Why are my internal transfer rates so slow?

[rising_suns]

Hello,
I am hoping you can help me out here. I am getting horrible internal transfer rates and I don't know why. Here is my rig;

i7-870 overclocked to 4.0Ghz
4 GB G.Skill 1600Mhz RAM
128 GB Corsair SSD + Western Digital Caviar Black + Velociraptor + WD Green
Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3
XFX 9600 GT
Win 7 64bit (PC1) and 32bit (PC 2)

My transfer rates average about 10-20 MB/s, even transfering between a Black and a SSD. The transfer begin maybe 90 MB/s tops, but they immediately begin to drop to a creeping 10 MB/s within a minute or so. How is this possible?

I have been reading people easily getting sustained transfer rates of 100-125 MB/s on WD Blacks alone. So why are mine so slow? Is is perhaps my motherboard?

Any tips would greatly be appreciated!

Thanks!

 

[sub.mesa]

Are you copying large files (1GB+) or also lots of smaller files? For each file you would have to seek, HDDs are very slow when doing that compared to your SSD.

Download CrystalDiskMark and post a screenshot of a benchmark on your disk if you want some feedback, but i think you mistake 100MB/s+ sequential read throughput with partial random reads; which has much lower performance.

 

[rising_suns]

Most of the processing work I do is with thousands of small files, which seems to be the weakest part of the SSD (see below). I don't think I can post an attachment yet, but here are my numbers:

SSD DRIVE:
Sequential Read : 213.864 MB/s
Sequential Write : 96.456 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 171.387 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 21.887 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 21.867 MB/s [ 5338.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 2.449 MB/s [ 597.8 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 17.186 MB/s [ 4195.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 2.395 MB/s [ 584.7 IOPS]


Perhaps I should have done more research on these SSD drives before purchasing one. Maybe it would be better to switch my mother boards and drives to 6 GB/s?

What do you think?

 

[rising_suns]

Here is my shared WD Caviar Black over a 1GB LAN network;

Sequential Read : 102.370 MB/s
Sequential Write : 105.395 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 35.131 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 59.483 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.626 MB/s [ 152.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.215 MB/s [ 296.5 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.575 MB/s [ 140.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.238 MB/s [ 302.1 IOPS]

 

[sub.mesa]

Your HDD looks fine, but you must have a cheap SSD if it does only 2MB/s random writes. That means you still have 298MB/s left of your SATA/300 bandwidth.

It also appears your SSD does not support NCQ or you have it running in IDE legacy mode instead of AHCI.

But you created the topic because of low transfer speeds. Does that also happen if you transfer one big file? If not, the performance level is normal. HDDs can only achieve 100MB/s+ speeds if they read or write a single large file (sequential I/O). And under 1MB/s if they have to seek alot.

The Intel X25-M SSD does little under 200MB/s of random reads (qd=32) - compare that with a HDD. Is about 400 times faster.

 

[FishAk]

Unfortunately, this is probably normal. I don't know which 128Gb Corsair you have, but both the P128, and the Nova are pretty week- especially with small files. If you work with a lot of small files, you should consider an Intel or SandForce based drive.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Try running from a compressed folder. I've read that that can improve performance in storage-bottlenecked situations with highly compressible data. (You trade a little processing power for smaller files, meaning less to read/write)

Other than the obvious NCQ, perhaps you could fool around with cluster sizes?

Or just wait for Ruby.

 

[alexruiz]

Try a different SATA cable.
I faced a similar situation before, and changing the cable fixed it

 

[sub.mesa]

Try a different SATA cable.
I faced a similar situation before, and changing the cable fixed it

In that case, you would see a non-zero value for UDMA_CRC_ERROR_COUNT property in the SMART output of your HDD/SSD.

The free version of HDTune has a Health tab which lists these attributes.

 

[rising_suns]

My SSD model is the Corsair P128 CMFSSD-128GBG2D.

I purchased it on newegg because of the good reviews it had, and its specs listed faster read/write speeds than the intel. But from what I understand you are all saying, these specs don't tell the whole story, as they are only for sequential r/wr. Is this correct?

Regarding enabling AHCI, I tried enabling it in BIOS. My motherboard has options for both "Onboard Sata/IDE Control Mode" and "PCH SATA Control Mode". I enabled AHCI on both, and it didn't boot up at first, but after reading a tutorial on enabling AHCI in Windows 7 (withouth having to reinstall Windows), I got it to boot with a registry edit. I ran the same test with CrystalDiskMark, but got the same numbers. Did I do this right? How do I know if AHCI/NCQ is enabled properly?

Also, I have tried multiple SATA cables...they all produce the same results.

 

[rising_suns]

Wow, you guys are right on the mark;
http://www.techspot.com/review/313-budget-ssd-roundup/page12.html

Apparently, Intel and OCZ drives produce far greater results in the 4K read/write speeds. when I looked up the same test on the Corsair P128, and the 4K numbers were closer to mine (25 r / 12 wr).

