Disappointing 80GB X25-M G2 performance

[Pollock]

I've been running an 80GB X25-M as my main drive for a month now, but I just can't say I'm impressed with it. I made sure to flash the latest firmware at the time to get TRIM (which Win7 confirms is enabled), but it's not at all what I was expecting.

Still takes like 90 seconds to boot to the desktop, although it is usable much more quickly than before. It doesn't feel really any more fluid. Probably most frustrating of all, is that it still stutters occasionally. I thought this wasn't supposed to be an issue?

I don't really know how best to test it, but here's a quick run on HD Tune:

Should I feel better about my investment? Was I expecting too much? It's just, Anand said this is the single best upgrade you can make, but I haven't been really noticing it.

 

[MagickMan]

I hear that from others too, they are less than impressed w/ SSD given all the hype.

 

[jimhsu]

Questions:

- Fresh install or image?
- AHCI or IDE (post benchmark scores)?
- How much free space is left?
- Have you tried going back to a regular hard drive and noting the differences?
- Apps? My firefox does stutter, but that's probably because I have 200MB of history and firefox just isn't very fast anymore with the latest versions.

The only benchmark that "matters": http://alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/downloads.php?cat_id=4

 

[rcpratt]

Something definitely isn't right with yours. Posting your AS SSD benchmark would help, as jimhsu said.

My firefox occasionally stutters as well, but that's just because it's bloated and I have too many apps.

 

[Emulex]

so what is not fast? benchmark queen numbers or your pc in general?

i can understand you want to post a great graph for everyone to see for that money but honestly your machine is hella faster now? or you setup something wrong .

i have installed X25-V, X25-M 80gb ,x25-m 160gb,x18-m 80gb and x18-m 160gb (ALL G2!!) and they are all awesome in their enviroment. the x18-m rocks out in small form factor laptops gotta love schwag

all make a pc stupid fast - but you still have to follow basic rules, ahci, partition alignment, keeping things clean (temp/cache/history).

i've seen some dumb things slow down SSD like a cheap sata cable - don't rule out the obvious

 

[Hey Zeus]

90 seconds to boot to a destop with a .1 access time and a fast processor = Something very wrong.

My old patriot el cheapo SSD would boot windows in 7 seconds with dual 3.8Ghz P4 Xeon's. Do a fresh install. Maybe you have too much crap loading at startup

 

[Emulex]

x25-V 8 seconds for unaligned XP boot on old core 2 e4300 to domain login prompt - a few more seconds for apps to all load (lots) - suprisingly about 1 second behind the big boi x25-m

 

[bob4432]

sorry, but i feel it is extremely ignorant to base a pc's performance on how fast it boots - ridiculous. that being said, 90sec is quite the amount of time. what was it before you moved from your old hdd?

as for how the hdd performs - the amount of random access you do the better the drive will show its real performance. if you just boot up, hit up firefox and that is it, well, probably not that big of a difference since few files are actually being moved into ram.

take that same machine, start a lot of apps and you should notice a difference.

basically it depends on how you use your computer - less random/hard use = less perceived performance. i am not a anand fan boy but he is correct - the hdd is the single slowest point in a computer (for the most part and if all other components are of the same generation and approx perf value) and when moving from a rotational hdd to a ssd, yes, this will be the largest improvement possible when you look at the numbers, but if you rarely access anything, it is kind of a moot point.

fwiw, i have a "old" ocz ssd - 30GB (no cache) that is in my htpc and it is a snappy machine even compared to 15k scsi drives which i have used for many, many years in all my builds. personally just waiting for 80GB ssds to come down a bit and replace all the 15k drives w/ ssds

 

[Pollock]

I don't care at all about graphs, I just wasn't sure if it would be an indicator if something was wrong. I just was expecting it to "wow" me but it hasn't so far.

Questions:

- Fresh install or image?
- AHCI or IDE (post benchmark scores)?
- How much free space is left?
- Have you tried going back to a regular hard drive and noting the differences?
- Apps? My firefox does stutter, but that's probably because I have 200MB of history and firefox just isn't very fast anymore with the latest versions.

