Corsair SSD Performance Decrease

amandeepmail · 02 Oct 2010

I got my new Corsair Nova V6 64 GB Solid State Drive 2 weeks back. When I first installed it it was very fast and I got hard disk rating 7.3 at Windows Experience Index but in just 2 weeks the rating is gone down to 7.1 and boot time has also increased by 5 seconds. Will the SSD performance fall so fast?
Did i made a mistake shifting from RAID (Normal Hard Drive) to SSD?
Also tell me is there a way to restore high performance of SSD?

UPDATE- Please read my last post

MK2 · 02 Oct 2010

Hi,

A few questions, how full is your SSD at the moment?

If your motherboard supports it, did you put it in AHCI mode?

Can you check if trim is enabled with IndilinxSSDStatus: The Indilinx SSD Status Thread - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net

Can you check if your SSD is aligned (should be with Windows 7) with AS SSD, you don't have to run the benchmark: Alex Intelligent Software - Downloads: AS SSD Benchmark

Please post back the screenshots of both tools.

MK2

amandeepmail · 02 Oct 2010

Hi
My SSD is 64 GB and free space is 20GB.
I am posting the screen shots as requested by you.

I didn't run the benchmark as you said.

MK2 · 02 Oct 2010

I see trim is enabled and your SSD is aligned so that's okay.

Could you also tell me if AHCI is enabled, AHCI is a lot faster (you can check this in the bios) I don't think this is the problem because you say the speed decreased over time but it's good to know so if it's not you can enable it in the future. Here's a link to the Corsair Forum about it: SSD Frequently Asked Questions! - The Corsair Support Forums

Your SSD has a indilinx controller wich supports Garbage Collect it's a automatic function to erase blocks that are marked as erase so they can be used again by the drive. You still have 20GB left so that should be enough for Garbage Collect to do it's work but it only works when your drive is idle. The best way to let Garbage Collect do it's work is to log-off and let the computer sit idle at the log-on screen a couple of nights a week. This should restore some performance.

Most SSD will lose some performance from when new but they should settle and keep a certain speed. Also a lot of SSDs will get slower when almost filled up.

If you're still not happy with the performance after Garbage Collect you could try this tutorial on the Corsair Forum to get the speed back: [Tutorial] Restoring SSD performance and imaging Disk - The Corsair Support Forums

Another thing that's not advised is using Defrag on a SSD drive, this could degrade drive performance and should normally be turned off by Windows 7 automatically.

MK2

amandeepmail · 03 Oct 2010

I checked in the BIOS, there are 3 option IDE, RAID and AHCI and RAID is selected. Should I change it?
Also, if I plan to reinstall OS should I Secure Erase first as given in guide at link you gave me?
Another problem is 15 GB space is taken by page file and Hibernate files and I cant turn off hibernate because I use it. Will this affect the performance?

MK2 · 03 Oct 2010

If you use Raid for other drives on your system you should leave it on Raid if not you can switch it to AHCI. It is best to do it when you do a clean install of Windows 7 otherwise you have to edit the Registry.

Having your page file and hibernate on your SSD should not have a impact on performance but you lose a lot of space and the system is doing more writes to your SSD wich affects drive life. Some people switch their page file to another drive but if this is a mechanical drive it will actually be slower.

Most of the time you won't need a pagefile as big as windows allocates and a lot of people make it smaller, this only will gain you some more drive space. Here is a Link to the Corsair Forum with tweaks you could perform to make your pagefile smaller and lessen the writes to the disk: Windows 7 Tips & Tweaks - The Corsair Support Forums
Remember those are tweaks and not all of them will be necessary and are at your own risk.

I first would see if Garbage Collect will recover some speed before I would do a secure erase and clean install.

Did you see my advice I added on Defrag in my last post?

MK2

amandeepmail · 03 Oct 2010

Thanks for such great advice. I never knew that defrag is not good for SSD (I actually ran it myself). Also that temporary internet files and temp files in other drive trick is excellent (the link you gave me). Thanks a lot.

MK2 · 03 Oct 2010

No problem, let me know if Garbage Collect helpes and if you get the SSD working to your satisfaction.

amandeepmail · 03 Oct 2010

My corsair SSD has died. I don't know how, maybe due to recent blue screens i've been getting.
There was one blue screen (in fresh install of Windows 7 64 Bit) while HD benchmark and now the SSD is not detected in BIOS. Not even in BIOS of other computers. Its is no more running.
Any other way to make sure its dead before returning it?

MK2 · 04 Oct 2010

That's too bad, maybe there was a problem all along and that's why you were loosing speed.
Do you see something or is it not detected at all in the bios?
You could check the Corsair forum: Solid State Drives (SSD) - The Corsair Support Forums for advice and help but if it's not detected at all and you tried it on different computers and with a different SATA cable there's nothing much more you can do I think.
You also can RMA it directly with Corsair.

Good luck!

MK2