Marvell 9128 SSD issue

[phil128]

This is driving me nuts. I've bought two corsair ssd force GT's, hooked them upto the sata 3 controller and I'm getting crap speeds.
I've installed the sata 3 driver too.

HD tune professional reports:

READ: 281MB/Second
WRITE: 132MB/Second

My drives are supposed to run about 500MB/Second

Any help please?

 

[nnorton44]

Are you running them in RAID?

 

[phil128]

Nope.

I've just finished installing a fresh copy of Windows 7. I've installed my SATA drivers.
I've just finished running ATTO. These are my results:

My write speeds are rubbish.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Did you go into the system BIOS and set it to AHCI mode prior to installing Windows 7?

Which motherboard do you have?

 

[phil128]

Did you go into the system BIOS and set it to AHCI mode prior to installing Windows 7?

Which motherboard do you have?

Yes they're in AHCI mode.

I'm using an Asus maximus extreme 3 motherboard.

Should these write speeds be that slow?

 

[Mugsy]

I just installed this same drive using an ASM1061 x1 card and am getting roughly the same result.

I don't THINK it is the drive because I got much better Write speeds using the MoBo's own Sata-II ports.

It is interesting though that we're seeing roughly the same speeds on the same drive with different Sata-III controllers.

Are you using a card or the "onboard" Sata ports?

(PS: Try using the MS driver instead of the supplied driver. My Read speeds improved by about 2%.)

 

[phil128]

I just installed this same drive using an ASM1061 x1 card and am getting roughly the same result.

I don't THINK it is the drive because I got much better Write speeds using the MoBo's own Sata-II ports.

It is interesting though that we're seeing roughly the same speeds on the same drive with different Sata-III controllers.

Are you using a card or the "onboard" Sata ports?

(PS: Try using the MS driver instead of the supplied driver. My Read speeds improved by about 2%.)

Hi. I'm using the on-board sata (marvell) 3 ports

 

[Mugsy]

I'm getting crap speeds.

No sooner than I posted my reply did I find a solution.

For others suffering from the same problem... miserable Write speeds with your SSD in Win7... simply go into the Device Manager and disable "Write caching" on the "Policies" tab for your SSD.

More than TRIPLED my Write speed and even gave my Read speeds a tiny boost!

"Write caching" is not needed with an SSD.

 

[phil128]

No sooner than I posted my reply did I find a solution.

For others suffering from the same problem... miserable Write speeds with your SSD in Win7... simply go into the Device Manager and disable "Write caching" on the "Policies" tab for your SSD.

More than TRIPLED my Write speed and even gave my Read speeds a tiny boost!

"Write caching" is not needed with an SSD.

I haven't tried this.

Although, I'm now using the native Intel Sata 2 ports and the write speeds are ALOT faster than my SATA 3 ports.

 

[CaedenV]

There are a ton of SSD optomizations and things to do to possibly extend the life of the drive. You should also make sure that you have the latest firmawre for your mobo, chipset, and SSD. Many times there are little fixes in there to help with such problems. You should have ~4-500MB/s reads on these drives if you are on a SATA3 controller.

 

[groberts101]

don't hold your breath on achieving top speed on that controller due to the INTERNAL PCI-E x1 lane restriction.

It runs 1 Sandforce 6G drive at not much more than 400/250 and 2 in raid can cause all sorts of issues and even slower speeds as the chip gets loaded up. Some mfgrs even have disclaimers for boards using those Marvell chips that tell the user it is not intended for SSD raid.

You'll need to get a newer native 6G mobo(Intel or AMD).. or a raidcard starting at around $200 to see max speed potential with those drives.

 

[Mugsy]

No one should expect full 6.0MB/s speeds from a card in a 5.0MB/s slot.

But a $15 card that takes me from 274MB/s Reads & 241MB/s Writes, to 406MB/s Reads and 335MB/s Writes is more than worth the money until I can afford a new MoBo with native Sata-III ports.