The only benchmark that "matters": http://alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/downloads.php?cat_id=4

The 90 seconds was including BIOS, etc. (~30 seconds if I had to guess), but yeah, it totally didn't seem right to me. I almost want to say that's what it was before (but it wasn't immediately usable with my WD drive).

It is a fresh install of Win7 x64 Pro, and I think I correctly changed the targets of my libraries, etc. to my WD drive.

It is set to AHCI (that's what it should be, right?), and I'll get on that benchmark. 25.9 GB free.

At startup I automatically run Thunderbird, Trillian, and Steam (and antivirus). Shouldn't be a big deal, right?

My main browser is Opera and I do admittedly use a TON of tabs (60+ tabs per window, but only one window right now). *shrug*

I don't know anything about alignment or how to check it.

 

[Pollock]

How should I interpret these results?

 

[bob4432]

60 tabs....good lord - do you go to any 'questionable' sites? possible virus?

 

[Pollock]

60 tabs....good lord - do you go to any 'questionable' sites? possible virus?

No, I am smart about my browsing. Besides, that's what Ubuntu is for. :hmm:

 

[zuffy]

You have poor seq write and 4k-64thrd write. That is probably due to the 25.9GB diskspace free.

Have you tried to run the Intel Optimizer?

 

[Pollock]

Also, I've been doing some editing with paint.net (basically photoshop) and it runs like poop. Yeah, I have like 40+ layers, but most are very simple, and it's only like 800x800 pixels, and my processor is still really great. What is wrong?

You have poor seq write and 4k-64thrd write. That is probably due to the 25.9GB diskspace free.

Have you tried to run the Intel Optimizer?

Part of the toolbox, right? I will give it a try.

 

[jjmIII]

I'll agree, the hype is greater than the tech.....but I also like this comment:

Questions:
- Have you tried going back to a regular hard drive and noting the differences?

 

[bob4432]

I'll agree, the hype is greater than the tech.....but I also like this comment:

for all you guys that think this, i will gladly take these "slow" ssds off your hands for cheap, you know, just because they aren't working for you

 

[Zap]

The 90 seconds was including BIOS, etc. (~30 seconds if I had to guess), but yeah, it totally didn't seem right to me. I almost want to say that's what it was before (but it wasn't immediately usable with my WD drive).
...
At startup I automatically run Thunderbird, Trillian, and Steam (and antivirus). Shouldn't be a big deal, right?

I think you're expecting too much because powering on the system and booting into Windows is not purely reading off the drive, as you are aware with your 30 second POST. The time it takes Windows to boot can vary greatly depending on what drivers it has to load, what hardware is in your system, what software starts up automatically and probably a lot of other stuff. I had one system take an extra 30-60 seconds to boot into Windows just from a certain PCI controller card in the system combined with that particular motherboard. That card didn't cause Windows to take longer to boot on another motherboard and that motherboard without the PCI card did not take longer to boot.

I've had the chance to play with an overclocked Core i7 975 setup with 12GB RAM and two Indilinx based SSDs in RAID0 running a fresh install of Windows 7. Bootup still took a long time and most things wasn't that different from before... until you did something that was normally pretty disk intensive which did not need to wait for anything else, and you go, "wow, that was fast." For instance, installing 3DMark Vantage was a lot faster because it is a 400-500GB single downloadable file that has to uncompress into the temp folder (I'm guessing) before installing into Program Files. The progress bars for those operations usually take a while because you are reading and writing to the same drive at the same time. On the RAID0 SSDs it was fast enough to go "wow!" Of course starting up 3DMark Vantage after it was installed didn't seem a huge amount faster, probably because it still has to scan your system before the software finishes starting up.

To best show what you gained from the SSD, you have to take it away. Clone your current install onto a normal 7200RPM HDD and you'll notice the difference.

