Slow Benchmarks of Samsung Evo 850

[Maged_77]

Hi,

I'm a new comer to the world of SSD's as I bought a Samsung Evo 850 500GB during a trip to Europe (so I won't be able to return it back for any reason!) but benchamrks run by the magician software yielded poor results (in my opinion) and I came here to help me know why and else I can do to increase the performance of my drive (Please see screen shot below).

Also do you advice me to update to this firmware shown below or not? (I'm afraid of bricking my new SSD)

My setup is a Gigabyte P55A-UD3P MB running an intel core i5 @ 2.6 MHz (stock speeds and voltages). I'm using G.Skill 8GB DDR3 RAM & I'm using a good shielded SATA 3 cable and SATA 3 itself is managed by the built-in Marvell 9128 chip. My setup is kinda old nowadays but everything still works perfectly fine for my purposes so I thought of refreshing my hardware and implementing SATA 3 HDD and the system's overall speed is even faster but I don't think I'm getting the most out of my drive. I'm on AHCI mode and I started with a fresh new installation of Windows 7 Professional using all latest drivers and patches.


Many thanks in advance

 

[JaredDM]

Definitely do the Firmware update, it fixes some performance issues. The Motherboard might be a bit of a bottleneck, even the SATA interface isn't as fast as the newer M.2 and PCIe interface SSDs. Also, you might want to check that you have TRIM enabled and that your 4K sector alignment isn't off (if you did a fresh install of Windows it will be aligned properly). Also, you might try updating your motherboard BIOS and be sure that AHCI is turned on. Also keep in mind that if you're currently running it as the OS disk and have programs installed it won't give the full benchmark results as other processes are sucking up resources.

Edit: I just saw that you already checked AHCI and did a fresh install. So just check TRIM, and do any firmware/BIOS updates available.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Your motherboard was relased in early 2010. It was during the beginning of the transition from SATA 2 3 Gb/s to SATA 3 6Gb/s ssd's. The Marvel controller wasn't exactly on par with Intel's own embedded controller so synthetic benchmarks may be a little low.

If you haven't already done so, download and install the newest version of Samsung Magician for you ssd. Under system management check the OS Optimization sections. Try selecting maximum performance to see what happens.

NOTA BENE - The maximum performance selection deactivates the Windows backup and restore feature. To reactivate it switch from maximum performance to advance and enable restore and backup.

 

[Maged_77]

Thanks JareDM for your quick reply.
Bios is up to date (it's v. F14) and I think this is the latest afaik.
I partitioned the drive before installing windows 7 just to be 100% sure the partition alignment is taken care of. I used IOMEI partition standard edition which is compatible with SSDs.
Trim is enabled.
Buying a PCIe interface card is not an option for me at the moment since my market is kinda retarded regarding the availablity of recent hardware and general bad prices so even if I find a good card that I'm interested in, it'll be likely to be expensive...bla. That's why I piced the SSD from outside and it was a steal
I'll do the firmware update but because I'm very worried about killing the drive as there's no way to return it (even if I returned back to Switzerland where this drive was bought coz I got it online from microspot.ch thus making it very difficult & expensive to return it back to them), let me know plz if there are any issues with this firmware with other guys or not? I tried searching everywhere but couldn't find useful information. I just want to be sure the firmware is stable enough with lots of people before I apply it myself and also I wish I know a list of fixes that this firmware offers as samsung doesn't provide any info on their website about it.
More importantly, will I lose everything on my C: (which has the OS) and D: partitions (which has my files) of my SSD drive because of any firmware update and that I have to start from scratch on the drive as if it is brand new?

Many thanks...