Wanting to squeeze all the performance from my new Vertex 3

[Hallowed_Dragon]

Yesterday I have purchased an OCZ Vertex 3 120GB drive and I installed Windows and my games on it. I am pleased with the speed and overall feel of having the SSD running all my apps and games, but looking at the reviews for this drive it seems that I am not getting its full potential.
Before I tell you what is the "problem" I want you to know that I have read the guide to installing a SSD and followed its steps.
I have Windows 7 Home Premium 64 installed with the lastest drivers for chipset (see signature).
Now the "problem" is that comparing synthetic benchmarks from HDTune http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/06/27/ocz_technology_vertex_3_ssd_120gb_240gb_review/5 I see some differences compared to mine. I get an average of about 340MB/s avarage Write speed and I have frequent drops to ~250 MB/s. From the benchmarks I have read I should have my minimum at 340 MB/s.
Am I being paranoid or can this be improved?

 

[Prey2big]

You are benchmarking while your OS is running off of the drive.

 

[Charlie98]

I had an issue with write speeds and my Agility3, I traced it back to the C3/C6 states. Once I disalbed them, my write speed went back up.

 

[Jocelyn84]

Yesterday I have purchased an OCZ Vertex 3 120GB drive and I installed Windows and my games on it. I am pleased with the speed and overall feel of having the SSD running all my apps and games, but looking at the reviews for this drive it seems that I am not getting its full potential.
Before I tell you what is the "problem" I want you to know that I have read the guide to installing a SSD and followed its steps.
I have Windows 7 Home Premium 64 installed with the lastest drivers for chipset (see signature).
Now the "problem" is that comparing synthetic benchmarks from HDTune http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/06/27/ocz_technology_vertex_3_ssd_120gb_240gb_review/5 I see some differences compared to mine. I get an average of about 340MB/s avarage Write speed and I have frequent drops to ~250 MB/s. From the benchmarks I have read I should have my minimum at 340 MB/s.
Am I being paranoid or can this be improved?

HDTune isn't really the best thing to be benching an SSD with.

You are benchmarking while your OS is running off of the drive.

I'm not sure this really matters. While it may affect 4k reads and writes a tad, it doesn't seem to change my benchmarking at all (Seen Below).

I had an issue with write speeds and my Agility3, I traced it back to the C3/C6 states. Once I disalbed them, my write speed went back up.

This on the other hand I agree with. Turn off EIST, C states, and any other motherboard power saving features if you want to see what your SSD can do.

 

[groberts101]

all good points so far.

I'll add to it by pointing out W7 power options should be set to high-performance and to never let the drive shutdown. Time until the system sleeps should also be extended from the default 20 mins to at least 2 hrs for any chance of garbage collection cleaning up the mess of trim-marked blocks set aside prior.

Personally, I never let my system sleep as it introduces far too many variables into the mix. These 2281 controllers don't panic lock like the first gen SF did/do.. but best not to push your luck and you gain additional recovery time in the electricity tradeoff.

PS. you were already warned about using HDTune but I'll answer your question anyways. If there is data located on the drive?.. the graph will dip wherever the data resides in the bitmap. With Sandforce drives you will generally get lower dips where incompressible data resides. That's why the reviewers always test SSD as fresh/erased to get much more consistent graphs. Still not the best SSD benchmark tool and fits HDD much better as it was designed to do in the first place.

 

[Hallowed_Dragon]

all good points so far.

I'll add to it by pointing out W7 power options should be set to high-performance and to never let the drive shutdown. Time until the system sleeps should also be extended from the default 20 mins to at least 2 hrs for any chance of garbage collection cleaning up the mess of trim-marked blocks set aside prior.

Thank you very much my good sir. This has fixed my "problem". I now get the speeds that I've seen in reviews.

 

[Jman13]

Does anyone know if there is a way to make sure it never lets the SSD shut down, but still spins down the other hard disks?

 

[KingFatty]

Does anyone know if there is a way to make sure it never lets the SSD shut down, but still spins down the other hard disks?

When I asked about this, the consensus was that no, you can't because you apply the drive shut down settings globally to the computer and it applies to all drives.

So I'll ask a different question: Is there a way to disable a spinning hard drive under device manager or disk management so that the drive stops spinning?

I think the last time I tried this was in Windows XP, and the drive would keep spinning up whenever I powered on the computer, even if it was disabled in windows. But now with Windows 7, do disabled drives spin down?

 

[Jman13]

Adding on to this.. if power saving is enabled for hard disks (say after 1 hour), but the system will never go to standby (I never do), will this still prevent garbage collection? The OS will stop the garbage collection because of lack of input from the user, or will it keep going because that drive is 'active' during the cleaning of trim marked blocks?