 

[phil128]

don't hold your breath on achieving top speed on that controller due to the INTERNAL PCI-E x1 lane restriction.

It runs 1 Sandforce 6G drive at not much more than 400/250 and 2 in raid can cause all sorts of issues and even slower speeds as the chip gets loaded up. Some mfgrs even have disclaimers for boards using those Marvell chips that tell the user it is not intended for SSD raid.

You'll need to get a newer native 6G mobo(Intel or AMD).. or a raidcard starting at around $200 to see max speed potential with those drives.

Could you recommend me a raid card? I guess I need my motherboard to boot off the PCI bus too? I don't it can do that. I might be able to get around this buy installing Linux (I have this anyway) and then get that to boot Windows 7 off the PCI bus.

 

[phil128]

No one should expect full 6.0MB/s speeds from a card in a 5.0MB/s slot.

But a $15 card that takes me from 274MB/s Reads & 241MB/s Writes, to 406MB/s Reads and 335MB/s Writes is more than worth the money until I can afford a new MoBo with native Sata-III ports.

What device did you buy?

Thanks.

 

[groberts101]

if you can't boot from a raidcard?.. then it would be a no-go.

If you have enough ram on the system?.. give Fancycache by Romex a try. It can help to reduce writes to the drive and leverages system ram to be used as disk cache for redundantly used data. Ram is far faster than any SSD if the app will merge into your workflow the way you need it to.

http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/

 

[Mugsy]

I purchased an ASMedia ASM1061 Sata-III pcie x1 card off eBay for $14.95 (shipped from China) and free shipping to use with my Corsair Force GT 120MB drive on my Gigabyte MA790GS-DS4H motherboard with Phenom II X4 920 cpu.

My next purchase is looking to be a USB 3.0 card. But I'm holding off until I have some 3.0 devices.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Slapping myself upside the head for not catching it earlier!

You've got an older motherboard with an Intel P55 chipset that does not support SATA 3 6GB/s performance levels. The motherboard does have a Marvel controller added in that supposedly supports SATA 3 6GB/s performance but it is not very good.

Try using the Intel SATA 2 3Gb/s controller. That should boost performance enough to keep you going until you can get a new motherboard.

 

[phil128]

if you can't boot from a raidcard?.. then it would be a no-go.

If you have enough ram on the system?.. give Fancycache by Romex a try. It can help to reduce writes to the drive and leverages system ram to be used as disk cache for redundantly used data. Ram is far faster than any SSD if the app will merge into your workflow the way you need it to.

http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/

What the hell!!!!!

3.5GB a second!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is crazy!!

I've got 8GB of dominator, so I'm loving this!

Thank you sooooooo much!

Rep+=1000

 

[groberts101]

Johnny has a very good point there guys. Those who chase tall sequential speeds are usually not aware of what they are giving up when using these sorts of cards.

Even the measily Intel ports have better write speeds with INCOMPRESSIBLE/RANDOM data(such as vids/pics/music or benchmarks that use similar data to test with) than those cards do. Latency is usually slightly better as well. Not to mention, ram caching is seamless and has been refined over many generations by now.

Look at it like this. Where does the OS live most of the time? It is NOT in the sequentials. OS drives are all about randoms and latency and onboard beats those economical solutions every time.

Plus.. and not many realize this.. do you have another storage drive that can make use of those taller sequentials from that card? Because if you don't?.. you'll never realize the benefit in actual transfers while you're bottlenecked by the storage drives R/W speeds. You cannot write data to the SSD any faster than it can be read.. and conversely never read data from the storage faster than it's read capabilities will allow. You'll still be waiting just the same while the data is transfered over to the SSD and only then can you read the data at benchmark speeds.

Hardly worth all the e-peen'ing hubub when you consider that we don't wait for reads on an SSD anyways. And that would be regardless of whether it reads at 200MB/s or 400MB/s. It's the writes that we wait for and you'll never see those anyways until you get raided HDD storage to make use of it.