Hi, I've just built an i5 2500K rig around an asus P8P67 mobo. I have the SSD (OCZ is the make, not sure what the exact model is) plugged into the navy SATA ports on the mobo (6GB/s according to manual). Now I know this is not what the SSD is going to run at but I've just benchmarked it and it's going very very slowly, about 150mb/s read speed. It was about 250mb/s before in my other mobo (asus p5kc). what's going on? what settings in the BIOS do I need to tweak to improve the speed of this badboy?? Cheers
Make sure in the bios that you set the drive to AHCI, rather than IDE compatiblity mode, which seems to force SATA1 speeds. edit: you may need to make some registry tweaks, or reinstall windows when you change to AHCI.
The V2s (& other 3Gb/s SSDs) work significantly faster on the intel controller (ich10r i imagine) & you should install the RST drivers from the intel site (rather than the default MS ones). Also, assuming you reinstalled Windows, you did erase the SSD first (rather than quick formatting)? This is the easiest method &, whilst it's on the OCZ forum, should work with any SSD.
Hi, Yeah the speed improved to 200mb/s when I plugged into the intel controller - I think I used the intel drivers that came with the motherboard driver cd. I think I did just do a quick erase when I reinstalled windows - is the best bet to get the latest intel drivers and do a proper format of the disk then? have to re-install windows again I have 3 normal samsung disks in there to, is it fairly straight forward to setup a raid 0 with two of them and use the other one for storage? was just thinking I'd use the raid 0 array to run steam off.
The reason for wiping the SSD first (using a method akin to the one i linked to) is that it resets all of the nand to a fresh state - by doing it the way you have done means that there will be x amount of 'dirty' nand & it will take time to recover (& is a likely reason for slower b/ms). Whilst it will recover, it's really not the ideal way to do things obviously & would recommend to anyone & everyone to wipe their SSDs before reinstalling an OS. So, assuming you had Win7 or Vista on beforehand (so the alignment will be correct - if you went from XP then there's an issue & i'd recommend wiping & starting again) then you could get away with not reinstalling - just remember for the future that this really isn't ideal. & you can just install the latest RST drivers on top of whatever you've installed so far - i've no idea what came on your mobo disk naturally. As to your second point, obviously you'll need to alter the bios so that the ich controller is in raid mode (if it's currently in achi mode then the SSD should just work), but it's really straight forward to put drives into R0 (though all the info will be deleted from them) -> there will just be a key press CTRL+[some key or other] after the bios checks... Because your 3 drives are identical though, if you have data on the storage one, i'd recommend disconnecting this temporarily first (& booting into Windows to verify you've disconnected the correct one), as it'd be very easy to make it into one of the array drives (losing all of the data on it).
