Slow write speed with SSD on SATA2

[Crovakiet]

I recently bought a new (240) Crucial M500 SSD as the last upgrade for this aging system of mine which consists of an ASUS P5Q Pro and E8400. The SATA ports are SATA 2, not 3. The OS is a clean install of Windows 8.1 Pro. AHCI enabled in BIOS and reflected as such in device manager. TRIM is enabled as well. I am satisfied with the read speed but I feel the writes are really, really low...I was expecting something higher than 100 at the least. I have attached the ATTO benchmark and Crystaldisk info screenshots. The drive is only 10% full (201 GB of 223 GB free). As you can see from the crystaldiskinfo only, there has been less than 100 GB of writes to the drive thus far. AS SSD shows alignment as OK. Crucial M500 firmware is the latest MU05.

 

[SSD_Fan]

Your motherboard has 8 SATA 2 (3Gb/s) ports.
Double-check that your SSD is connected to one of the 6 Intel SATA ports (SATA1 - SATA6), not to one of the 2 Silicon Image SATA ports (SATA_E1 - SATA_E2).

Connect the SSD to port SATA1 if it is not there already.
See page 2-2 of your motherboard manual for the location of the port.

Hopefully that will improve your Write speeds.

 

[Crovakiet]

Your motherboard has 8 SATA 2 (3Gb/s) ports.
Double-check that your SSD is connected to one of the 6 Intel SATA ports (SATA1 - SATA6), not to one of the 2 Silicon Image SATA ports (SATA_E1 - SATA_E2).

Connect the SSD to port SATA1 if it is not there already.
See page 2-2 of your motherboard manual for the location of the port.

Hopefully that will improve your Write speeds.

Should have experimented more with the ports! Thanks.

I already knew not to put it on SATA E1/E2 (Silicon Image controller). The M500 was connected to SATA port 5 and 6 initially (INTEL controller). I changed the SSD over to SATA port 2 (INTEL controller). This seems to have fixed my write problems. Read/Write on my m500 now basically maxing out over 250 on ATTO given the limitations of SATA 2 as per my expectations.

Very weird that even though SATA ports 1-6 are going to the INTEL controller, the first couple ports allow me to get the write speed I was expecting and the last couple ports (5 and 6) did not.