Slow SSD speeds.

Energize

Energize

Energize

Caporegime
Joined
12 Mar 2004
Posts
29,960
Location
England
I have just installed win 7 pro 64 on my Crucial C300 60GB SSD and got these paltry results.

attobench.png


It's as though it's SATA I, but my Asus P5N-E SLI only has SATA II ports. Can't see any options restricting it's speed in the BIOS, any ideas as to why it's so slow?
 
Download AS SSD and run that, my guess will be you're in IDE mode rather than AHCI, in as ssd it will normally say ide, or achi as which mode the drive is in, it will likely also give you a green number with ok writen next to it, or red number with bad. Its the indication off the offset, windows 7 as default "should" align it correctly, but there are ways for it to not be aligned.

Write speeds are as they should be, the 64gb is half the speed of the 128mb drive, which is slower than the 256gb drive. Read speeds should be 300mb/s+ on sata 3, less on sata 2, what motherboard do you have, its likely an older mobo. Go with manufacturer's site and look up your mobo and its downloads/drivers, get the latest ones. I'm not actually sure what read speeds you can expect overall on a sata 2 controller, and assuming your mobo is quite old, a fairly new sata 2 mobo, as in, early implementation of sata 2, maxing out sata 2 bandwidth(220-240mb's) might not be possible either.

Don't worry about that too much, the two things SSD's do best isn't the pretty, high looking sequential speeds, they mean very little, its the random read/write, the latency and the way they work so well in threaded random read/write, those aren't really effected by the top sequential speeds in the slightest. However Crucial's controller is horrible when its not aligned, you're talking 50%+ slower than it should be.

If you didn't set AHCI in the bios before installing windows, to enable AHCI mode you'd need to change a couple settings in the registry, reboot, flick to AHCI mode in the bios and windows will install a default AHCI driver, that works pretty well on Intel chipsets anyway so you might not need an Intel driver at that point.
 
Yes latest version. I remember my previous cheapo asrock motherboard supporting this option. **** you Asus with your useless pos motherboards, featureless and overpriced with terrible overclocking performance, you piece of ****.
 
Last edited:
Raid will use AHCI, though I haven't seen a mobo without the AHCI option in, a LONG time now. Its not always obvious, storage controller option, sometimes its a third party controller option. Raid WILL use ahci though for any drive not connected as a raid drive, and for raid volumes aswell so just choose raid, though I'm not at all sure that the registry option for ahci will work if you switch the bios to raid mode.

Its aligned, which is good, did AS SSD not run? hit the start button to run the benchmark and show the scores, its possible for atto to just not show great numbers. IIRC ATto shows the best case scenarios when the data is compressable, OCZ drives run heavy compression algorithms to condence the writing and increase speed so highly compressible data will write faster than non compressible data, while on Crucial, and Indilinx drives IIRC, they don't compress the data so won't always show the best performance in certain benchmarks. Atto is fairly unrealistic to "real world" performance these days, but most benchmarking is :p

AS SSD is pretty good for a range of performance info, I'm not sure what driver nvstor refers to, ide or raid/ahci driver as I've not used an Nvidia mobo in a freaking age.

Also, do you know which port the drive is on, performance would usually be better on the main controller as opposed to a secondary controller run off the pci bus. INfact, that is exactly what it looks like on second thoughts, pci bus will limit a hdd to 133mb/s if I'm remembering right.

Again, its been an age since I ran anything off a controller on an old chipset or anything running on a pci bus. That would explain the benchmark spot on actually, pci bus limiting the read beyond 130mb/s, and write can't go beyond 70mb's on the 64gb model, if the 4k and 4k-64 thread read/writes are spot on, its probably running fine, not the best it can but still good.
 
The ssd is connected to sata port 0 on the motherboard, speaking of pci, could I get a sata 3 pci-e adaptor?

I'll do some more checks tomorrow, I'm booted from my hdd at the moment.
 
Last edited:
Energize said:
The ssd is connected to sata port 0 on the motherboard, speaking of pci, could I get a sata 3 pci-e adaptor?

I'll do some more checks tomorrow, I'm booted from my hdd at the moment.
Click to expand...

hehe, would help if you said the mobo, honestly I can't picture what mobos were around when the Q6600 was out and what chipset you have. NVidia are weird with chipsets, I'm thinking that honestly it should be more than new enough to not suck so many balls and have the controller tied to pci bus, but they've done some weird things over the years.
 
What's the motherboard?

It will depend on the chipset whether the board supports AHCI (and thus not ASUS's fault if it doesn't*), if it's a P5K series board for example it'll support it fine as I've fitted a number of them (in about 4 variants from the cheapest to the most expensive DDR2 one), and they've all supported AHCI.


*I have vague memories of AHCI being relatively new when the Q6600's were newish, thus older boards or cheaper non intel chipset ones probably didn't support it.
 
A quick google suggests that that is an Nvidia based board, and Nvidia didn't implement AHCI in that series of motherboard chipsets but did some of the main features in their own way (one of the reasons I've avoided Nvidia and Via since about 2004).

Which unfortunately means it's a hardware issue with the chipset.
 
Don't know how I missed the mobo name at the top, going blind.

Assuming Werewolf is right(probably is, Nvidia always do weird things compared to everyone else), then you might have issues with a pci-e raid card/controller aswell, it would depend on the link between north/southbridge probably and I can't remember enough about it to know.

But like I said, the "main" reasons SSD's are fast are the random and random threaded small file reads and the latency, people get misled by the big sequential numbers, but if you limited every one of the best ssd's to 150mb read/rights you'd barely notice it.

If performance is stunted in random performance, or high latency, then I'd look up some asus/nvidia forums and see what the opinion is on a pci-e controller removing the bottleneck, could well work.
 
As said previously, switching the controller into RAID mode might increase performance as RAID mode on Intel based controllers have the same features with the addition of RAID as running in straight ACHI mode so you might benefit on your nvidia based board too.
 
I've enabled raid mode on the mobo, but do I need to enable raid for the drive as well, also do I need to alter anything in the registry etc?

If I need to change motherboard, which would you recommend? Overclocking ability would be nice too, unlike this pos motherboard.
 
This is the as ssd benchmark.

asssdbench.png


Looks like OCUK don't stock any ahci motherboards so I'll have to look elsewhere.
 
Last edited:
Energize said:
This is the as ssd benchmark.

asssdbench.png


Looks like OCUK don't stock any ahci motherboards so I'll have to look elsewhere.
Click to expand...

That score looks pretty respectable to be honest. I have an Asus Maximum Formula, and it supports AHCI and the drives are working at rated speed. (Vertex 2E)

I'm sure there are plenty others however.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom