Question SSD slow on laptop

[JEDI]

I have a Dell i3-4030u @ 1.9ghz with 4gigs ram running Win 7.
I switched to a Sandisk 120gig ssd when I got the laptop a couple of years ago. (fresh win7 install.)

it seems slow from day 1 compared to my 8year old Win7 desktop also running a Sandisk 120gig ssd (but has a regular 2gig hard drive for data). it also has 4gigs ram.

seems like Lots of disk drive thrashing on laptop.

benchmarks for my laptop:


How do the benchmarks look?
If fine, what else could be the problem?

 

[UsandThem]

What is the SSD model?

Some entry-level Sandisk drives are pretty slow, and the difference can be quite different between their various models.

 

[JEDI]

What is the SSD model?

Some entry-level Sandisk drives are pretty slow, and the difference can be quite different between their various models.

device mgr says sdssda120G

and how do my benchmarks look?

 

[UsandThem]

device mgr says

You will need to look at the packaging (if you still have it), the SSD, or download and run a utility like CyrstalDiskInfo to get the exact model number.

Sandisk offered quite a few drives over the years, from pretty decent to DRAMless very low-end stuff.

and how do my benchmarks look?

Your write scores are pretty low.

 

[JEDI]

You will need to look at the packaging (if you still have it), the SSD, or download and run a utility like CyrstalDiskInfo to get the exact model number.

Sandisk offered quite a few drives over the years, from pretty decent to DRAMless very low-end stuff.

Your write scores are pretty low.

Model # is the same as what Device Manager said:


How to improve write scores?

 

[C1]

Just in case, ensure that "trim" is enabled:

Troubleshoot - How to trigger SSD TRIM command under Windows 7?

So guys, everything is said in the title. Does anyone know how to trigger a SSD TRIM command under Windows 7 ? SSD has enabled TRIM firmware SSD is in AHCI Mode I am aware there are commands to see if the TRIM is enabled under Windows 7 DisableDeleteNotify = 1 = TRIM support disabled...

malwaretips.com

Generally "disk thrashing" results because of caching due to insufficient available RAM.

Ensure also that you have sufficient overhead (ie, unused space) on your drive storage. I like a 25% overhead.

Some things to try/experiment with are to adjust shadowing (eg, BIOS and Video), "superfetch" (eg, disable), disable auto disk write caching.

 

[UsandThem]

Model # is the same as what Device Manager said:
How to improve write scores?

I had a sneaking suspicion you had one of their DRAMless drives, but I hate assuming things.

But to answer your question, you can't. That's all that particular drive and size can do:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/dramless-ssd-roundup,4833-8.html

You can always upgrade your RAM to 8GB, and that should help a bit. If you are a person who does things like keeping a lot of browser tabs open, or using several different things at once, that should help out quite a bit.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, that appears to be one of the slower "DRAM-less" Sandisk designs (I got suckered on a couple of those too, I think), and there's not much that you can do to actually "speed it up". It is what it is.

However, if you're running out of RAM (check Task Manager, Memory, Commit Charge), then it will spill over as use the SSD as a PAGEFILE, and if it does that, with a DRAM-less drive, you may see performance as bad as a HDD when paging out stuff.

In that case, add more primary RAM, of whatever flavor and timings that platform takes (DDR3, I think, match timings and voltage to whatever's already in there).

Is this a laptop?

The good news is, RAM is relatively cheap, so are SSDs. You can get a 1TB SSD for $80, and 16GB of DDR3 SO-DIMM for like $60-70. (Or a 512GB SATA like the Silicon Image A55 "Ace" SATA 2.5" SSD for $49.99.)

That may be more than you want to spend on your laptop, however, given it's age.

Don't forget about being able to use Macrium Reflect Free to image your existing SSD, so that you can avoid a re-install.

Edit: You can always get a Samsung EVO 860 SATA 2.5" SSD, those are pricey, but they are the cream-of-the-crop performance-wise for SATA. But I think that your primary problem is not so much your SSD, but the amount of physical RAM that you have installed.

When things start to bog down a little bit, check your "Commit Charge". See what it's at. It's probably at 5GB, before you even notice bogging down, and it just gets worse from there.

Your physical RAM should be larger than your commit charge, as much as possible within budget, so as to avoid paging.

 

[JEDI]

I don't see a memory commit charge option in task manager?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I don't see a memory commit charge option in task manager?

It should be in Task Manager, Performance tab, in the text underneath the graphs. "Commit". See if that's 4GB or above.

 

[JEDI]

It should be in Task Manager, Performance tab, in the text underneath the graphs. "Commit". See if that's 4GB or above.

ahh... 4064 / 7994

also, dram-less ssd's are as slow as regular hard drives when it comes to swap files?
ugg.. that's the reason why I bought a ssd.. the swap file is what slows everything down

 

[Shmee]

Just thought I would double check on this, is the Sata controller set to AHCI? (also required for TRIM to run) That said its not a super fast SSD, you may want to upgrade it to a larger, faster, more modern one. That and another 4GB of RAM.

 

[PattenTank]

ahh... 4064 / 7994

also, dram-less ssd's are as slow as regular hard drives when it comes to swap files?
ugg.. that's the reason why I bought a ssd.. the swap file is what slows everything down

They're as slow as mechanical drives when mechanical drives are new. An old badly fragmented mechanical drive is much. much slower. There is a big difference in speeds between a brand new mechanical drive and a 1 year old mechanical drive.

The SSD is 82% full. It only has 20 gigs to work with. That reduced overhead can mess up the benchmark results. The stats would be completely different on a fresh install OS with more than half the drive empty.

With reduced space, a lot of the caching can't be optimised and the OS has to use a much smaller cache file than it needs in order to run optimally.

Check if your SSD is partition optimally for SSD. I think they need to be in 4K clusters (whatever that means). On my samsung SSDs they came with migration tools that converted the partition correctly and makes a big difference in performance.

The laptop does seem to support sataiii (sata600) so there's no bottleneck there. I wonder if the CPU has a factor on slower SSD benchmarks. The CPU, ram have to be involved in dumping files in and out of the SSD and could lead to poorer stats,.

 

[JEDI]

Just thought I would double check on this, is the Sata controller set to AHCI? (also required for TRIM to run) That said its not a super fast SSD, you may want to upgrade it to a larger, faster, more modern one. That and another 4GB of RAM.

it's set to Raid-On, which I've read is a subset/superset of ahci.
so I should be running ahci.

 

[JEDI]

They're as slow as mechanical drives when mechanical drives are new. An old badly fragmented mechanical drive is much. much slower. There is a big difference in speeds between a brand new mechanical drive and a 1 year old mechanical drive.

ugg.. so I should have bought the Kingston 120gig ssdnow uv400?

 

[Shmee]

I don't believe so. I would look for a deal on a crucial MX500 250 GB. That is a good drive for a good price. I don't think the low end Kingston drives are great, but I could be wrong. Check the reviews.

 

[hojnikb]

It's still plenty fast for an ssds and order of magnitudes faster compared to HDDs, where it matters. I wouldn't worry about sequential writes. Budget drives, that offer 500MB/s writes are usually inflated due to slc caching.