mSATA SSD in an AMD system

[undelete]

Hello,

I bought a new SSD for my Acer W501 tablet computer, but it seems slow to me. It is an AMD x86 based Windows tablet computer with a AMD C50 Fusion-CPU (dual core, 2x 1GHz). I am using Windows 8.1 Pro (32bit) on it. The chipset of the device is an A50M. The only information I found about the southbridge, is: "AMD A40/A50 Series FCH 40". It comes with a 32GB SanDisk mSATA SSD. I use the tablet to look at my digital photos and 32GB are not enough space for some sets of DSLR pictures. So I bought a 128GB SanDisk mSATA SSD (SanDisk X110 - SD6SF1M-128G-1022 - Firmware: X231200). As it is connected to an AMD SATA controller, I use the Microsoft Standard SATA-AHCI-Controller Driver. As I read on another page, TRIM does not work with the AMD Drivers on older controllers, because it is not supported by the hardware. The Microsoft driver uses TRIM in a software mode. AHCI is activated and I did a fresh installation of Windows, it is not cloned from another drive. All Windows Updates are installed, I copied 10GB of photos to the drive and I have only installed a browser and an email program yet.

The results of the AS SSD Benchmark:
Seq: read 428,48MB/s - write 262,37MB/s
4K: read 8,00MB/s - write 12,58MB/s
4K-64: read 617,76MB/s - write 59,91MB/s
Acc.time: read0,323ms - write 0,345ms
Score: read 669 - write 99 - over all score: 1097

The over all score does not look bad, but 4K seems very slow to me. I also tried the AMD controller driver, but with that I got a 4K read of about 3,5MB/s and an overall score of 150.
I do not want the highest benchmark scores, the problem is photos are loading very slow. Getting the Windows File Explorer working takes a while, the symbols of the files need some time to load and I have to wait till I am allowed to do anything, otherwise it just won't react.

Does anyone have a suggestion?

Thank you and kind regards
undelete

 

[alexruiz]

Hi there,
welcome to the forums and congratulations on the world cup championship!

How much RAM do you have in the system?
The c-50 is slow, but the SSD should speed the machine by a lot so I suspect you are short in RAM.
Now, what version of the AMD driver did you use?

My take on the MS driver vs AMD driver is very simple: AMD driver all the way. No site has tested AHCI performance on a SB700 / SB750 or newer chipset with the latest catalyst drivers in years. Cat 13.2 AHCI was already better than the MS driver, and that catalyst is old, there are at least 3 major revisions since then. All what you will find on the web about "AMD driver is awful" was done on much older drivers. I say install the latest cat 14.4 AHCI, see how you like it.


Alex

 

[VirtualLarry]

My take on the MS driver vs AMD driver is very simple: AMD driver all the way. No site has tested AHCI performance on a SB700 / SB750 or newer chipset with the latest catalyst drivers in years. Cat 13.2 AHCI was already better than the MS driver, and that catalyst is old, there are at least 3 major revisions since then. All what you will find on the web about "AMD driver is awful" was done on much older drivers. I say install the latest cat 14.4 AHCI, see how you like it.

My experience is that the MS AHCI driver is much more compatible, and allows reading SMART data using, for example, HDTune, while the AMD driver will not.

I avoid AMD's proprietary AHCI driver as much as possible.

My understanding was that it had issues with TRIM as well.

 

[Cerb]

Something is not right, there, and it may not be the SSD.

4K-64: read 617,76MB/s

That is impossible. SATA maxes out at 6Gbps, with 8b/10b encoding, making for an even 600MBps. Then, there's the overhead for ATA itself. Sequential reads over ~550MBps are pretty much impossible over SATA 6Gbps.

Does the SSD also feel slow?

 

[Elixer]

My experience is that the MS AHCI driver is much more compatible, and allows reading SMART data using, for example, HDTune, while the AMD driver will not.

I avoid AMD's proprietary AHCI driver as much as possible.

My understanding was that it had issues with TRIM as well.

Hmm, I have never seen a case where AMD's AHCI drivers won't read SMART data, and I haven't seen issues with TRIM.
(The driver just passes the TRIM command to the SSD, so, what is there to have "issues" about ?)

For what it is worth, AMD's AHCI drivers are pretty solid these days.

