Agility 3 Confusion

RANZID · 19 Jun 2011 at 16:19

ok , so first of all I should point out that this is my first SSD so pure stupidity or lack of knowledge may be the root cause of these problems.

anyway,

I buy my new monitor and ssd from OcUk ... lightening fast delivery as always, my "OcUk" 24" monitor otherwise known as e2473hds from iiyama is cracking.. crisp picture nice and big all good

the agility 3 .. worried me as spending £100 on a brown cardboard packet seemed somehow cheating . .but it the thing inside that counts right.

so my board ( p5q deluxe) only has sata 2 , my theory was that a drive like the agility 3.. running at 500 odd meg a second up and down should easy be able to max out the sata 2 connection at 300mbps.

It seems I was wrong .. very very wrong.

sure it installs and works but the speeds are confusing to say the least.

so first some of the basics , ive enabled trim (win 7 64) ive enabled Ahci in both bios and windows.

then i got myself some benchmarking software..

the 3 ive tried are : As SSD , ATTO and HDtune

AS SSD:

Seq : Read - 164.19 mb/s write - 44.57 mb/s
4k: Read - 13.13 mb/s write - 32.16 mb/s
4k-64thrd: Read - 43.28 mb/s write - 42.10 mb/s
Acc.time : Read - 0.253 ms Write - 0.366 ms

score : Read 73 Write 79 total 189

hardly the blinding speed I was told about with SSD's
now Hdtune gets around the same sort of speeds as AS SSD
but ATTO is another story , i wont bore you will writing out the whole thing.. but on default settings atto gets over 250mbps on both read and write over the 128 mark.

This is the kind of speed i expected .. maybe not the 300 but 250 would be nice .. no how can ATTO say its running that fast when the others have poor speeds?

and as for real testing , i can hit 110mbps transferring from the ssd to my 1tb samsung but its hardly a real test.

things seem faster but not amazingly so.

So my question is ...

WHY

is it just that im using sata 2 that im being punished?
is it a driver issue?
is the drive itself not working right?

any help or advice would be great at this point.

thanks.

Rig spec:

P5q Deluxe
Q6600 (used to be 3.2 now back to stock just in case it was that)
4gb crucial balistix 800mhz (2x2)
corsair h60
2x500g Samsung
1x1tb Samsung
GTX 460 768mb
Windows 7 64bit
OCZ agility 3 60gb

KMpuggy · 19 Jun 2011 at 16:25

Im sorry i cant help you out, ive just got a question. How do you enable trim on these drives? ive had a look around but cant find the option.

I got one of these yesterday, along with a sata 3 PCIE card, i get around 400mb read, 250mb read. I guess thats down to the marvel controller as ive heard they are pants.

So maybe and option for you would to get a sata 3 pcie card.

RANZID · 19 Jun 2011 at 16:29

http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=86403

there is how to enable trim , you kinda need AHCI aswell from what I understand so its a bios trip aswell. assuming your on windows 7 that is.

its quite simple just a little registry change .. some cmd work .. a bio setting and tada done.

and maybe your right , my board wasn't full enough obviously and needs another card adding to it lol

Avathar77 · 19 Jun 2011 at 16:37

Re : Trim
Taken from OCZForums
In Windows 7, go to start/run/cmd), type the following:
fsutil.exe behavior query DisableDeleteNotify. It should respond back with:
DisableDeleteNotify=0 if TRIM support is ready and active.
If it's not.. type fsutil.exe behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0.

KMpuggy · 19 Jun 2011 at 16:44

Cheers for that, ive checked in my bios and AHCI is enabled. And just done what was suggested in CMD.

I will boot my drive up on my sata 2 port and run ATTO bench test on the sata 2 port and see what sort of speeds i get and compare with yours.

KMpuggy · 19 Jun 2011 at 16:54

Test done via sata 2 port on motherboard

This test done via PCI-E Sata 3 card

So quiet a big difference on the read speeds, but not much on the write. It was a cheap PCIE card, if i had spent a bit more (which i wish i had) i probably would have got better speeds. Im looking to upgrade my motherboard by the end of the month any.

InHuman · 19 Jun 2011 at 17:36

Hi, sorry to kinda highjack the thread if i am. But i was thinking about buying a new sata drive as my one broke, I also have a Sata 2 motherboard (P6T deluxe V2) and was wondering if having Sata 2 is a problem or do i need to buy a new motherboard with Sata 3 to get the maximum speeds?

