Solid state drive reading at half the advertised speed but writing

[bliss421]

Just bought an ssd about 3 or 4 days ago and only ran the benchmarks now and noticed that is reading at about half of what it should be while it is writing at the advertised speeds. I have made sure it is in AHCI mode as well as made sure it is aligned. Any help would be appreciated before i RMA this back to newegg and hope for a better one. It is connected with a sata 3 6gb/s cable and the motherboard supports sata 3. it is a gigabyte ga-p55-ud4p and the SSD is a plextor m3 128gb

 

[nukemaster]

What OS?

Are you sure Trim is on?

What are you using to test the speeds?

If you hit a drive hard with lots of benchmarks it can effect its speed until trip or its own firmware has cleaned it up to restore performance.

 

[vollman1]

Is it plugged into a 6gb/s port on the mobo?

 

[bliss421]

It actually was plugged into a 3gb/s port and just plugged it into the 6gb port and its going a little faster now but still not what it is advertised at. was at about 250 before and now its 375 or so. The benchmarks im using are the ones that came on the cd included with the SSD, and that german one called An SSD Benchmark. OS is windows 7 64 bit and i have confirmed that trim is enabled. I'm thinking i might have to format the drive and reinstall windows because maybe it didnt use the right drivers since i was plugged into the wrong sata port. Or maybe i should put the mobo cd back in and itll update them? I noticed that when i plugged it into the other slot and put the computer back on it tried to install a bunch of stuff and it all passed except the very last condition of about 10 that said " Marvell 91xx config ATA device - no driver found ". Thanks for all the fast replies guys, much appreciated.

 

[vollman1]

Did the Plextor need a firmware update?

Update your Marvell drivers

 

[bliss421]

the plextor firmware is up to date and i just updated my marvell drivers and it didnt increase the speeds

 

[vollman1]

Did updating the Marvell drivers eliminate the "no driver found" error?

 

[bliss421]

when i check in device manager there is still the yellow caution sign thing under the other devices tab with Marvell 91xx ATA Device, so i dont think so.

 

[vollman1]

I think that you have to remove the controller in device manager then load the new drivers. But, we need a second opinion on this.

 

[bliss421]

thanks alot for the help vollman, hopefully someone will come and give one

 

[vollman1]

yw

 

[vollman1]

One more question: did you enable Marvell in your bios?

 

[bliss421]

ill check, i know i enabled the gsata and gsata ahci but i dont remember checking for anything to do with marvell controller. brb

 

[bliss421]

there isnt any option in bios to enable/disable the marvell controller so i assume its enabled

 

[vollman1]

do you have the latest drivers for the SSD?

 

[bliss421]

there arent any drivers for the ssd, only for the chipset on the mobo and thats updated

 

[vollman1]

Do you have any non Marvell 6gb/s ports? You should have 2 I think.

Plug into one of those and see if you get better results.

Edit: sometimes Marvell is a little 'funky'

 

[bliss421]

the error message saying marvell 91xx ata device driver not found isnt coming up any more

 

[vollman1]

Still try the other non Marvell port.

 

[bliss421]

thats the one i changed from that caused it to jump by about 100 mb/s. they only go 3gb/s as opposed to the marvell ones at 6gb/s

 

[RetiredChief]

Advertized performance and reviews for SATA III drives are based on (1) Drives is connected to an intel Sata III port and use iaSTor as the driver (msahci is close but slightly lower performance. (2) Normally based on benchmark using data that is readily compressable.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, But SATA III SSDs on gsata and marel based controler (Especially the older marvel controller) come out on the short end of the stick.

One bright spot - Don't sweat High Sequencial read/write performance to much as it does not translate tha well to improved performance for an OS + Program SSD - It's the Random 4 k read/writes that are important.

Bottom line, You can RAM it, but that's not going to change the performance, nore will switching brands make much difference.
Ignore the Benchmark (Hmm amoust like a BM movement) and go by your real life performance. When you upgrade the system you can brag about the BMs then.

 

[bliss421]

So do you think 375 is the highest ill be able to get on 500mb/s advertised speeds with this mobo? also the random 4k read/writes are awful. When i run An SSD Benchmark i get 40mb writes, 23mb reads for 4k and for 4k-64thrd i get 183 reads and 110 writes. also says my read access times are 0.121ms and write 0.086ms. Thanks again vollman and everyone else for helping

 

[vollman1]

yw I am glad we got someone else in here

 

[bliss421]

Best answer selected by bliss421.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey