SSD - extremely slow as system drive but ok when secondary

[zbr]

Hello, I am having strange issues with a newly bought Verbatim 2SSD128 (47478). The disk works as expected from its class when connected as a secondary drive (consistent reads and writes in the ~200MB/s region, slightly under), but basically holds to a still when system is booted from it (down to 10MB/s or even less then that on few occasions).

I have tried on two very different machines (a HP HDX18 laptop with SATA2 and a modern i7 desktop with Gigabyte motherboard with SATA3), the results are the same. Its not the machines as they both work absolutely fine from OCZ drives. I thought it must be a faulty drive so went back to the shop and got it replaced with a new one (confirmed with S.M.A.R.T. operating hours) but the problem persists.

HD Tune shows its speed as almost a flat line with ~244 write and ~200 read when the drive is not being used as system drive, but as soon as the drive is booted from it shows a bumpy line of 0.6 MB/s (!!!!) with occasional peaks of ~10MB/s (!!!).

I am out of ideas for tests to run on it, reinstalled the system two times now, and even made a 1:1 copy of a system that works absolutely smooth of an Agility drive - same results.

I also run ATTO benchmarks on it and results were consistent with above - absolutely fine when run as a secondary drive and wierd irregular shaped graph never going above 15-20MB/s when a bare system is booted from it (with no other system activity)

I may give it a go on a mac just to rule out that its windows 7 fault, in the meantime suggestions appreciated.
thanks

 

[TheMadFapper]

Hello, I am having strange issues with a newly bought Verbatim 2SSD128 (47478). The disk works as expected from its class when connected as a secondary drive (consistent reads and writes in the ~200MB/s region, slightly under), but basically holds to a still when system is booted from it (down to 10MB/s or even less then that on few occasions).

I have tried on two very different machines (a HP HDX18 laptop with SATA2 and a modern i7 desktop with Gigabyte motherboard with SATA3), the results are the same. Its not the machines as they both work absolutely fine from OCZ drives. I thought it must be a faulty drive so went back to the shop and got it replaced with a new one (confirmed with S.M.A.R.T. operating hours) but the problem persists.

HD Tune shows its speed as almost a flat line with ~244 write and ~200 read when the drive is not being used as system drive, but as soon as the drive is booted from it shows a bumpy line of 0.6 MB/s (!!!!) with occasional peaks of ~10MB/s (!!!).

I am out of ideas for tests to run on it, reinstalled the system two times now, and even made a 1:1 copy of a system that works absolutely smooth of an Agility drive - same results.

I also run ATTO benchmarks on it and results were consistent with above - absolutely fine when run as a secondary drive and wierd irregular shaped graph never going above 15-20MB/s when a bare system is booted from it (with no other system activity)

I may give it a go on a mac just to rule out that its windows 7 fault, in the meantime suggestions appreciated.
thanks

Make sure your chipset/BIOS and SSD firmware is fully updated, make sure it's plugged into a native SATA3 port (not your MB's proprietary SATA3), and any file compression or encryption stuff you have going on will screw with those numbers as well.

 

[zbr]

Hi, thanks for your response.
There's no firmware updates for the laptop I want to use the drive with.
The drive itself reports firmware S5FAM012, but verbatim doesn't seem to support upgrading firmware so it would have to be a 'hack'. I have no compression going on and I am using SATA2 ports on the laptop. The performance is worse than a 5400 2.5" HDD but its fine when drive is connected via eSATA. strange

 

[wanderer11]

Did you set AHCI mode for the ssd? It is probably on IDE.

 

[zbr]

its possible, the bios on the laptop does not offer AHCI as an option, its pretty old. IT should still perform better than 4.6MB/s even on IDE.
Also it was set to AHCI on the Gigabyte motherboard and results were the same. However, when the system was booted from another drive, the problem was gone. This is really puzzling

 

[zbr]

ok, just for those who were interested: it seems the problem is related to Windows. The very same drive, installed in a MAC with OSX performs OK. It still slows down to ~10MB/s occasionally (once every few minutes) but otherwise performs acceptably.