OCZ Vertex 2E, only 180MB/S what am I doing wrong? please help :)

R5GTT · 10 Sep 2010

Hi all,

Well I installed my 120GB Vertex 2E and went about installing Windows 7 64bit.

Once installed, I disabled indexing, superfetch, defrag etc, updated motherboard drivers and so on. I ran CrystalDiskMark and only saw around 180MB/s for sequential read and writes even though I've seen people benching with 240 ish.

I then tried to install the intel rapid storage driver which failed basically saying something like no supported hardware. (I don't remember the exact message)

I found my bios was set to IDE on the sata interface and read that it should be set to AHCI for speed and also was the likely cause of the intel driver install failing. Is this correct?

Once changed over to AHCI windows begins to load but then BSOD's and restarts. Is this because I need to re-install windows with the ahci enabled now for it to work? WinXP on my old boot drive also failed with a BSOD whilst in AHCI mode.

Hope someone can shed some light

I'm probably doing it all wrong and not sure whether I should be installing the intel driver through device manager or something? Also would there be any issues with running my samsung spinpoints on ACHI for storage.

thanks

Spencer

stealthgeek · 10 Sep 2010

Yes, you would have needed to install Windows with AHCI enabled, it would have installed the AHCI-compliant driver for the controller

reygjabla · 10 Sep 2010

A registry edit is required before you can change your bios storage configuration from IDE to AHCI to avoid blue screen but since you've ran the CDM benchmark already, I would suggest doing a secure erase using HDD Erase 3.3 while your still in IDE mode. If your not familiar doing this, I suggest, you head to OCZ forum as they've got a very comprehensive guide on how to do this as well as updating the SSD firmware. Once you've done all of this, you can then, set your storage configuration to AHCI and reinstall your OS, install Intel IRST driver and apply some of the tweaks from OCZ forum if you fell the need to. Then, you will see the difference.

While in OCZ forum, check also some posting about compatibility, bugs and fixes and other stuff that affects Gigabyte mobos.

R5GTT · 10 Sep 2010

Thanks for the info, I did read about a registry change that can be made in IDE mode before switching to AHCI to enable it and not need a fresh install however on this occasion I'll re-install.

I've updated my gigabyte to the latest beta bios after reading some info on the ocz forum and the drive is currently running the latest firmware.

I will try a secure erase and then re install wth AHCI enabled.

Finally I'll post up some benchmarks

Going to switch to ATTO benchmarking after reading about crystalmark bogging sandforce ssd's down

Cheers

reygjabla · 16 Sep 2010

Are you happy with your SSD now?

R5GTT · 16 Sep 2010

Yes thanks, and cheers for the advice. I know these drives should be benched with ATTO really and I am happy with the reults I get with it (284MB/s Read and 276MB/s Write) from my other thread here are my CrystalDiskMark and Atto results with AHCI setup correctly, better than the 180MB/s mentioned in my OP here anyway

Now I just need to get around to tweaking some more stuff in windows 7 with the guide on the ocz forum.

Broken Hope · 16 Sep 2010

R5GTT said:
Yes thanks, and cheers for the advice. I know these drives should be benched with ATTO really and I am happy with the reults I get with it (284MB/s Read and 276MB/s Write) from my other thread here are my CrystalDiskMark and Atto results with AHCI setup correctly, better than the 180MB/s mentioned in my OP here anyway

Now I just need to get around to tweaking some more stuff in windows 7 with the guide on the ocz forum.

Be careful using CDM a lot to bench a Sandforce based drive, you can cause your write performance to drop low permanently unless a secure erase is performed.

R5GTT · 16 Sep 2010

Broken Hope said:
Be careful using CDM a lot to bench a Sandforce based drive, you can cause your write performance to drop low permanently unless a secure erase is performed.

Yep I know, I Secure erased the drive (HDD Erase) before a fresh install because I didn't know this before and this time only ran it once and then left it a while logged off for garbage collection to do its thing.

ATTO is the best way to bench these drives isnt it?

Broken Hope · 16 Sep 2010

I wouldn't really say ATTO was the best way to bench them, it will show you performance pretty much equal to what OCZ advertise, because ATTO uses easily compressable data which the Sandforce controllers like. In the real world however, not all data is compressable, e.g videos, installers etc. With harder to compress data the actual performance of the drive will be a lot lower than advertised.

Hammering the drive with hard to compress data can quickly cause the performance of the drive to drop and it won't be able to recover itself.

Look at these 2 posts on the OCZ forums, it's a bit extreme but it shows how badly these drives can be degraded and not be able to recover themselves at all

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...else-Sandforce&p=540933&viewfull=1#post540933

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...else-Sandforce&p=540936&viewfull=1#post540936