X25-M G2 Writes slow

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[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 5, 2004
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Here is a recent bench I took on my x25-m. Drive is only a month old.

This was taken after I took it off the Gigabyte SATA controller and put it on the Intel one. Seq read times became much better, but compared to what Im seeing other people results are, 4k writes are much slower. Some I see in the upper 50's, but I am much lower.

Is there some tweaking that needs to be done? NCQ is enabled according to Intel's utility

capturezy.png
 
Your speeds are fine, only your random write is somewhat low. You should be getting about 80MB/s with the QD32 random write benchmark.

Are you using TRIM? Did you also try the Intel Toolbox utility and manually perform the TRIM function?

How full is your drive, how full did it ever got at any point in time and did you reserve space to be unused or are you using the full capacity?

Typically, you should get the best performance from Intel controller, the Gigabyte is often a Silicon Image controller; though it works it is not that exciting. The scores confirm you are using NCQ, or you wouldn't have such a high 4K QD32 score.
 
I am unsure if TRIM is on. I understood this is done by default by Windows 7

I downloaded the Intel SSD toolbox and ran the SSD optimizer which mentions TRIM, but there is no specific TRIM options in the toolbox that I can tell.

I have never used all the space. Almost all my programs go on my Raid 10 array. Only my e-mail/firefox/random work utilities go on the SSD.

There was definitely a bump in improvement on the intel controller. My thoughts on putting it on the Gigabyte controller is so the Intel controller could be dedicated to my Raid 10 array. But it seems to handle both drives just fine.

This optimizer did improve performance for sure, not quite as fast as I have seen others, but at least more in the ballpark.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 261.948 MB/s
Sequential Write : 86.609 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 203.692 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 88.818 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 19.915 MB/s [ 4862.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 41.226 MB/s [ 10064.9 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 160.490 MB/s [ 39182.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 86.253 MB/s [ 21057.9 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [C: 38.9% (29.0/74.4 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2010/04/11 21:34:07
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)


sub.mesa said:
Your speeds are fine, only your random write is somewhat low. You should be getting about 80MB/s with the QD32 random write benchmark.

Are you using TRIM? Did you also try the Intel Toolbox utility and manually perform the TRIM function?

How full is your drive, how full did it ever got at any point in time and did you reserve space to be unused or are you using the full capacity?

Typically, you should get the best performance from Intel controller, the Gigabyte is often a Silicon Image controller; though it works it is not that exciting. The scores confirm you are using NCQ, or you wouldn't have such a high 4K QD32 score.
Click to expand...
 
I upgraded to the new Intel 9.6 drivers, which supposedly will turn on TRIM for my SSD on the raid controller.

Same results. Do you think running a raid 10 on the same controller as the SSD is affecting performance?
 
Note that TRIM isn't supported if the SSDs are part of a RAID.
After you using the Intel Toolbox utility, you can see random write speeds increasing (both scores). That's exactly the performance score that was running low; so with your last posted scores your SSD is performing properly.

However, it does appear you did not leave free space on the SSD (unpartitioned) and TRIM also doesn't work. You should use either the Microsoft AHCI driver; or the latest Intel AHCI/RAID drivers; those should support TRIM on Windows 7.

If you say you upgraded to newer Intel drivers; that also means you were running older Intel drivers. That also means you used your SSD for some time without TRIM. So its logical that your random writes scores got higher after you ran the Intel Toolbox utility; you were missing TRIM and now this was done manually, and leads to higher/proper performance.
 
The problem was that you did not have TRIM. Random writes is where you see the biggest hit if you don't have TRIM. Even though you've never "filled" the whole drive up, as your OS drive, with caches and other files on there that are constantly rewritten I'm sure you probably actually have filled it up over and over.

Using the latest 9.6 Intel drivers, and running the Intel SSD toolbox weekly just to make sure everything is up to snuff, should fix any problems you're having.
 
Okay so with 9.6 and running the SSD toobox I should be good to go? Do I need to repartition anything?

Every since I moved my SSD to my intel controller, programs keep freezing that arent even on the SSD, but running off my raid 10. Any ideas there?
 
Ack. I thought I had fixed this problem after reformatting my machine without my raid connected.

When I initially installed Win 7 Ultimate, it was archaically slow. At this time I had both my SSD and Raid 0 setup connected to the ICH10R. I had a ton of issues with alot of my programs randomly locking up for several seconds then coming back.

