Slowwww SSD need help please

[alrobichaud]

Hi folks. I have an OZC agility SATA III 120GB SSD and the read and write speeds are slow. I have AHCI enabled in the BIOS. I did change this after the OS install but I made the nescessary registry edit to enable it. I update my motherboards BIOS to v1502 which is the latest. I downloaded all of the latest drivers from the ASUS website for the motherboard. I updated the firmware on the SSD. I enable caching in the device manager and my SiSoftware Sandra score is still only 172.995MB/s. Any thoughts on what I may have missed? I also made sure that my ssd is plugged into SATA port 1 which is the 6GB/s port on the motherboard.

 

[RussK1]

Thanks for all the great info people. Based on all of the info provided plus reviews that I have read if I can manage to hit 400MB/s with ATTO then that is about as fast as I am going to see with the onboard marvell controller. In part due to the single pci-e lane of the onboard sata III controller with a max 500MB/s plus the marvell controller itself. So the marvel 9182 controller is supposed to have two dedicated pci-e lanes which apparently makes it run better than the 9128 controller. The asus rampage extreme III black edition has the 9182 controller and it is supposed to work pretty well according to what I have read though it does trail behind the native intel driver but not by much. So what if I had a pci-e raid card that had two dedicated pci-e lanes? I would think this would be a definite improvement on the single lane controller on my board. I think at 180MB/s, I must have the crappiest read speed of any SATAIII SSD out there for any platform.

I think I am going to cross my fingers and give the rocketraid 640 a try. If it sucks then I will just send it back to newegg. It is currently half price down from $180 to $90. There are actually a number of reviews from reputable sites that are all positive. One review from tweaktown( I think that is where I read it) shows single SATA II SSD's hitting 200+MB/s using hdtune and 300+ with a single SATA III drive.
It is supposed to be bootable out of the box and have two controllers each with two dedicated pci-e lanes and work well with a single SSD. I will post my results after I get it. If it sucks you can politley say I told you

I think it'll work out... good luck!

 

[alrobichaud]

SSDs do NOT like to have Benchmarks repeatably run - there performance will suffer, Must let trim and CG restore the drive.
If you follow my recommendation - Move it to the Intel SATA II port, I also recommend (a) Do a secure erease, B0 verify latest Firmware (I believe ir's 2.15), then re-install windows 7.

What if I made a back up disk image, erased the drive, verified the firmware and then used the disk image to restore windows? Reinstalling everything is going to be a huge pain in the rear end especially if you take into consideration the dozen or so games as well as applications on my data drive. I would rather use a back up than a fresh install if it will work just the same. I would consider a fresh install if I was having issues but everything is working perfectly aside from the slow data transfer rate of my SSD.

 

[RetiredChief]

If you can move it to the Intel sata II ports and boot to the drive - Yes You can do that.
If moving the drive over to the Intel sata II port and can not boot to the drive, then no as the Image will recreate the drive exactly as it currently is.

NOTE: once you have the SSD on the intel sata II port run AS SSD, just to verify A) driver If you have not loaded the intel driver it should show msahci (can load Intel RST drivere and it should switch msahci -> iaSTor. and B) will show if partition is correctly algined. (Do not need to run the Benchmarking part, just open the program) will see if I can find my shot of AS SSD and post.

 

[kovaxo]

i would just say save the 100$ of rocketraid 640 and sell your current mob and buy the G 1 sniper Gigabytes or the asus ones u mention up there , both have Marvell 9182 and they are as good as native intel sata 3

beside G1 Sniper has creative sound system and K2100 big foot network card so its win win

other wise listen to RetiredChief stick with the sata II ,,, all its matter is 4k ..
seq dose not matter that much

 

[alrobichaud]

I would prefer the asus board but they are both discontinued so finding a new one is extremely difficult. Also, the G1 sniper was $369 locally before it was discontinued. I contemplated getting it but I had to many issues with Gigabyte in the past. Where are you getting one for $175?

