Hey all, I recently took the plunge and got an SSD drive to breath some life into my aging powerhouse (Samsung 256GB 840 Pro). After getting everything set up with a new install of Windows 8, I ran some benchmarks and I do not seem to be getting the speeds I'd expect. From what I read, I thought I'd expect at least 300 sequential speeds? I'm all AHCI enabled too: I am however in a white Marvell SATA 2 port, not a 3, but I've also read I should still be well above the speeds shown. I tired moving to a SATA 3 port and the PC would get as far as displaying the Windows 8 boot logo and promptly shut down... My mobo is a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 rev 1. I've not updated any drivers or bios in the past. Any ideas? Thanks.
Then the first thing you should do would be to update your mobo BIOS and update the firmware on the SSD. Motherboard drivers contain SATA controller drivers as well, so these are your first steps.
You want to use the intel sata ports. Marvell controller has poor performance and on top of that dosen't do trim.
Use Intel Controller. Marvel really screwed up like no tomorrow the SATA-3 Marvel Controller found on most X58 motherboards. The Intel one is way faster and more reliable. Sure you won't reach the max sequential read and write of your SSD, but it will be faster than those figures you have now, PLUS it wont' affect you, as usually you don't work with very large files on a daily basis. Everything you do is with very small files, even games. And the performance of small files is way under the max speed of SATA-2, even if you have the fastest commercially available and in RAID0, SSD configuration you won't reach it. As slow as it sounds, it's still miles faster than HDD's
Thanks guys, I'll do just that. I have a new problem now though. The disk is currently in while Gsata2 port (so Marvel, which is white on these boards). If I try and plug it into anything else, be it Gsata3 or a blue Intel one, the PC gets as far as the Windows 8 logo and abruptly powers off. Any ideas? It would not be the end of the world if I had to re install everything but I wanna avoid that if possible
I believe this has led to some stability improvements on my gigabyte system (although that is just wild speculation, I can't bee 100% certain)
This is all a bit of a shame really, I really don't wanna swap mobo's right now, I can live with the drive not preforming to it's max, but would be nice if I can get it half way there and not the almost HDD figures above. I've installed all the drivers and updates related to Intel from this page: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3304#ov And even did the bios, yet I can't swap the ports to Intel (or SATA 3, although I've ruled that out not based on the advice here). I've read it should not need an OS re install, so is there anything I'm currently missing? I've changed everything to AHCI I can in the bios. Still getting as far as the windows 8 logo and promptly booting down. EDIT: Woot, tried another Intel port, and I'm back up and running. I'll let you know how the benchmarks go. EDIT 2: That'll do me for now Thanks all.
That is perfect. We have the same board (well I have 1 model higher than yours). These are my benchmark (old benchmark.. when I was on Windows 7) Different benchmark, different score, and different OS at the time, and older drivers, but considering all that you can see it's the same. 4K speed is what you work with the most on a daily basis. So you really taking full advantage of your SSD, until you do SSD to SSD or file duplication of large files, like 1080p HD movies or something. I don't think its something you do daily. So fear not, and don't feel any pressure to buy a new board or system upgrade. Not worth it.
I figured I'd use the same benchmark, just to give me total peace of mind. Thanks for making me feel totally happy about my investment again, I don't care about copying big files tbh, it's all about the day to day use and loading of programs.