After adding 2 more drives for raid 10, I decided to reformat again. This time around I decided to put my SSD on the Gigabyte controller, and didnt hook up the RAID 10 until after installing windows.

This ran fantastic, no random freezes everything was great. Then I read that the intel SSD's ran better on Intel controllers, which spawned this thread.

HOWEVER the speeds are great, but now all the random freezing is back again. Its never my entire OS, only a single program. On top of that immediately after putting my SSD on the ICH10R, its telling me one of the drives in my raid array is bad....

I want to keep my SSD on the ICH10R, but it seems to be that when I do this everything falls apart.
 
Bump any ideas? I updated to the newest bios on my mobo (Gigabyte X58A-UD3R). Speeds improved but same issues with random freezes.
 
Any chance you're installing stuff with an infected USB drive and have a virus? Got a rootkit virus? Conficker, etc.

kind have no clue. I'd tell you to do a full clean install, but it sounds like you already did that.

Moving your OS drive around in a system will definitely cause issues, but if you've done a clean install with the SSD on ICH10R, update to all latest drivers, install SSD toolbox to make sure everything is working you should be good. I don't think the other RAID drives would affect it, unless you're hitting some type of bottleneck having so many devices on the controller, as most people I see with 4 drives in Raid go with with an add-in (nice = $$) card. BTW, if you're not using the gigabyte controller disable it, as well as anything else you're not using. Just a little extra speed, by freeing up IRQ resources.
 
Yeah,

When I have my SSD in the ICH10R i disable all the other controllers including the Marvell 6.0.

I really cant figure out whats going on, the computer is very snappy overall, but occasionally it just dies on me. For instance the other day I was copy/pasting a table from excel into thunderbird. It took nearly 20 seconds.

I cannot for the life of me fully understand why this is happening. However I am not sure how much longer I plan on putting up with it, but I will have to do something about it soon.
 
Possibly...I wonder if I can run a drive fitness test while its in a raid 10 configuration.

I might ditch the raid 10, and leave only my SSD on the ICH10R. I have read people who have done this and saw things get better. Plain and simple with the throughput of the G1 and ICH10R cant keep up with the 4 extra drives.

Maybe raid 1 on the Marvel controller and another Raid 1 on the gigabyte controller...



Any suggestions on how I should partition this drive the 3rd time around?
 
I'd leave it all one partition.

Use Win7 disc to delete all partitions, then go to create your parition, it will create a 100Mb partition plus whatever you asked it to.

Then go advance... delete the main partition and extend the "system" (100Mb) partition to like 73-74Gb (most of the rest of the drive). Leave a little bit like 1Gb if you can as extra reserve, to keep performance higher.

So it should show like a 73Gb system partition and like 1Gb of unpartitioned space (leave it unpartitioned). Select the 73Gb partition as where to install it.
 
Is 1 GB enough to leave free? I don't have an SSD yet but I will probably get this one.

Has anyone actually done any performance tests with various amounts of the SSD free?
 
C-rizzle said:
I'd leave it all one partition.

Use Win7 disc to delete all partitions, then go to create your parition, it will create a 100Mb partition plus whatever you asked it to.

Then go advance... delete the main partition and extend the "system" (100Mb) partition to like 73-74Gb (most of the rest of the drive). Leave a little bit like 1Gb if you can as extra reserve, to keep performance higher.

So it should show like a 73Gb system partition and like 1Gb of unpartitioned space (leave it unpartitioned). Select the 73Gb partition as where to install it.
Click to expand...

This is the first time I've seen someone recommened to do this. Why not just let the Win7 disc do its automatic thing, thats what everyone else says to do.
 
Well, thats not what EVERYONE else says. Plus I didn't say to do any tweaks after that. Just consolidating partitions.

Its an easy way to get rid of the hidden 100Mb system partition which doesn't need to be on a separate partition. I just like having everything on one partition so I know the controller has no issues with reserve space, etc.
 
I had an idea....maybe i am seeing huge delays (as most of my apps are on my raid 10)

Perhaps windows is spinning down the raid drives while not in use, and I am seeing lockups because the drives have to spin back up.

Is this possible?
 
yes, possible

go in to the advanced tabs and set it to never power down drives to see if that fixes things.
 
I have set that, but i can still hear my drives spinning down. Is the ICH10R controller controlled by windows? I cannot find any options in the raid bios or the intel matrix software to control it
 
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