General SSD Noob questions

[moomooman]

Hi,
I just purchased a Corsair Force3 120GB SSD and have some admittedly silly questions I havent found answers for yet.

I installed it in my Gigabyte EX58-UD3R board, which only has SATA2.

Ran several benchmarks, the initial numbers in "Bench Me" were about 150MB/s, which didnt seem great, my RAID0 drives benched higher.

I verified TRIM and AHCI were enabled from the command line and regedit.

Later in CrystalDiskMark it was showing 120MB/s. (I can post more detailed results later, in work at the moment).

So, have I screwed up my drive by running 3 or 4 benchmarks? Degraded performance? Or does TRIM eliminate the concern of slowing performance?

My real world performance is good, Windows boots before my TV even displays a picture! Pretty good, but I'm concerned that its underperforming or I've damaged it....

 

[tomatthe]

Try running ATTO and see what the numbers are.

http://www.attotech.com/products/product.php?sku=Disk_Benchmark

IMO the Corsair SSD's are beyond horrible, and would never purchase one again. I would very strongly consider returning it if possible.

http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=96333&page=1

37 page forum thread of people having issues with them. Perhaps the firmware updates fixes all the issues at some point.

 

[moomooman]

Thanks for your reply!

I will run that benchmark tonight and I will also have to figure out what firmware is on it.

We will see how it goes, thanks again!

 

[moomooman]

Heres my bench with Atto v.2.46

Looks like it reaching a plateau and stopping there...

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[moomooman]

Okay, in the hope that this might help someone else I'm posting these results.

My first test had been using the Gigabyte SATA2 controller. So I powered off and plugged the Corsair Force3 into the Intel ICH10R controller, I also had my two WD 500GB HDD in Raid 0 plugged in there too. I had the BIOS set for RAID which I read somewhere also allows ACHI commands to reach non-raid devices.

So on reboot I had my Raid 0 and Corsair 3 and saw a huge improvement in performance:



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

In future I'll check out updated drivers see if that can go up any further, if anyone can answer how often I need to wipe an SSD to keep it running well, or will TRIM take care of that on modern SSDs?

 

[tomatthe]

Yeah, that looks pretty spot on for Sata2 with an SSD. My Force 3 drive didn't last long enough to actually determine if it degraded over time, and how badly. I would just use it, and by the time it gets slower Win8 will be out and you will be re-installing most likely anyway.