OCZ Agility 3 Issue

AiiR · 7 Jul 2011 at 17:22

Had this drive in for 24 hours now, however the speed doesn't seem to be what it should. Before buying I looked at reviews where the speeds were around 300mb/s, but I just can't seem to hit that at all.

Here's the screenshot;

My motherboard is a Asus P7P55D which doesn't have any Sata3 ports, so I bought a PCIe expansion card (this one http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CC-000-AS&tool=3) however speeds still seem to be lacking.

Anyone care to offer a helping hand? This is my first SSD so I have no idea what to expect, but I assumed it'd be better than this..

AiiR · 7 Jul 2011 at 20:46

Okay did some further testing by trying it on a standard Sata2 port on the motherboard, unsurprisingly there was no improvement;

Then swapped back to the Sata3 port on the card and got the following;

Still no joy, compared to others they're horribly low? Could i be a problem with the drive itself?

Really need some assistance with this.

Ta.

Edit- Just read this by scouring Google;

Setting up a partition on an SSD drive.
The partition needs to be aligned on an SSD drive before you install your operating system.

You may well ask what "partition alignment" is?
A normal HDD partition should be aligned before an OS is installed. Maybe some IT guys in charge of large servers may do this, but normal users probably don't or won’t have even heard of it. For a normal HDD it doesn't really matter as access times are slow anyway.

For SSD drives, partition alignment is very important. SSD drives more or less all use NAND flash memory. The flash memory on an SSD is laid out in 512KB blocks, and the minimum erase size is also 512KB. If the partition isn't aligned, to write a small file it will have to write it to 2 blocks. This has already slowed down the writing process 50%. If the SSD was to write and read at the same time, which it can do (more or less) then with a non aligned partition, you've lost a lot of performance.

Could that be the issue?

Captain Chaos · 9 Jul 2011 at 07:54

Drive needs to be set to AHCI in the bios. You will need to reinstall or tweak the registry. Do a search on google to find out how to do this.

AiiR · 9 Jul 2011 at 08:52

See I did that before installing Windows as I read up about it, however when I go to the drives configuration is has IDE OCZ Agility 3, but everything was configured as AHCI prior to installing Windows, so I don't quite understand that one. :s Ideas?

Captain Chaos · 9 Jul 2011 at 20:38

Drives configuration? I take it that this is in the BIOS? Shouldnt be showing as IDE, is the drive in a SATA III port?

biuro74 · 9 Jul 2011 at 22:23

Which port did you populate on your motherboard with this external controller ?
I can only presume that due to nature of PCIe lanes sharing scheme in your P55 chipset, your PCIe controller "gives back" some bandwidth to another device (PCIe/PCI card/USB device) and it's what might be seen on screenshots you attached.
BTW, don't do so much tests on SSD drive as they make their lifespan shorter. Read OCZ' guide & FAQ and follow instructions, including some tweaks

AiiR · 10 Jul 2011 at 07:25

colthillary said:
Drives configuration? I take it that this is in the BIOS? Shouldnt be showing as IDE, is the drive in a SATA III port?

It is in a SATA III port, but not a native one, it's one an ASUS U3S6 add-on card.

biuro74 said:
Which port did you populate on your motherboard with this external controller ?
I can only presume that due to nature of PCIe lanes sharing scheme in your P55 chipset, your PCIe controller "gives back" some bandwidth to another device (PCIe/PCI card/USB device) and it's what might be seen on screenshots you attached.
BTW, don't do so much tests on SSD drive as they make their lifespan shorter. Read OCZ' guide & FAQ and follow instructions, including some tweaks

It's in the 4x PCIe lane, and the part about the bandwidth sharing makes sense as my FPS drops ever so slightly when I use my keyboard to move (only noticeable on high FPS games however)!

So is this pretty much the best speeds I can expect without getting a new motherboard that has proper SATA3 ports? I'll also lay off the testing aswell.

Thanks.

biuro74 · 10 Jul 2011 at 09:45

Your mobo has got x16 slot working as x4, but in spec I found it's 2.5 GT/s (identically as your 2 other PCIe x1 slots) only - so it gives no more than ~312 MB/s of bandwidth, depending on 8/10, or Giga (1000 or 1024) calculations, it's able to reach maximum raw speed you presented on screenshots. But independently, this bandwidth is shared, so for your purpose motherboard change is highly recommended to something with native SATA3 support.

freddie64 · 10 Jul 2011 at 10:17

Should you not be using ATTO to test that ssd?

AiiR · 10 Jul 2011 at 10:47

biuro74 said:
Your mobo has got x16 slot working as x4, but in spec I found it's 2.5 GT/s (identically as your 2 other PCIe x1 slots) only - so it gives no more than ~312 MB/s of bandwidth, depending on 8/10, or Giga (1000 or 1024) calculations, it's able to reach maximum raw speed you presented on screenshots. But independently, this bandwidth is shared, so for your purpose motherboard change is highly recommended to something with native SATA3 support.

Okay thanks, but the thing that's getting to me now is the dips in performance are always at the same time no matter what it's plugged into, as you can probably see on the charts. I din't really understand why it'd drop that sharply on both the Sata3 card and a native sata2 port.

Should you not be using ATTO to test that ssd?

Wasn't aware of that one, what's the advantages using it?

freddie64 · 10 Jul 2011 at 11:32

Think it's something to do with the sandforce controller or something like that.

Used it on my Vertex 2E when i first got it and then forgot about it.

Of course, yours been sata 3 and a different version of Sandforce, you may not need to only use ATTO.

Sorry for rambling on, suffering from on a night on the Jack Daniels.