Underperforming SSD's

[jmsellars1]

Hi guys,

I've installed some new SSD's in my laptop and my PC, the Crucial M4 128GB in my PC and the Samsung 830 128GB in my laptop. Both are running pretty slow though, the desktop is particularly bad. Startup with my Seagate Barracuda took 40 seconds or so, it takes more like 3-4 minutes with the SSD. I initially realised it wasn't running in AHCI so I reformatted and changed that and it got even worse.

Could that be the problem? I believe you are not supposed to format SSD's but secure erase them. Could that cause it to get THAT slow? It is running on SATA II but I didn't think that would make a noticeable difference.

With the laptop (MSI X-370), the SSD isn't quite as slow as that but it isn't any faster than the WD Scorpio blue that was in it. Could the weak CPU be bogging it down in terms of boot speed or do we think there could be another problem?

For both I have turned off defrag, enabled AHCI mode, disabled the paging file and installed a clean OS then ran HD tune. Both look fine on HD tune and when I benchmark, they average 200-250MB/s reads which seems pretty normal. For the Samsung drive I did do a secure erase, I didn't on the Crucial but it was brand new. I only formatted it the once during the Windows installation.

Any ideas?

 

[ko888]

Which Windows Operating System are you using?

If you didn't use Windows 7 to create the primary partition then the partition will begin on a misaligned physical boundary leading to redundant read/write operations resulting in poor performance.

 

[jmsellars1]

Hi, thanks so much for the reply.

I used Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit for both machines and created the primary partitions within it.

EDIT: I'll mention as well that I tried the WEI on both machines and got scores of around 7.5-7.8 for each of them. I know that doesn't mean much but it shows again that the read/write speeds are probably OK, they just don't 'feel' fast for some reason.

 

[ko888]

Hi, thanks so much for the reply.

I used Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit for both machines and created the primary partitions within it.

Then you should be fine in terms of partition alignment.

Some laptop makers provide Paragon Alignment Tool for free so that you can check for misalignment.

http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/04/DriverDetails?driverId=3GFJC&fileid=2731103564

http://sdd.toshiba.com/support/utilities/PAT_Toshiba_edition_ea.exe

 

[ssddx]

the samsung 830 is quite fast. i recently swapped out my wd scorpio blue drive for a samsung 830 256 and my boot times are down to about 7-8 seconds from the 40 or so it normally took. asus k53sv with sataIII i believe.

at sataII performance should be greater than a 7200rpm drive but not as large of a difference. hdds can not max out sata II but new ssd drives can causing limited performance.

it sounds as if you have other issues though. did you do a fresh install of the OS or ghost it on? i used a fresh install for both my home pc (two 80gb vertex 2 ssd) and my laptop (one 256 samsung 830 ssd) and have had zero issues. both run windows 7 home premium.

honestly i can not remember whether or not the pc asked to format the drives or not. i believe i just had to create the partition during windows install. if you did not do a fresh install then you might want to try it.

 

[squirrelonfire]

Ok do your computers support the connectors on the HDD? SATA II or SATA III.
Don't bother with reformatting. What you want is to reimaging the drive completely.
2nd if your CPU is slow, yes your drive will be slow too, so what is your CPU? Also RAM does affect your drive performance.

 

[jmsellars1]

The desktop setup is in my sig, the RAM is running in single channel mode because I have a problem with my DIMM slots.

The laptop has an AMD E-450, 1x4GB DDR3 (probably 1066Mhz) and the Samsung 830 128GB.

The desktop is definitely running in SATA II, the laptop probably is too although I'm not 100% sure.

I think it did ask me to format because the M4 was brand new, it was just completely blank with no file system. I'm not 100% on this either. Both times I did a fresh install though, only a few days ago.