 

[kovaxo]

typed it wrong
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Gigabyte-X58-G1-SNIPER-Intel-1366-ATX-Motherboard-/360402179449?pt=UK_Motherboards_CPUs&hash=item53e9a4d579
G1 Sniper
@ 260$

 

[alrobichaud]

So with shipping I am still looking at over $300 but it is new which is nice. Gigabyte also warranties motherboards based on a date code in the serial number which is also nice but I think I am still going to go with the rocketraid 640. Besides I also have a couple of newegg gift cards that are going to expire in two months so the total is going to be less than $80 with shipping and taxes.

 

[kovaxo]

by the way internal card wont performance as the in chip ones .. beside RocketRaid 640 is marvell9128 too but x4 ... and its meant for Raid not just single drive
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2011/01/04/high-point-rocketraid-640-review/1
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/3309/highpoint_rocketraid_640_sata_6gb_s_4_port_pci_e_2_0_controller/index1.html

Read the two reviews above
beside you decide

-Best Regards

 

[alrobichaud]

Thanks for the links. I have read both of those reviews already. If you go to looking for info on the high point card they actually provide the tweak town review in PDF format. I had been doing some thinking and my 120GB SSD has a bit less than 20GB available space. The windows folder alone has over 70GB in it. I have been playing with the idea of getting another SSD and setting them up in RAID 0. One for increased performance and secondly for increased space. One of the concerns that I have is losing trim support which I have read that you lose with SSD's in RAID. The tweaktown review states

"Speaking of drivers, there is a huge debate going on in various SSD manufacturers forums over the Marvell drivers and their ability to pass along the TRIM command. In a point blank question to HighPoint I was told that the HighPoint 600 Series does pass along the TRIM command to the drives, even when used in a RAID 0
array. This is great news, but it is not the final say to the story at this time."

I can't find any solid tech details that state this from Highpoint. I also have a concern that POST times have increased by as much as 40 seconds for some people according to some of the reviews but these are only from user feedback reviews on sites like newegg. None of the legit reviews mention anything about a greatly increased POST time. I do like that I go from power on to full boot in 21 seconds. The other thought that I had was to use the SATA II controller for a RAID. I could still get increased perfromance with more space but it would not be as fast as the controller card. So many decisions! I think I will try out the card with a single drive and do some benchmarks for performance and boot times then put another OCZ agility 3 in RAID 0 and do the same thing again. I may also set it up with RAID 0 on the native SATA II controller and repeat the process. Why can't the answers to these questions be easier 🙁

 

[kovaxo]

yea that card rocks on small Raid Setup . but if you want to full boot in 21 sec or less then u looking for Raid Setup or some drive with High IOP's 85k+ Like samsung and m4 or maybe intel as well .... other wise aim to the big score and get one of OCZ RevoDrive 3
like http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227745
those is smoking fast

 

[kovaxo]

the one 240GB is 1500 MB read and 1200 MB write and up to 200k iops i think

 

[alrobichaud]

So I tried the rocketraid 640. My computer would freeze shortly after the windows logo appears with nothing connected to it. I tried with and without an ssd connected to the raid card. My test pc boots just fine with the rocketraid640. It has an ASUS maximus formula motherboard with win 7 64 bit pro. This is the same issue that all those people on newegg are complaining about. Anyway, going to send it back to newegg. I picked up a second ocz agility 3 so I can set up a raid on the sata II ports. It should work out better than a single drive on the SATA III port and I will double my storage capacity. I will post my results.

 

[alrobichaud]

So a RAID 0 on the SATA II ports is much better than a single SSD on the SATA III marvel controller. I am very happy with these results.


First pick is single drive on SATA III marvel controller and second pick is RAID 0 on Intel SATA II controller.

 

[RussK1]

Nice! BTW, Intel is going to be releasing RST that supports TRIM on RAID 0.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Intel-RST-SSD-TRIM-RAID,14048.html