 

[Towermax]

My experience is that the MS AHCI driver is much more compatible, and allows reading SMART data using, for example, HDTune, while the AMD driver will not.

That may be a problem with HDTune, not with the AMD AHCI driver. Samsung Magician, Speedfan, and CrystalDiskInfo provide full SMART info using the AMD AHCI driver.

I have the AMD AHCI driver on both AMD systems in my sig, and it works perfectly. Last time I tested it on the 970A system, the AMD driver was slightly faster than the Microsoft driver.

 

[undelete]

Thank you all for your help and thanks for the congratulations. But I did not do much, that we won the world cup.

Yes the AMD C50 is slow, it is a competition to the Intel Atom, but for looking at some pictures it was allways ok. I installed the most recent AMD driver (amd_sata), when I tried it. It was the 14.4. To show you the results, I reinstalled it now. The benchmark now looks like:

The results of the AS SSD Benchmark with the AMD driver (amd_sata):
Seq: read 308,37MB/s - write 250,22MB/s
4K: read 7,48MB/s - write 11,85MB/s
4K-64: read 311,75MB/s - write 26,72MB/s
Acc.time: read 0,391ms - write 0,433ms
Score: read 350 - write 64 - over all score: 590

The results of the AS SSD Benchmark with the reselected Microsoft driver (storahci):
Seq: read 391,37MB/s - write 269,63MB/s
4K: read 9,29MB/s - write 16,77MB/s
4K-64: read 589,05MB/s - write 55,93MB/s
Acc.time: read 0,0,275ms - write 0,249ms
Score: read 637 - write 100 - over all score: 1054

SMART data are set as "Not Available" in the "SanDisk SSD Toolkit", with both drivers. One problem is, I am not allowed to change the harddrive setting in the bois of the Acer W501. It just does not show any options.

Thank you
undelete

 

[undelete]

Does the SSD also feel slow?

I do not want the highest benchmark scores, the problem is photos are loading very slow. Getting the Windows File Explorer working takes a while, the symbols of the files need some time to load and I have to wait till I am allowed to do anything, otherwise it just won't react

It does feel slow.

undelete

 

[Cerb]

OK. Now, just to be sure, AS-SSD does have green text for the alignment, right? That would be an obvious thing could make reads much faster than writes, but still make real-world reads slow (shouldn't be that bad, but worth seeing about).

As a reality check:
http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/SanDisk-X110-mSATA-128GB/Rating/2213

Those scores look about right for an Ultra Plus 128GB, which is what the X110 should be.

Try the AMD drivers. Maybe there's some issue with MS' going on, here. You can always swap back to the MS ones, after the AMD ones are installed, by changing the SATA controller driver in Device Manager, and rebooting, should you have a need to.

 

[undelete]

Ok, I did this benchmark now too. The tablet becomes really unusable, if the AMD driver is selected. Everything needs its time, sometimes minutes.

Here are the results:

AMD driver:
SanDisk X110 mSATA 128GB (SD6SF1M-128G-1022)
52GB free
9 User results - Rank 103 - 69.4%
Firmware: X231200 Max speed: SATA 3.0 600 MB/s
NCQ 4KALIGNED SSD TRIM S.M.A.R.T
Performance health: 11 % ?

Rank 360 33.9%

Read 336
Write 235
Mixed 290
80% 287 MB/s

4K Read 8.04
4K Write 9.15
4K Mixed 3.35
18% 6.85 MB/s

DQ Read 8.85
DQ Write 9.19
DQ Mixed 4.39
4% 7.47 MB/s

Worst: 34% 33.9% Best: 85%


Microsoft driver:

SanDisk X110 mSATA 128GB (SD6SF1M-128G-1022)
52GB free
9 User results - Rank 99 - 69.9%
Firmware: X231200 Max speed: SATA 3.0 600 MB/s
NCQ 4KALIGNED SSD TRIM S.M.A.R.T
Performance health: 11 % ?

Rank 336 38.1%

Read 319
Write 268
Mixed 285
82% 290 MB/s

4K Read 8.02
4K Write 13.8
4K Mixed 8.71
26% 10.2 MB/s

DQ Read 15.9
DQ Write 18.2
DQ Mixed 6.05
7% 13.4 MB/s

Worst: 38% 38.1% Best: 85%

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My system has 2GB of RAM.