Slow read/write speeds on Agility 3

[xreyuk]

Hey guys

I have an OCZ Agility 3 installed in my White Mid 2010 MacBook.

I am only able to run the drive with a SATA II controller, as that's all I have. The write speeds are 130MB/s, and read 195MB/s, and I thought these were a little low for this drive, considering it would usually be SATA III, I thought it would be able to handle SATA II no problem.

Any ideas why?

 

[bryanW1995]

What size is it? Bigger ssd's are faster, with numbers that low I assume yours is either a 64 gb or perhaps 128.

Don't feel bad, my x25m g2 is doing double duty as my OS + cache drive in my SRT setup, and it is scoring 140 sequential read/92 sequential write in atto. And it "feels" faster now than it did out of the box bc it's not in IDE mode any more. Random read/ random write has a much greater impact upon real world performance, and even slow ssd's are a couple orders of magnitude faster than even the latest velociraptor in those areas.

 

[xreyuk]

Hi,

Yeah it's a 120GB version, it's just that I know people with the same SSD are getting faster speeds.

Do you think there is anything that can be done to speed it up?

 

[bryanW1995]

Are they also stuck using the sata II controller? Also, what test are you running? CDM uses incompressible data, which severely cripples that sandforce controller, while ATTO uses fully compressible data, which lets your ssd really shine. The actual performance you'll get is probably somewhere between the two. Here's a link to Anand's most recent ssd review, it's a pretty good read and will give you more info about this issue:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5272/ocz-octane-128gb-ssd-review

 

[xreyuk]

Yeah they are also stuck on the SATA II controller but getting higher speeds.

I'm on Mac OS X, so do the above benchmarking tools still apply?

 

[groberts101]

bryan hit the nail on the head in that it depends on the test data used by the benchmark.

and to answer that last question.. the Linux kernal is known to show lower benchmark results(maybe due to drivers used) with some drives. I've personally seen many users with dual boot config'd Sandforce controlled SSD's simply toggle the listed speeds by booting between the different OS's.

I wouldn't stress about it too much but if you want to test out to see if what I say is true?.. pull the drive and test it as secondary from a W7 machine. No doubt, you'll reach advertised spec's on that setup.

PS. also keep in mind that the Agy drives use slower asynch nand as compared to other faster versions synch(or toggle) nand. Is why it was slightly cheaper in cost.

 

[xreyuk]

So you don't think there is anything I can do to improve the speeds? I'm not sure about the benchmark thing because the drive does feel a bit slow to me, but I'll see if I can find another benchmarking tool.