SSD Not Running Full Speed

rune2004

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Sep 7, 2011
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Hello all,

I've done a fair amount of research before posting, and read through the threads here that I could find as well.

I recently bought this drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139602

Upon arrival, I installed my drive into my case and loaded up the Acronis software that came bundled with my drive. I followed all instructions to a T. The drive booted fine, however upon benchmarking, even with ATTO, it was not coming nearly close to advertised speeds and speeds with which I've watched multiple reviewers obtain. The reviewers were even getting higher than advertised speeds in their tests. The advertised speeds are 550MB per second read and 510MB per second write.

I can't supply a screenshot atm as I have my SSD unhooked and am back on my HDD for the moment, but my ATTO benchmarks were in the neighborhood of 200MB per second for both read and write.

I'm posting because I'm not sure what the bottleneck is. My computer is a Gateway DX4320 that I've modified. Here's my motherboard specs:

Motherboard.png


Upon researching my MB, all 6 ports are SATA III. However, I cannot find anything about the controller and I don't know if that's my bottleneck or not.

I know I made one mistake, however; not setting my BIOS to AHCI prior to installing my drive. I've tried the regedits and they don't work for me, my drive would refuse to boot while set to AHCI. It would only boot if RAID was selected, which doesn't make sense to me because I only have one drive installed. My only 3 options for the controller are IDE, RAID, and AHCI and as I said the only one that would boot is RAID. However with my normal HDD, during the black booting text of the BIOS it would not say any of the 3 but would say SATA, whereas the SSD would say RAID when hooked up.

Where it stands now, I'm waiting for a disc that I ordered from Gateway that has Windows on it so I can do a fresh install after setting to AHCI, then just move whatever programs and such I want to to the SSD instead of copying everything over. However, I don't know if this is the right route or if it will solve my problem. If anyone could offer their advice and help, it would be greatly appreciated as I've never really worked with storage before so this is new to me. Also, I spent a bunch of money on this drive and want it to work full speed. :lol:

Thank you in advance!

EDIT: I will be keeping my HDD in as a secondary storage drive.
 
Your first problem is that you have a Gateway , I worked for a number of years as a cable installer and one of the things I would have to do is hook up the cable internet to the customers computer. When I would walk into the house and see a Gateway I wanted to turn around and walk back out because they were notorius for many problems and I still to this day don't even want to look at one. However I also don't know if they have improved thier builds over the years. The thing you want to find out is what kind of controller they used for the sata 3 ports. Then you do want to change to AHCI and of course the SSD's are not guaranteed to give the advertised speed , they always seem to put in the words "up to ". Also the SSDyou have is a raid set up of either 2 of 4 seperate ssd's useing the sandforce controller . As a last resort option if you had a spare pci-e slot on your motherboard you could get an add on card with a sata 3 port on it and that might be a work around if Gateway used a lousy controller chip for the sata 3 ports on the MB.
 
Your bottleneck is your motherboard. You currently have an AMD 880 chipset based motherboard. You will never get the maximum advertised speeds until you get a 890 or 990 chipset board.

The only thing you can do to increase speed with your current board is to change the SATA mode of your SSD to AHCI.

If you are positive you’ve performed the Windows Registry fix then change your SATA mode to RAID. All drives that are not part of a RAID array will automatically default to AHCI mode.

Update your AMD South Bridge & AHCI drivers from this link: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/raid_windows.aspx


 

rune2004

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Hmmm... what is it about the motherboard that's slowing me down, is it the controllers? Do you think it would bypass bottleneck that if I followed what Inzone said and bought a SATA III controller for a PCIe port or can my MB just not handle those speeds period?
 

x Heavy

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It exists as a Gateway, therefore it cannot compute.

Moooo. (Makes me wonder just how dumb society must have been to buy into Gateway all those years.)

When I see a Gateway, I don't even touch the thing.

Trash it and build one that will support the speeds you seek. Or bypass SATA entirely with a Revo in a PCI express slot.
 


Yes, it's your controllers. You probably need to buy a controller card that is at least PCIe x4 rated to get maximum performance.

Edit: And of course you need an available PCIe 2.0 x4 or x8 slot on your motherboard to plug it into.
 

rune2004

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Ok... so does this sound like a good course of action?

Wait for my Windows disc to show up, wipe the SSD and change BIOS to AHCI. Install windows freshly and try a bench. If I'm still getting low speeds, try buying a PCIe controller card. If I don't have an extra port (which I can't remember right now) then I'd need to buy a new MB and maybe a case?

Also about the Gateways, the only thing "Gateway" on this anymore really is the MB (which I suppose you're right, is garb).
 



You might not have to buy a new case a new motherboard should fit.
 

Sky High

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I know this is an old thread, but did you ever get this figured out? Did you ever unlock the 6GB speed or find out if SATA 3 was even possible on this board? I have the same issue.