X-25M 160GB Low Read Speeds

[Collider]

i7 860, Dell/Intel mobo, 8GB Ram
Intel X-25M G2 160GB
Windows 7 64-bit

I'm concerned about the low read speeds I'm getting on the above mentioned setup. In HD Tune Pro:
Avg Read: 168
Min Read: 115
Max Read: 183
Access time: 0.114ms
Burst: 90.3
CPU Usage: 5.5%

These are quite low for this drive, I should be seeing 225MB average read. Also most other benches I saw show a straight line in the graph, mine is very jumpy.

If you can offer any suggestions on how to remedy this, please let me know. Thanks.

 

[CurseTheSky]

Have you run the Intel SSD Toolbox recently? How full is the drive?

 

[Collider]

The drive is only 50% full. Never ran the toolbox on this PC, I thought that was only for drive that dont have trim support.

 

[Old Hippie]

Dell/Intel mobo...what's that?

Update drivers?

 

[sub.mesa]

Show us a screenshot of AS SSD, that also shows alignment and which I/O driver you use. But since you're on Intel platform that should be either microsoft or Intel; both should support TRIM.

 

[Collider]

Dell/Intel mobo...what's that?

Update drivers?

This is a DELL PC at work, the company has a policy of using only DELL PCs only so I didn't have any flexibility with the board. As far as I can tell its a DELL branded board with Intel chipset, according to CPU-Z its model: 0D441T

SSD firmware was never updated, think that could be the issue?

 

[Collider]

Show us a screenshot of AS SSD, that also shows alignment and which I/O driver you use. But since you're on Intel platform that should be either microsoft or Intel; both should support TRIM.

not sure what you meant by "screenshot of AS SSD" can you explain please. Thanks.

 

[Old Hippie]

SSD firmware was never updated, think that could be the issue?

Could be if it's an older drive although I was thinking more along the lines of a chipset update.

Looks like that board has a P55 chipset and if you could install the Intel drivers it may help.

The SSD could also need aligned.

Could be any, all, or none of the above.

 

[Collider]

Update:

1) I updated the firmware on the drive
2) Reinstalled the chipset drivers for the board
3) Ran Intel's SSD Toolbox

The speeds improved slightly, my average read speed according to HD Tune is now 207.9 MB

But the graph is still very jumpy: http://screencast.com/t/R3z8wmHmNuh

most reviews show a straight line at about 230-240MB

Any suggestions on what could be causing this?

Would BIOS drive settings have any effect? I'm able to boot in "RAID", "Legacy" & "ATA" modes, booting in "AHCI" will not load my windows.

Also what do you guys mean when you say SSD needs to be aligned?

 

[Rifter]

you are going to want to enable AHCI for best performance. I think you are going to have to reinstall windows though if you did not install it with AHCI enabled. Otherwise it wont have the drivers and i dont think you can do anything about that without a reinstall or do the registry hack.

 

[Collider]

can you give me a little more info on the registry hack?

 

[Old Hippie]

can you give me a little more info on the registry hack?

Try here if you're running w7.

 

[Rifter]

you beat me to it, also should mention im pretty sure you need AHCI enabled for trim support. so doing that would be a really good idea.

 

[Old Hippie]

also should mention im pretty sure you need AHCI enabled for trim support.

No, but everything on SSDs goes better with AHCI.

 

[Emulex]

yeah make sure you run the latest IATA96 if you have intel ICH chipset.

IDE mode will have a severe slowdown. also aggresive power management can slow down your speed.

 

[OCGuy]

You really need to step into the big-time if you want performance.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227517

 

[Makaveli]

I don't see how a $4000 SSD is going to help him.

And since he is in a corporate environment do you actually think someone in accounting is gonna sign off on that purchase?

 

[Emulex]

ocz is not corporate lol. would not let that junk near my servers with a 10 foot pole.

 

[jiffylube1024]

You really need to step into the big-time if you want performance.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227517

Hehehee.

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As others have said, make sure you're running in AHCI mode, try running the Intel SSD tool, and make sure you have more than like 5% of the drive free.

My drive seems to fluctuate from 180MB/s to 200+ in HDTach and other programs... The AS SSD Benchmark seems to be more accurate in terms of comparing its performance to other drives. Sequential performance isn't really what these drives are about - anything 180MB/s or faster is golden; the only thing you should be concerned about on these drives is irregularly low random read and write speed.

 

[Collider]

I don't see how a $4000 SSD is going to help him.

And since he is in a corporate environment do you actually think someone in accounting is gonna sign off on that purchase?

Yeah, I had to fight tooth and nail for 2 months just for them to approve our G2s. Even had to estimate productivity gains vs machine performance to show that our team can benefit from better HDDs considering that we rebuild our solutions very frequently during debugging and HDD speed is the biggest bottleneck.

 

[GoSharks]

IDE mode will have a severe slowdown. also aggresive power management can slow down your speed.

IDE mode isn't THAT slow. My board doesnt support AHCI:

 

[pcslookout]

IDE mode isn't THAT slow. My board doesnt support AHCI:

I tried AHCI over and over again. Was at first on IDE. I really noticed no difference as well. Prefer IDE because bootup is so much quicker. AHCI takes forever to get out of the BIOS.