as the trim enabled Intels, yet crystaldiskinfo says it isn't supported.

Unless CDI^ just uses a preconfigured database of SSDs that is known to support trim, but doesnt actually test/acknowledge it.
 
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