Hello all, I've just bought an SSD and I need your help! These are the benchmarks of my new Crucial M500 (480Gb) drive operating on SATA II (Intel controller): I seem to be getting much lower speeds than I should do (particularly read speeds), even given the limitations of the controller. I expected read speeds of about 280mb/s (near the limit of 300mb/s on SATA 2). Any suggestions? The general consensus on the internet seems to be that I should use the Intel SATA II contollers on my motherboard as these will give me the best real world speeds. Thanks!
You are running it in IDE mode, you are told about that right there on the picture. You need to switch to AHCI (beware that you need to do some stuff before switching, or you will have to reinstall OS).
Doh, thanks - I had it set to AHCI before but it must have reset during a recent motherboard BIOS flash. Here is the result with it on: Thanks!
Glad you've sorted it, AHCI was clearly the issue. I do have a question. How come you're not running it as your OS drive?
Haven't quite got around to re-install Windows on it yet! No other reason apart from laziness... I will get around to it soon. Speeds are obviously a long way off SATA 3 which is annoying, but there's nothing I can do unless I want to completely replace the whole system... (add in PCI-E cards aren't really worth it). Thanks all
Some of the newer pci-e sata 6gbps cards are actually OK. I have one with Asmedia 1061 (I got the version for msata, but they have standard with sata ports too of course) which is actually one from a few years... but it still does pretty good especially consider it cost me like $15. It's not quite as fast as native intel 6gps ports on later series but it gets pretty close on reads, still quite a bit slower on writes but better than 3gbps. It also supports trim so no issues there either.
SATA3 PCIe cards are definitely worth it when you have such a nice SSD! If you have a spare PCIe slot I would definitely suggest it.