It's like driving on the highway. Speed up from 60MPH to 80MPH and you'll feel as if you're only going a tad faster, but after driving for a while at 80MPH, if you have to slow down to 60MPH, OMG it feels like you're going slow!

 

[MagickMan]

for all you guys that think this, i will gladly take these "slow" ssds off your hands for cheap, you know, just because they aren't working for you

I didn't say it's bad, it's just over-hyped. It is faster, but it's not going to make you freak out like when you got your first real 3D card or multi-core CPU.

 

[rcpratt]

The sequential writes are way too low for an X25-M too, aren't they? Should be at least 70 GB/s. Most X25-M's score in the 400 range on that bench. Not really sure what could be causing that, though.

Interesting how people are split on SSDs. I think the change was every bit as big as my first multi-core CPU. Guess it just depends how you use it.

 

[Engineer]

installing 3DMark Vantage was a lot faster because it is a 400-500GB single downloadable file that has to uncompress into the temp folder (I'm guessing) before installing into Program Files.

:biggrin:

 

[CurseTheSky]

Hmm.

I have two X-25M G2s - an 80GB in my desktop, and a 160GB in my laptop. The 160GB feels extremely fast, but then again I spend more time booting and shutting down my notebook than I do my desktop (I restart my desktop maybe once a week, tops). The 80GB feels a bit lackluster in comparison, but I do have secondary HDDs installed for my games, media, etc. so not everything is running off of the SSD.

Here's my performance results:

Notice that mine scores lower for both reads and writes, but it appears to be mostly better across the board with the exception of 4k-64 thread reads and 4k writes?

As you can see, I have a significant amount of free space available:

 

[PUN]

It's the same dumb people who claims the SSD will increase your boot time by 10-100 folds, give hype about the general SSD performance.

Here are few facts,
1)SSD is definitely faster than a conventional 7200rpm drives, but it's not much noticeable to 90% of users out there. If you are using your PC for browsing, movies, home photo editing, encoding/decoding, you won't see much difference between the two drives

2)SSD helps the boot time but may not change at all. If your boot time was slowed by Antivirus/malware, 100's of startups, then SSD definitely helps. Otherwise your boot time may still be the same. Most importantly, it depends on which bios/mobo you are running.

3)I've never heard of any stuttering issues with Intel G2. I've never encountered one either. It maybe be some of your I/O issues. I'd update all the drivers.

 

[taltamir]

- Have you tried going back to a regular hard drive and noting the differences?

This is so so true...
When I got used to it I started to think of it as "not that fast"... it took a week... but now if I try to use a spindle drive I cry at how slow it is.

Most of the boot time has to do with your mobo bios... there is certainly a lot of hype there as HDD can only improve so much there. (and AHCI increases the bios load time only to decrease windows load). In my system boot time didn't change much. sure the time it takes windows itself to load once the bios is done is a lot better, but the total time isn't that great.

Something I have noticed is amazingly faster is program installation, particularly windows updates. as well as the operation of certain programs which depend on the HDD's speed.

 

[Emulex]

if you watch your ssd booting you notice it pauses for a second? must be windows thinking or plug n playing then it continues to boot. at least one of the 7 seconds seems to be without disk activity. maybe with SP1 they will improve that.

 

[sgaliger]

Without getting into the argument of is it worth it, have you downloaded the Intel SSD Toolbox?
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/T8Clearance.aspx?sType=&agr=Y&ProductID=&DwnldID=18455&url=/18455/eng/Intel%20SSD%20Toolbox%20-%20v1.2.0.000.msi&PrdMap=&strOSs=&OSFullName=〈=eng

You need to install this and run it once a week. I got similar scores in the mid-300's on my X25M and running the optimization got them back to 420 or so. This is the "toolbox" and not the firmware.

Performancewise, the disk kick's ass in the right situations. Installing new programs is lightning quick. Other tasks will vary on processor, memory etc. depending what is using them. But I certainly wouldn't go back.

Hope this helps.