Windows 7 - New to SSD's. First install attempt with bad read/writes

Hi everyone, first time poster here. Maybe you all can help me figure out what i did wrong.

I switched over from a hdd to a ssd for the first time. I installed the new 120gb Patriot Pyro on my sata mobo and took the advice from some other posts here about doing a quick Windows 7 backup/restore to get my OS back on the new ssd. Everything seemed to work fine. Booted up first time with no problem. Thought everything was okay until i started gaming. Noticed significant decrease in performance. Did a couple of speed tests on the read/write for my ssd. I know that no ssd is gonna perform to factory specs but mine is horribly low. Patriot describes this Pyro model as having 550 give or take a few on the read/write. Im getting less than 150 on multiple tests with different software. Anything that you all can see thats an obvious mistake with my install process and maybe how to fix? thanks in advance.

*Major Update*

I called Gigabyte and this particular model mobo is only Sata2 @ 3gbs and does not have the capability in the bios to set AHCI mode. Is this my major issue?

What port is it plugged into? Makes a huge difference.

When You restored the image it did not slign your SSD. To check, open a elevated compemand prompt. (click start, type cmd in the search box, right click the cmd snd select run as administrator) In the box thst opens type diskpart and press enter, when it responds diskpart, type list disk and press enter, It will list every drive in your computer and give each a number. (Hopefully, yours is drive 0) type selrct disk 0 (or the number given for your SSD. Next type list partition and press enter. It will show each partition on the drive with it's size and offset. The offset is your alignment. Use the snipping tool and take a snip of the window, save it to your desktop (or wherever it is easy to find) use the paperclip icon at the top of the reply window here to attach it. The alignment must be divisible by 4, but if you have the 100MB partition the results can be confusing. If that is the case, it can be fixed with this tutorial.

EDIT: to help, this is what it should look like.

Not sure, there are 3 sata ports on my mobo. im not home right now but i think i remember that 1 port is a different color from the other two, any way for me to tell which port my primary ssd is on? i also had a hdd and an optical drive hooked up on the other two ports when i did the install

It should be doing better than that. Check out the tutorial essenbe posted.

When you do the diskpart I posted above, when you do the list disk command, it usually lists them in order. But, your mobo manual should tell you the port numbers.

That sounds like a Sata3 port and that would be OK. I agree with the others, you have an alignment problem. That can degrade the performance by up to 300%.

Before you do anything, check the alignment and let us kow what it says - copy the command prompt result here. See under "Verification" at the end of this tutorial: SSD Alignment

ok i'll check the mobo manual for port info. what exactly am i looking for? what port should the ssd be on?

I think you are OK.

Thanks for all the helpful replies so far. When i get home in a few hours i'll jump into all the suggestions and get those screenshots up on post. Just thinking ahead a little....

If i wanted to start over, since I have a good recent backup of my hard drive and a ssd that is obviously in good working order, what would be the suggested course of action to wipe the drive and start over with doing all this the right way from the beginning. Im assuming that i did/did not do something during my initial install and would like to know for future reference how to get it right from the start.