Agility 3 Getting 256MB/s

Also, Sandra is saying the interface is SATA300. And the intel storage manager was saying SATA 3Gb. So if it's something there, it would be nice to unlock the rest of that speed.

Advertised speeds for OCZ drives are with ATTO & AS-SSD benchmark software.

You will only see the 525MB/s Read and 475MB/s Write speeds using ATTO, which uses highly compressible data to test Read/Write speeds.

AS-SSD uses highly incompressible data to test Read/Write speeds. Advertised speeds using AS-SSD are "up to" 180MB/s Read and 65MB/s Write.

Also verify that your 6Gb/s ports are in AHCI mode.

Yes, it's AHCI mode for all SATA. Furthermore here's where I'm getting my info:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/ocz-agility-3-review/13

That review tests a 240GB drive. There's no way you're getting those results on a 60GB model.

Soo, I'm trying to figure out how this correlation is possible between size and performance. Would the 60GB version have fewer dies, and each die running on its own channel?

I've been reading, and it seems that while larger size affects performance, it's almost exclusively the write performance that's affected.

I also found that smaller drives use SLC compared to the larger drives' MLC. However, I thought MLC had worse latency and slight performance hit because of the nature of higher-density memory.

Supposedly there's also more room to breathe in terms of free clusters. but my drive is only about 30-40% full.

But it seems like in my benchmarks, there's a tendency for it to cap out at around 256 when looking at graphs. An interesting number, being 2^8. Usually something like this is a hardware limitation.

But anyway, if you could explai why a large drive would be faster, I'd really appreciate it.

Correct. The larger the drive, the more NAND dies it will have.

The 240GB Agility 3 has 16 NAND dies, and the 60GB has 8.
The 60GB has 1 die per channel. The 240GB has 2 dies per channel that the firmware processes in parallel (similar to RAID-0).

Gotcha. So it would thus make sense that I would get around half the speed for the larger versions.

After testing on ATTO, I found my speeds went easily past 300MB/s, so I think I'm happy with that, all things considered. The seek time was more important for me, anyway.

Ope Ope Wait:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-60gb-benchmark-...

The site's own review. I tried ATTO and HDTune and didn't hit near the numbers they were hitting. I'll have to double-check my setup when I get home.

Does the Celeron 530 support SATA 6.0g?

Your cpu is not a factor with regards to SATA support.

Your motherboard is what has to support SATA as it is what has to support a particular cpu model.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNAwUwnzcGo

Okay, so this guy is getting over 1000MB/s with two of my SSD's in RAID-0 Meaning the speed of each is running at LEAST 500MB/s. Was there a firmware update that affected this perhaps? Maybe it's a cache setting or pefetch setting in windows?

The latest firmware version for your drive is 2.22.
In Device Manager you can see if "Enable write caching on the device" is checked.


If you’re not satisfied with your current performance your only option (which still may not resolve your problem) is to start over with a fresh install.

1.) Update your motherboard’s BIOS to version 3904
2.) Backup any needed data and Secure Erase your SSD to restore it to fresh-out-of-the-box condition
3.) Disconnect all drives from your motherboard and clear the cmos
4.) Connect your drive in AHCI mode to port SATA6G_2 (assuming you previously had it connected to SATA6G_1). Also leave any other drives disconnected until Windows installation is complete.
5.) Install Windows. Don’t format the drive or pre-install any drivers. Let Windows format the drive and install its own default drivers.
6.) After Windows installation is complete you can update any drivers and connect any remaining drives.
7.) Download and run ATTO benchmark

Okay, I found the issue.

After a bit of digging, I found that the "speed tweak" offered in OCZ's linux tools limited the transfer speed to 3Gb/s rather than SATA3's 6Gb/s.

By removing the tweak, I performed benchmarks again. My speeds went up to 560MB/s in ATTO and 330MB/s in Sandra. Case Closed!