Samsung 830 128GB SSD read/write speed slow

SimonT

SimonT

SimonT

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Joined
15 Jul 2012
Posts
21
Hi,

Just built a new PC for basic home use and i chose to use a SSD to boot the system with. The 830 was on offer so chose to use that.

Happy with the kit and how it all went together but after browsing this forum and others on the products i bought i thought i would see if i could check the speed it was working at by using ATTO benchmark.

It appears that it's not achieving even close to the advertised specs. The below pic is the SSD connected to Sata 2 port and AHCI enabled. The speeds really drop when it's connected to the Marvel controlled Sata 3 connection.

Samsung 128GB SSD 830 Desktop Series SATA 6Gb/s KIT with Norton Ghost
Samsung F3 Spinpoint 1TB secondary drive
Intel Pentium G840 2.80GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor
OCZ ZS Series 550W '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply
Gigabyte H61MA-D3V Intel H61 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard
OcUK GeForce GT 430 1024MB GDDR3 PCI-Express Graphics Card
BitFenix Merc Alpha Gaming Case
Kingston Blu 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX1600C9AD3B1K2/4G)
Samsung SH-S222BB/RSMS 22x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter


Any ideas as this is all new to me?

Untitled-1-6.jpg

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you wont get faster than that on sata2, your best bet is to try the marvel again but update the motherboard bios (will update marvel firmware) and try newer marvel drivers.

Even through those are not the full rated speeds of the drive, you are unlikely to see any real world difference between the speeds you are getting now and the full rated speed of the drive. It is nice to have stuff working properly though :(
 
Marvell isn't the best for high sequentials on sata 3 though it should beat sata 2 ports handily anyway. Not sure because no one really ever says if the Marvell ports are good or bad for 4kb random read/writes or not, either way the single most important metric for ssd performance is 4kb random read, you won't break 35mb's on any mobo with any drive currently, so far under sata 1 spec that sata 2/3 make little real world difference.

Bench with as ssd or crystal disk mark, atto is entirely useless, as ssd gives both info on alignment and driver being used which are really the two HUGE reasons for good or bad ssd performance so an AS SSD benchmark and posting the screenshot tells an awful lot.

Unaligned will kill performance(as ssd says good in green or bad in red for this), and if you're running IDE mode instead of AHCI or raid(which is ahci also) then you'll lose a lot of performance.

In reality that benchmark looks fine, there is likely nothing wrong, sata 2 is limited to about 275mb's real world with overheads taken into account so that is exactly what you should see, sata 3 would put the sequentials closer to 550mb/s reads but it really doesn't matter. 90-95% of computer usage isn't sequential, and the reason ssd's are fast isn't sequential, its 4kb read/writes.

Long before ssd's you could have 2 hdd's in raid with 200mb's sequentials no problem, yet a ssd limited to 80mb read/write blew it away, because the 4kb read/writes were 10 times faster.
 
are you sure ahci is enabled for the marvel controller? I wouldn't have thought it should say pciide - BAD.

it will likely have a separate ahci setting to the intel sata2 controller.
 
Kotu said:
are you sure ahci is enabled for the marvel controller? I wouldn't have thought it should say pciide - BAD.

it will likely have a separate ahci setting to the intel sata2 controller.
Click to expand...


Yes there is only one option to enable AHCI in the UEFI and it's set.
 
I went through the manual, there are 2 options.

Peripherals ->
Marvell ATA Controller Configuration (at the bottom) ->
GSATA Controller -> (IDE/AHCI/Raid)
 
Kotu said:
I went through the manual, there are 2 options.

Peripherals ->
Marvell ATA Controller Configuration (at the bottom) ->
GSATA Controller -> (IDE/AHCI/Raid)
Click to expand...

Well i never! I must have been in there about 7 or 8 times today and there is the option right down at the bottom. Thanks for taking the time to look for that.

I went in and switched it to AHCI which stops the pciide - BAD message. However, the read speeds are the only thing that increase when using SATA III. They go up to 350 and everything else is roughly the same.

I then switched it back over to SATA II and there has been a good bump in numbers all round so it seems that although, apparently, limiting it in SATA II it produces better numbers all round in ATTO, AS SSD and Crystal Disk Mark.

I've been spending a little time researching the Marvel 9172 chip and the consensus appears to be it's better off not using it and using the Intel chip.

Examples:

http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=100381

http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds#
"If you are using a SSD use the native Intel or AMD SATA 3Gb/s or SATA 6Gb/s ports, I advise that you do NOT use the Marvell or other 3rd party SATA ports for your SSD/HDD."
 
I really wouldn't be too fussed, Intel sata 2 looks better in terms of as ssd, but it rather stupidly marks the 4kb 64thread scores with far too much importance normally and you've got a bit of a burst/freak result there anyway which makes it think its a great drive :p Stick one of these drives in a server and you'll hit high depth queue no problem, home user with game/general windows/av usage and you'll rarely if every break 3 or 4, though it DOES increase speed and scales pretty well. I would imagine that AHCI on the marvell improves the 64thread score, the real life performance to take from those screen shots is, similar random read(most important) AHCI mode gives you command queuing and lets you send multiple requests at the same time and lets that 64 thread score go way up.

Reality is though as said that sata 2 score is overblown by a 64thread score you'll never achieve in real use(anywhere even near) and the ide version of the marvell is stunted by no queue depth improvement at all. I'd guess day to day(with marvel on ahci) you'd not see a huge difference but I'd go with the intel sata 2 ports for stability, support, drivers.

Just been upgrading some laptops with ssd's myself and finding it even worse than you, sata 2 in the "faster" laptop but the 830 ssd simply getting not very close to sata 2 reads/writes for sequential but the random read/writes are WAY below what the same drive gets in a desktop. Oh well, still WAY better than any hdd, makes the laptop almost usable now and with the price the Samsung 830's were going for, I wasn't spending more to get faster drives :)

Incidentally, that's why as ssd screenshots are good for diagnosing problems, as other users can quickly tell the Marvell controller was in the wrong mode or, if the bit below it was red we could see the drive wasn't aligned which tends to destroy write performance, random read/writes and high queue depth numbers pretty badly. Less of an issue now, xp/vista were a bit "meh" when it came to getting the drive aligned right, as were almost all imaging/cloning tools back then, these days a fresh install won't have an issue and a lot of cloning/imaging tools can deal with the alignment correctly.
 
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