Horrible SSD performance

Astrowind

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 28, 2018
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I have an old Asus M3A78-EM motherboard and connected to a Kingston A400 120GB SSD. I ran a couple of tests and the results are like 76MB/s or even 12MB/s.

Any ideas?
 
First guess is that windows is in IDE mode vs AHCI (especially if its the OS drive). That or the drive in bios settings is in IDE and not AHCI mode. Also, that mobo is around ten years old with only Sata II ports so you'll never see over 300 MB/s.
 
OK, I'm going to try to check that out. I have the latest 2701 BIOS but found the AMD 780G chipset driver which I installed after installing Windows 8.1 in 32-bit. Apparently, that motherboard did better in 32-bit. Anyway, for now the benchmark test showed 155MB/s which is like double what it was.
 
Got the latest BIOS? Quite a few for that board, may not help but with old gear it never hurts to have the very last one installed.
 
First guess is that windows is in IDE mode vs AHCI (especially if its the OS drive). That or the drive in bios settings is in IDE and not AHCI mode. Also, that mobo is around ten years old with only Sata II ports so you'll never see over 300 MB/s.
Windows is in IDE mode?

I'm very farmiliar with the BIOS setting of IDE (sometimes called legacy) vs AHCI.

What Windows setting would this be?
 
Windows is using different drivers based on your sata bios settings when you installed windows. You can swap it after install, just search the net for ide to ahci switch or similar keywords. It usually involves registry edits for win7, I don't know for win8/10.
 
To recap,
I have the latest BIOS
I'm running Windows 8.1 32-bit on an Asus M3A78-EM
I got into safe mode, changed to AHCI in BIOS.
Ran a couple of tests from userbenchmark.com and got the following:
one ran in AHCI and one in SATA mode in BIOS and both gave the same score of around 120 MB/s

Conclusion: This motherboard is weird I guess. I've had good results with Asus in the past but even better with Asrock. So maybe I'll get Asrock next time I get a board. lol (I did try Gigabyte but it was only stable once I had flashed the BIOS.)

Anyway, i'ts an old machine and might install Linux Mint on it anyway...
 
OK, I managed to install Linux Mint and it's dual-boot. I thought this might be real cool until I noticed I have no idea how to get things done in Linux. I tried downloading several benchmarking software and when I click to run the installation files, nothing happens. And I don't know where or how to type in command lines so...
 
But but....command line is so much faster and easier than clicking a couple of icons...so they say!
 
Yeah most of the time you're in the terminal running bash install.sh this and sudo nano config that but some file managers let you right click and run the scripts. Zorin and Manjaro are just a tad more user friendly. What you need to check out is the package installer for the OS, Elementary and Deepin have nice ones. Microsoft is actually trying to push its windows store that functions like them and the Mac App Store. If you have the RAM capacity or an alternate computer to mess with, I kind of auditioned a bunch of distros to find the ones I liked, it's quite fun.
 
Well, do you like Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop? I read that one is the most similar to Windows 7. I was kind of hoping it was. Does anyone here think installing in 64-bit is better for compatibility with various programs. I'm not sure if even some browsers are made in 32-bit now.
 
software on a debian based environment is all handled through repositories. MINT has a VERY NICE gui for it.
https://www.reallinuxuser.com/how-to-install-applications-in-linux-mint/

i run mint as a desktop, Debian as a server with active directory, OSX, windows, and i try to keep up on the common linux versions for the sake of helping users.

i use mint with XFCE but my second choice is cinnamon, it is very windows like.
 
UPDATE: I'm now running dual-boot Win8.1 & Linux Mint both in 64-bit. I finally was able to run a benchmark with this: sync; dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs-1M count=1024; sync

So, I saw 264 MB/s which I think should make sense for the Kingston A400 SSD. Now, in Windows 8.1 64-bit I'm still seeing results like 88 MB/s or 114 MB/s whatever... So it might be Windows or the benchmarking software I used. In Windows I used the one on userbenchmark.com. But, is it possible it's some kind of power management feature in Windows that does this?

If you've tried benchmarking your SSD in Linux can you say what the results were like?
 
OK, I guess I can laugh at myself now because I think this may be "user error". I just tried CrystalDiskMark on that machine. I clicked to download the Vista file and clicked on All to test. Anyway, here's the result: top speed 253MB/s
 

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