From what you're saying, all I need to do then is switch to an Intel/OCZ drive, and I should get much better performance for the processing work I do?

What about the more expensive SSD's, like this one;
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227499
Will the performance increase be that much better than the cheaper SSD's?

Also, can I use Windows XP with these SSD's? I have read that XP does not support TRIM, but some manufacturer's may have a patch for XP?

 

[FishAk]

This is not a perfect comparison, since it is the P256, not P128, but it should be close. Note the 4K random writes is the worst case scenario, since many of the files you are working with may not be so random.

In this graph, you can see that the P128 doesn't start to pull away from even the VelociRaptor till file size hits about 16K. That is really very poor for an SSD. The SSDs major advantage is in the low access times for small files.

 

[tcsenter]

How do I know if AHCI/NCQ is enabled properly

Look at the storage controllers section of Device Manager. One of them should read "Intel AHCI SATA (or Serial ATA) controller".

Also, have you installed the latest Intel RST drivers? If it fails to install reporting it does not apply to your system, then you're running in legacy IDE/ATA mode.

 

[rising_suns]

tcsenter,
In device manager under storage controller is just says "gigabyte GBB36X controller". But under the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, one is listed as "standard AHCI 1.0 serial ATA controller". Does this sound right?

Also, during post, it says AHCI is detected and seems to load the drivers (although it posts so fast I cannot read it all). And then it says "Detecting Drives...No Drives Found"...and then is boots into Windows.

Also, have you installed the latest Intel RST drivers? If it fails to install reporting it does not apply to your system, then you're running in legacy IDE/ATA mode.

Do I need a driver if I am not running in a RAID setup? (sorry if this seems like a dumb question).

 

[rising_suns]

This is not a perfect comparison, since it is the P256, not P128, but it should be close. Note the 4K random writes is the worst case scenario, since many of the files you are working with may not be so random.

This is shocking!

 

[tcsenter]

tcsenter,
In device manager under storage controller is just says "gigabyte GBB36X controller". But under the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, one is listed as "standard AHCI 1.0 serial ATA controller". Does this sound right?

Sounds like you may have one or more drives connected to the Gigabyte (c/o JMicron) controller instead of the Intel ICH10 controller. JMicron (and other secondary third party) controllers can have lower performance.

Do I need a driver if I am not running in a RAID setup? (sorry if this seems like a dumb question).

The Intel RST driver is for both RAID and AHCI mode. You don't "need" the Intel driver for AHCI, but its better than the MS provided driver ncluded with Windows.

 

[rising_suns]

Sounds like you may have one or more drives connected to the Gigabyte (c/o JMicron) controller instead of the Intel ICH10 controller. JMicron (and other secondary third party) controllers can have lower performance.

I have all the drives in the P55 sata ports. I am not using either of the two Gsata ports provided on this motherboard.

The Intel RST driver is for both RAID and AHCI mode. You don't "need" the Intel driver for AHCI, but its better than the MS provided driver ncluded with Windows.

I see what you mean. After installing the Intel driver in place of the gigabyte driver, my transfer speeds increased slightly (by a few MB) across the board.

 

[Seferio]

The Samsung controller in your Corsair P128 is not that great for 4k random read/writes. You will want either an Intel SSD (160GB G2) or any of Sandforce based SSD (OCZ Vertex 2/Agility 2, Corsair Force, Patriot Inferno, etc.).

 

[rising_suns]

Ok, I just ordered a Vertex 2...will report back to let you know the results. Thanks for the help guys.

Out of curiosity, is it possible to use these SSD's on XP machines rather than Windows 7? (specifically in regards to TRIM) Surely there must be some sort of patch/controller by now, that makes these drives backwards compatible to XP?

.

 

[rising_suns]

Ok I got the OCZ Vertex 2 in, and everything is installed. I got very nice numbers at first, but as soon as I installed the driver that tcsenter linked to above, my write speeds dropped by 50% across the board.

Before installing the EXE file:
Sequential Read : 213.690 MB/s
Sequential Write : 142.218 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 202.286 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 140.481 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 19.375 MB/s [ 4730.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 66.102 MB/s [ 16138.3 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 115.403 MB/s [ 28174.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 130.449 MB/s [ 31847.9 IOPS]

After installing the EXE file:
Sequential Read : 213.603 MB/s
Sequential Write : 79.275 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 202.883 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 76.247 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 20.774 MB/s [ 5071.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 63.278 MB/s [ 15448.6 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 122.708 MB/s [ 29957.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 76.957 MB/s [ 18788.2 IOPS]


So I then uninstalled the program, rebooted, and ran the test again, but I am still getting the slower numbers.

Any ideas ? Should I just reinstall windows again and forget about installing this EXE file?

.