Thanks.

Surveyor · 19 Jun 2011 at 17:54

HHs said:
Hi, sorry to kinda highjack the thread if i am. But i was thinking about buying a new sata drive as my one broke, I also have a Sata 2 motherboard (P6T deluxe V2) and was wondering if having Sata 2 is a problem or do i need to buy a new motherboard with Sata 3 to get the maximum speeds?

Thanks.

If it's a hard disk drive then SATA2 or SATA3 won't make any difference.

If it's a solid state drive then you may need SATA3 for the best performance depending on which drive you get.

Darkman · 19 Jun 2011 at 18:41

Check out the OCZ forum for more info about benchmarking your new drive:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...es-with-a-brand-new-SandForce-based-ssd-drive

InHuman · 19 Jun 2011 at 20:46

Surveyor said:
If it's a hard disk drive then SATA2 or SATA3 won't make any difference.

If it's a solid state drive then you may need SATA3 for the best performance depending on which drive you get.

Hi, Sorry i should have been more specific, I was looking at buying the new Agility 3 which uses the Sata 3, And my motherboard only uses the Sata 2 connection.

Would it be better if i just got a PCI-e adapter like the above post says, Or do i need to buy a new motherboard to acheive the maximum speeds of the SSD?

Thanks

RANZID · 19 Jun 2011 at 20:56

ok thanks to all thats posted so far , ive been doing some digging and found this:

http://www.ocztechnology.com/res/manuals/OCZ_Agility3_Product_sheet (4).pdf

It seems the sequential reads and writes are about spot on... which confuses me ..

is the "up to 525mbps" some sort of burst speed from a buffer ? as I didnt they had buffers..

I need to read up on how they are built it seems . but I am quite disappointed as my now a little outdated 1tb samsung get 120mbps read and 88 write when its full and fragmented. compared to the current ssd speeds (see first post)

aside from response time this £100 high speed ssd hasn't actually done much for me yet.

hopefully with more learning and work i can kickstart this lump into at least something close to 200mbps.

HHs - unless im doing something wrong with this agility 3 , id say buy a card to bump it to sata 3 .. it will make all the difference.

Surveyor · 19 Jun 2011 at 21:19

HHs said:
Hi, Sorry i should have been more specific, I was looking at buying the new Agility 3 which uses the Sata 3, And my motherboard only uses the Sata 2 connection.

Would it be better if i just got a PCI-e adapter like the above post says, Or do i need to buy a new motherboard to acheive the maximum speeds of the SSD?

Thanks

Cheap SATA3 add in cards aren't likely to be much faster than your onboard SATA2 ports.

They're usually based on something like the Marvell Controller which is pretty dire.

I'd just stick with what you have and use a SATA2 port. It should be plenty fast enough.

Personally I wouldn't spend ~£100 on a new motherboard just to get SATA3.

RANZID · 20 Jun 2011 at 10:20

surveyor , are you sure that even a cheap sata 3 wouldnt make the difference, as im on par with some hard drives at the moment on sata 2 and im thinking its mainly down to the drive having to use sata 2.

Having now trauled through a lot of data , it seems the agility 3 is actually slower for sustained read/writes than say a vertex 2 , check the OCZ data sheets and it becomes painfully obvious it seems ive spend extra money on something that is slower than old tech , and now its crashing out every now and then.. if it fails im just getting my money back and going to hard drives , at least they dont promise the world.

InHuman · 20 Jun 2011 at 15:24

RANZID said:
surveyor , are you sure that even a cheap sata 3 wouldnt make the difference, as im on par with some hard drives at the moment on sata 2 and im thinking its mainly down to the drive having to use sata 2.

Having now trauled through a lot of data , it seems the agility 3 is actually slower for sustained read/writes than say a vertex 2 , check the OCZ data sheets and it becomes painfully obvious it seems ive spend extra money on something that is slower than old tech , and now its crashing out every now and then.. if it fails im just getting my money back and going to hard drives , at least they dont promise the world.

I also was reading lots of things today and iv been put off the agility 3 now, Instead i was thinking about getting 2 Vertex 2E 60gbs and putting them in a raid, Its cheaper and faster from what i can see. :cool: