Very slow SSD write speeds

[Dos_Box]

I've just purchased a couple of those £40 SSD drives from Scan I posted up about last week and they are doing a sterling job on some older laptops I have, with read speeds of 195MB/s and write speeds of 161MB/s using CrystalDiskMark. These laptops are about 5 years old and have SATA 2 controllers.

Just to see how this compared to the office PC, a 3 year old i7 with SATA3 and a 2 year old Kingston SSDNow+ drive (SATA2) and I'm getting read speeds of 250MB/s, however the reported read speeds won't top 30MB/s. I've ensured AHCI is on in the BIOS and I've swapped the SATA cable over for a new one but nothing seems to be making a difference. I know the write speeds are supposed to be lower, but not this low! Am I missing something?

[Dos_Box]

Just checked my other drives (conventional disks) and they are writing at just over 100MB/s. It's very puzzling.

[jamesfed]

Updated the firmware on them? I think the drives you are talking about are the old Vertex ones - they were quite buggy to say the least...

[3s-gtech]

We bought some Kingston V100s, what a mistake that was! Thankfully they took them back. Not sure which model you have, but ours were slower than the 5400rpm disks we took out.

[Dos_Box]

Its the SSDNow v series snv425s21, not the V+ as I orginally wrote. My mistake. As yet there is no firmware available, and from what I can gather on the net, everyone else is very happy with them. It has a JMicron controller. I've now tried swapping over SATA ports and done a chkdsk on it (no faults found). I've attached a screen grab using the ATTO benchmark for you to see. As you can see, it's not good.

 

[Dos_Box]

I've just found this on their support site:

 

Performance decrease has been reported on some of the SSDNow drives. If you have an older SSD drive that does not have effective Garbage Collection, SSD drive performance will drop over time. This is due to the way the system overwrites data that has been flagged for deletion.

Try using the Secure Erase tool like HDDErase to wipe the drive and restore it to original condition.

 

I suppose I'll give it a try next week.

[Dos_Box]

Well, this is interesting. After some more digging I have found out that if you disable C-State in the BIOS (On Intel boards) this increases your write speeds on SSD's. C-State is an Intel technology that allows the OS to alter the power to processor cores to save energy. Disabling it has doubled my write speeds, and I'm going back in there to see if I've missed any associated settings

Don't ask my why this works, but I'm sure there is a pretty good reason for it somewhere!

[Domino]

Do they support TRIM?

 

that's what it's there for...

[Dos_Box]

Here is a second screen grab with C-State disabled. See the difference!

 

[Dos_Box]

Do they support TRIM?

 

that's what it's there for...

 

Yes, it has TRIM support.

[Domino]

is it enabled? How to Enable/Check TRIM/AHCI in Windows 7 - The Corsair Support Forums

[Dos_Box]

is it enabled? How to Enable/Check TRIM/AHCI in Windows 7 - The Corsair Support Forums

 

'Yes we have a video!!!!'

 

Sorry, wrong decade.

 

Yes, TRIM is enabled. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a BIOS to fiddle with