Show us your SSD performance

[tw33k]

My C300 is running off an ASUS U3S6 card. A lot of people say the Marvell drivers are crap but for me, it out performs MSAHCI by quite a bit.

 

[Dave76]

Agree Marvell has not been getting the recognition it deserves.
Whether this has been from the start or their drivers have improved, I don't know.
If they are improving I hope they continue as I have a Marvell 6Gbps onboard chip.

You can compare some C300 AS SSD benchmarks with different drivers here: AS SSD Benchmark thread

 

[Kipper]

Just playing with a new OWC Mercury Pro SSD it is impressing me so far.

 

[Wishmaster]

Heres my Intel X25-V 40GB after a Year and a half of service.


No where near as impressive as some of the newer SSDs, and benchmarks being posted but ...
Still showing numbers as good as it did from day 1. Granted I just had to do a Secure Erase on it after a bit of trouble.


Which leads to me one question in reference to updating to AHCI driver.
Maybe its just me, or failing memory, but I found it odd.

Anytime I have ever updated the AHCI Driver from the MS one to Intels, I would have to reboot after updating it via Device manager.

After the reboot, it would install the AHCI driver, and ask for another reboot.

Then, it would install drivers for each HD I have, and ask for a final reboot.

This is the same process I go through now, when I remove the Intel AHCI driver to revert to the MS one.


Oddly, when I update to the Intel one now, It asks for a reboot, Right after updating via Device manager

And then thats it. No further installs or reboots. It just boots back to Windows and shows its installed.


I just re-installed Windows, and updated the AHCI driver after SP1 was installed if that makes any difference.
It doesnt seem to be affecrting anything, and benchmarks show as fine. it was just a bit confusing is all.

Anyone else notice this by chance?

 

[whs]

You have to remember that the X25V was a "low cost" offering at the time. And as long as your access times stays in the 0.1ms area, there is nothing to worry about. The R/W time for 4K is a bit slow, but then the system does not write that much to the disk anyhow.

I do not worry about AHCI any more. In my experience it does not buy you much in real life.

 

[Wishmaster]

Very true. It was/is the cheapest SSD intel offers.
More less a Entry Level product.

Sadly, I do not think you can even buy these anymore. Its replacement is the 320 Series, which theoretically should be faster.
Even it is only a $99 SSD.

I'll upgrade it at some point, but for now it does well enough for me
Certainly leaps and bounds faster than any mechanical HD, at least for the purpose of the OS.

 

[bheiser]

AS-SSD benchmark with Vertex 3

FYI here's what I'm getting with the following config:

Asus P8P67 Deluxe
2 x 120gb OCZ Vertex 3 in RAID 0 using on-board Intel controller
Intel RST v10101008 driver

The first test was taken with one of the drives in AHCI mode (before the RAID 0 setup). This was a fresh drive that hadn't had an OS installed on it. The stats were a little better than the same test run on a drive that had the OS installed (and several benchmarks already run on it).

The second was taken shortly after I rebuilt the system with the OS on the two devices configured in RAID 0.

The third test was taken today, 10 days later. I have had some periods of very light usage, but haven't yet left it at the login screen yet (unfortunately I don't know of a way to tell whether Garbage Collection has run yet or not).

 

[whs]

I wonder what could have happened that the access time for writes improved 5 times in the thid case.

 

[essenbe]

I'm not sure leaving it on the login screen will help. Last I heard trim doesn't work on raid arrays.

 

[Wishmaster]

There was talk that the newest Intel AHCI driver would now pass TRIM commands.

I haven't been keeping up with much lately, but last I heard it was not totally confirmed.

Im guessing thats all it was .. a rumor and talk? Anyone know for sure?

 

[Airbot]

There was talk that the newest Intel AHCI driver would now pass TRIM commands.

You mean in a RAID array? Thought it always worked with a single.

 

[Wishmaster]

There was talk that the newest Intel AHCI driver would now pass TRIM commands.

You mean in a RAID array? Thought it always worked with a single.

Yes, I was refering to RAID.
I too thought TRIM was fine on single drives, even with the MS AHCI driver.

But I had read a few reports a while back that it was working now in RAID as well with the Intel driver.
Never really looked further into however, as I do not have a RAID array to test.

 

[essenbe]

According to the intel website, it will pass trim, but not in a raid array. I think the confusion was that before the RST 9, it would not pass trim if there was a raid array even if the SSD was not part of the array. The newer intel drivers will pass trim in a raid array as long as the SSD is not in the array. I hope I made sense.

 

[whs]

Same for OCZ Revo drives (which are arrays) - they do not support Trim. On the other hand I really wonder how much difference that makes in real life. I still have two Gen1 80GB Intels - one in a desktop and one in a laptop. I am very happy with their performance despite the relatively slow write speeds in the measurements (I guess the 4K is still relatively good). See here:

 

[bheiser]

I'm not sure leaving it on the login screen will help. Last I heard trim doesn't work on raid arrays.

Based on what I've read on over on the OCZ forum, Trim won't work on raid arrays, but OCZ's garbage collection will. They recommend leaving the computer logged out, at the login prompt, for a few hours (or overnight) a couple times per week.

 

[Wishmaster]

According to the intel website, it will pass trim, but not in a raid array. I think the confusion was that before the RST 9, it would not pass trim if there was a raid array even if the SSD was not part of the array. The newer intel drivers will pass trim in a raid array as long as the SSD is not in the array. I hope I made sense.

Yes it does. Thank You.
That may be where I got a bit mixed up as well.

 

[essenbe]

Extreme Systems is conducting a rather interesting experiment on SSDs, seeing how much you can write to them before they die.

 

[Dave76]

That will interesting to see the results.

 

[essenbe]

That will interesting to see the results.

I think so too. It looks like they are writing close to 3TB a day to a 40GB disk. Trim better work.

 

[Wishmaster]

This will be interesting to see.



It would seem OEM wanted a guarantee of 20GB per day.

OEMs wanted assurances that a user could write 20GB of data per day to these drives and still have them last, guaranteed, for five years. Intel had no problems with that..
Intel went one step further and delivered 5x what the OEMs requested. Thus Intel will guarantee that you can write 100GB of data to one of its MLC SSDs every day, for the next five years, and your data will remain intact. The drives only ship with a 3 year warranty but I suspect that there'd be some recourse if you could prove that Intel's 100GB/day promise was false.

Full article: AnandTech - Intel X25-M SSD: Intel Delivers One of the World's Fastest Drives



Lets see how close these figures actually are