Poor 4k results for Samsung 830 SSD on SATA2

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Got a 256GB Samsung 830 SSD in my Dell e6510 laptop running Windows 8 (its my work machine)

Its my first time using an SSD and I'm not blown away by the performance

I have done some benchmarks switching between the AHCI and RAID (Intel RST) options in the laptop BIOS.

Looking at other peoples benchmarks online they get 60MB/s Write and 20MB/s Reads on the 4K tests. I'm getting worrying low results.

asssdbenchsamsungssd830k.png

First effort on the Intel RAID BIOS option with old drivers

asssdbenchsamsungssd830l.png

Updated to the 2012 Intel driver


asssdbenchsamsungssd830.png


Running regular AHCI, no drivers at all other than what Windows 8 gives me

Should my results be better for a SATA 2 Laptop and a Samsung 830 256GB SSD?
 
You alignment looks odd,even if it is reading ok,did you 4k align the ssd? Format it to 4096mb?

Run an atto benchmark aswell,see what that says
 
A lot of laptops absolutely screw over the end user. They'll use chipset Y with performance potential Z, but they turn off a bunch of features to save power and destroy performance :(

Laptop's have all sorts of dodgy bioses to disable things, to save power, and to make things slower, cooler, more stable in general. Bit of a sham really as a lot of laptops advertise a newer chipset and newer cpu/hdd, but have things disabled that kill you.

One of the laptops I've put a 830 in just sucks balls, its not quite as bad as that performance wise, a bit higher on reads but equally bad on writes.... not quite sure what they screw up but it clearly hurts writes badly.

Still even with poor seeming benchmarks its eleventy billion times better than a bog standard hdd. I'm more and more leaning towards the idea of getting the cheapest drive available at any capacity for really any system. There is smeg all difference in real world use between a Vertex 4 and a Crucial C300 despite benchmarks showing a much larger difference.

That is still often the Samsung 830 as its been insanely competitively priced for the past 3 months, saying that the last few weeks there have been some killer deals as companies finally get to clearing the final stock of old gen drives.

Shame that you can't use the full speed, but be happy it was good value and you can always move the drive on with you to a new laptop or PC and get more performance out of it which is always good. Laptops with an ssd as standard are still stupidly expensive so I'll be buying laptops with hdd's for the foreseeable future and sticking the cheapest ssd in asap.
 
I didn't 4k align, but did check the partition offsets and they are divisible by 4096. Windows 8 now creates a 350MB partition before the main drive for support.

In terms of AHCI / Intel RAID which is better? and do I need to use the Intel RST drivers at all?
 
RST drivers are marginally different, neither better nor worse, 3% change in benchmark performance means nothing in real world, and you might get a 1% bump in 4kb reads and lose 2% in sequential, or vice versa from one driver set to another. There aren't drivers out there that will give you the full performance of that drive.

Raid drivers use AHCI drivers for any non raid drive used so Raid is essentially the same as AHCI setting, give or take which driver Intel has updated when.
 
spixelspixel said:
The important thing is how does it perform in real life situations!
Click to expand...

Well I'm not impressed on actual day to day usage :( sure startup is faster but it still takes me longer to make a coffee on a morning that my old 7200 RPM disk took to boot.

Maybe I was expecting more, like instant opening apps. Seeing as most of my time is spend dealing with web apps it hasn't speeded up my works connection or the latency.

Sleep and resume works well and Windows 8 does feel responsive on it but I have yet to load all my applications and database stuff on.
 
I've seen a few of these in laptops coming close to the 270/255 seq, but the other posters are correct. Vendors fiddle with laptops so that things like my lenovo, which is technically sata III only runs sata II for power savings. Then they over volt the cpu and ram - pointless :)

Also you haven't provisioned, and you really should if you plan on shifting db stuff onto it.
 
Thanks people, guess thats all I'll get from the e6510.

To go slightly OT:
Azuse05, what do you mean provisioned? Yes I'll be running SQL Dev on here...
 
Space set aside for the garbage disposal and wear leveling. Most of the drives coming out now are sold as 240GB, although they're 256GB drives with 16 (6.25%) provisioned from the factory. However Samsung and Crucial seem to have given in to the marketing departments and gone with the largest headline capacity leaving the provisioning up to the user (which seems a marketing gimmick).

Install the magician software that came with it and it'll recommend something like 7-10% be provisioned. Essentially it just creates un-partitioned space which can be done in windows too, but it's just easier as you can also ensure trim etc are on. Running the wei also checks trim etc.

You can always use the space if you need it at a later date, but it really should be left. In fact it should have been done at the factory like every other manufacturer imo :p However the more the better really.
 
Cheers for that Azuse05

I'd got the 256GB for that reason as I know Windows previously complained about not free space but didn't know I had to leave it off the end as unused space after my primary partition.

I've estimated my usage will be about 150GB max on this disk so plenty spare even with a 10% provisioned for SSD system use
 
Yes, power options in Windows 8 set to maximum performance. The Dell e6510 uses the Intel QM57 express chipset, not sure if I need any drivers for that, Windows 8 supplies all the drivers by not sure about their performance offering.

If 4k results are limited by CPU I'm running the i7-820QM which is a 1.7GHz Quad so it must be something else?

Your post looks interesting, did it feel much faster though or just. In the benchmark?
 
Hummmm, thats more like what I was expecting

deadite66 What is the rest of your setup? Is it the one in your sig?

Did you do anything special?
 
yes it's the one in my sig, nothing special installed.

i did temporarily install Paragon Alignment Tool trial to check the partitions were aligned as i used trueimage to clone from my old drive.
 
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