New SSD... must be missing something :)

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farscapesg1

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Aug 4, 2004
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OK, so we recently got new Intel X25-M 80GB drives for our work laptops. After installing the drive and a clean install of Windows XP (Windows 7 isn't allowed yet), I'm not really seeing much improvement. I've run the Intel SSD Toolbox to attempt to optimize the drive. I just finished running HD Tune and the results were... interesting.

Min Transfer Rate = 53.9 MB/sec
Max Transfer Rate = 61.2 MB/sec
Average Transfer Rate = 59.5 MB/sec

Access Time = .1 ms
Burst Rate = 44.5 MB/sec

These seem to be really low IMO. Of course I'm new to SSD, but compared to the old 7200 RPM drive I had in this machine (Dell E6400), I'm not too impressed.

Any advice what I should check or run to improve performance?
 
Hmm, it may be the alignment issue then. Unfortunately, since it is a work laptop, it has to be imaged per our corporate standards (using OSD via Microsoft SCCM). This means I can't go in align the partition and then drop Windows XP on it :( The imaging process wipes the drive and repartitions it (during a WinPE session) then copies down the XP image.

Unless there is a way to get the drive aligned properly without reinstalling the OS... I'll just be back to square one. I may be putting my old 160 GB mechanical drive back in until we move to Windows 7.... unless anyone else has any suggestions.

I just ran AS SSD and these were the results
Seq = 72.99 MB/s / 44.60 MB/s
4K = 14.10 MB/s / 22.66 MB/s
4K-64Thrd = 83.76 MB/s / 55.21 MB/s

IOPS shows....
16MB = 4.56 iops / 2.79 iops
4K = 3610 iops / 5801 iops
4K-64Thrd = 21441 iops / 14133 iops

One concern also is in the top left box it has:
INTEL
iaStor
8032 K - BAD
74.53 GB
 
Probably has to do with the laptop.

My ssd had different performance between different mobos + cpus, so that could be the culprit... what type of laptops are they>
 
If you are using Bitlocker or any form of full drive encryption it affects the performance as well, most of my co workers with SSD's on their e6400 with bitlocker have seen performance drops after adding Bitlocker
 
:mad: That may be a culprit also. We are required to use Pointsec for whole-drive encryption. Sounds like everything is against me using SSD at work :( The drive may find it's way home with me to be used where it makes more sense ;)
 
Windows XP is a bad choice to combine with SSDs. However, only the Intel SSD reasonably stands tall with misaligned partitions. Sandforce SSDs would be totally crippled, instead.

The best idea to speed up I/O might be more RAM; at least for reads. That way your encryption won't hurt as cached data is stored unencrypted in RAM.

Otherwise, the benefit of SSD is quite low; latency issues perhaps but the encryption will add some latency of its own. If you have a mainly sequential workload; try moving to a better encryption platform that either uses AES-NI on modern Intel CPUs, or uses a multithreaded design so it can use more than one CPU core.

Good luck!
 
E6400, 160GB mechanical drive, Pointsec, Win XP... sounds like my work laptop.
 
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