Right, I'm currently in the process of getting a massive windfall from developing Android apps, so I've splurged and got myself a Macbook Pro and a Crucial C300. The Macbook Pro isn't the problem, in fact it's not here yet. The bigger issue is the Crucial C300 256GB. My speeds are somewhat below where I'd expect them to be. It's early days yet, but AS SSD is reporting seq reads of 203MB/sec and seq writes of 122MB/sec - a lot lower than BT say it should. I'm not using the standard sata ports on my motherboard (EX58-UD3R (not to be confused with the x58a-ud3r)) - it runs faster than 3Gbps so I bought an expansion card - the Startech 2 Port Sata 6 Gbps PCI Express SATA controller card. Does anyone have any tips? I'm sure I haven't checked something in the bios or set up something in Windows - this isn't a massively technical problem, I just want suggestions and anecdotes from people who've done the same thing (or similar) as myself
it depends how much slower it's running... Well, if you're only getting ~200MB/s reads then you've got it in a pcie 1.0 slot - i'm not 100% sure what the other slots on your mobo are, but the manual only expressly specifies that the 16x slots are pcie 2.0... ...but you also need to remember that the total bandwidth of a single pcie 2.0 lane is 500MB/s (though this is actually 400MB/s after the 8b/10b (20%) encoding overhead) so it depends how the card allocates the bandwidth... Having just done a quick google search & it appears that it 'should' be possible to get around 345MB/s from a single C300 on it...
You are correct, I fixed it a couple of hours ago. Irritatingly, only my x16 lanes are actually pcie 2.0 - not the much-more-useful ones near the CPU. It's now getting much better speeds - 347MB/sec seq read and 205MB/sec seq write
I was going to make a thread for some SSD help too but I might as well ask here for help too, few questions as I'm new to all this. I have a Corsair F60 SSD and wanted to make sure I have it installed correctly. Should I be running the SSD in AHCI or IDE mode? really confused about that. I have these drivers as options to install, do I need to install any of them? 1.Intel SATA RAID Driver 2.GIGABYTE SATA2 Preinstall driver (For AHCI / RAID Mode) Note: Press F6 during Windows* setup to read from floppy. 3.GIGABYTE SATA2 RAID Driver My speeds look good but I just wanted to know if I'm running it right.
Some people have reported that running SSD's in AHCI mode does have a positive effect on SSD speeds but the downside is if you have already installed in IDE mode you have to reinstall windows under AHCI for it to function properly.
xonar, you don't necessarily have to. I wrote this guide in 2008 for RAID mode (AHCI with raid support (which does have trim if the ssd is not in a raid array) - http://www.xfire.com/blog/bug8504300/153552/ It worked then, might not work on Windows 7 - you can only try with these things!
The recommendation from OCZ (obviously a different manufacturer, but the same controller) is to use the latest intel drivers with SF drives... ...mainly this was because there was a firmware issue with the default Microsoft drivers in Win7 (though that 'should' now be corrected with all of the various companies using SF controllers), but also that it reportedly gives better speeds. (i say reportedly as i've got my 4xV2 R0 array on a lsi controller so can't check)
I'm thinking of getting 1 of these for my new build, what do you guys think, worth it? http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/2TB-...-SSD-Read-1400MB-s-Write-1400MB-s-512MB-Cache
I would love to see windows 7 boot up time on that. How do you check that your SSD is using the correct latest Intel drivers.
Well, once it's gotten past all of the bios & add-on card checks (i've another 3rd party controller in there) then it's certainly pretty nippy ...though will get even quicker once the fastpath key arrives from Span on (hopefully) Thursday - just took a while to locate one over here (in fact Span only started listing it as i enquired in desperation) - along with the battery so that the full write cache can be safely enabled without risk of data loss. Oh, & also use a 120GB V Turbo (ss'd to 60GB atm for speed purposes) for all of the windows temp files & things like the Adobe scratch folders where the V2s may suffer d.t. the Durawrite r-t compression. With the intel driver, the easiest way is simply to install the latest ones since it's not the largest of downloads & won't matter if you try & install it over the same thing... ...so you simply use the RST driver which should be available here... ...or, if you want to check first, you could go into Device Manager, select Storage controllers -> Intel(R) ICH8R/ICH9R/ICH10R/... ...right click & select Properties, & then check the driver version in the Driver tab - the current version is 9.6.0.1014 dated 03/03/2010.
