Samsung 850 EVO mediocre performance

[magmag]

Hello,

My setup is a Gigabyte P55A-UD3P MB running an intel core i5 @ 2.6 MHz (stock speeds and voltages). I'm using G.Skill 8GB DDR3 RAM & I'm using a good shielded SATA 3 cable and SATA 3 itself is managed by the built-in Marvell 9128 chip. My setup is kinda old nowadays but everything still works perfectly fine for my purposes so I thought of refreshing my hardware and implementing the Samsung 850 EVO (using firmware emt02b6q) and the system's overall speed is faster compared to my old drive (WD 500GB green) but I don't think I'm getting the most out of my drive. I'm on AHCI mode and I started with a fresh new installation of Windows 7 Professional using all latest drivers and patches. Trim is enabled and partition alignments on SSD are in good shape. Benchmarks using the magician software gave me these kinda humbled results with the marvell 9128 chip:

After a lot of googling, I found out that I'm indeed not lucky with hardware in general as I tend to pick the bad/oudated hardware because I found lots of complaints from the marvell chip so I pulled the sata 3 cable from the marvell chip and sticked it into my old sata2 connector (which i guess is a jmb362 chip or a gigabyte chip - I'm not sure) and these are the results:

and now based on these results, I'm confused about what to do: should I stay with marvell or the other sata2 chip? in other words, do you think guys that the second result is better (even though the sequential read have dropped almost to 1/2)?

Any advices would be highlgy appreciated to get the most out of my drive and mobo as much as i can.


Thx

 

[fireberd]

Here is mine with an Intel controller.

 

[AddRAM]

Only the 2 Marvell sata ports are sata 3 6 Gbps, you have to have the ssd connected to them to get full potential. That would be port 6 and 7, or 7 and 8 depending on how they are marked on the board, but the specs say sata port 6 and 7

Your numbers are not good at all.

These are the specs so I don`t understand why it`s so slow.

2 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors (GSATA3_6, GSATA3_7) supporting up to 2 SATA 6Gb/s devices

Are you sure you have the Marvel drivers installed, and are you positive you have AHCI enabled in the bios.

Run ATTO and post a snip.

Also run AS SSD benchmark and post a snip.

My 850 EVO on an Intel controller.

 

[magmag]

Only the 2 Marvell sata ports are sata 3 6 Gbps, you have to have the ssd connected to them to get full potential. That would be port 6 and 7, or 7 and 8 depending on how they are marked on the board, but the specs say sata port 6 and 7

Your numbers are not good at all.

These are the specs so I don`t understand why it`s so slow.

2 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors (GSATA3_6, GSATA3_7) supporting up to 2 SATA 6Gb/s devices

Are you sure you have the Marvel drivers installed, and are you positive you have AHCI enabled in the bios.

Run ATTO and post a snip.

Also run AS SSD benchmark and post a snip.

My 850 EVO on an Intel controller.

Yes latest Marvell driver is installed and AHCI is indeed chosen before hand in bios before installing the fresh OS. I'm not sure if it is because of my outdated marvell chip 9128 or what? and what to do from my side to get the maximum peformance using my current hardware.

 

[AddRAM]

Still not happy, you could always try one of these.

SYBA SI-PEX40064 PCI-Express 2.0 Low Profile Ready SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) Controller Card - Newegg.com

Doesn`t matter if the Marvell chip is outdated, if the specs say those 2 ports should do 6 Gbps, then that`s what they should run at.

 

[Cr00zng]

The Marvell 9128 chip is an early implementation of the SATA 3 standard by Gigabytes. The actual chip uses PCIe 2.0 lanes. The read throughput that you see is correct, since the single PCIe 2.0 lane has a maximum nominal transfer rate of 5 Gb/s or 625 MB/s. As for reference the SATA 3 has a maximum nominal transfer rate of 6 Gb/s 750 MB/s. The actual transfer rate is less, about 20%, due to the 8b/10b encoding overhead.

I have a Gigabyte MB with SATA 3 ports by Intel and Marvell. While I prefer to use the Intel SATA 3 ports, the Marvell ports are also used and for that matter, all SATA ports are used.... Marvell chip is still much faster than the SATA 2 ports and my system has no issues with the Marvell ports.

If the Marvell ports don't give you any issues, you'd be better off connecting your Samsung SSD there...

 

[magmag]

The Marvell 9128 chip is an early implementation of the SATA 3 standard by Gigabytes. The actual chip uses PCIe 2.0 lanes. The read throughput that you see is correct, since the single PCIe 2.0 lane has a maximum nominal transfer rate of 4 Gb/s or 500 MB/s. As for reference the SATA 3 has a maximum nominal transfer rate of 6 Gb/s 750 MB/s. The actual transfer rate is less, about 20%, due to the 8b/10b encoding overhead.

I have a Gigabyte MB with SATA 3 ports by Intel and Marvell. While I prefer to use the Intel SATA 3 ports, the Marvell ports are also used and for that matter, all SATA ports are used.... Marvell chip is still much faster than the SATA 2 ports and my system has no issues with the Marvell ports.

If the Marvell ports don't give you any issues, you'd be better off connecting your Samsung SSD there...

There are no issues with the marvell chip except that the IOPS results for my drive when connected to SATA 2 are generally better than the IOPS results when connected to marvell!. I haven no idea what chip is powering the SATA 2 because it says nothing in the manual other than 6 x SATA 3 Gb/s connectors & since the results given from IOPS are more practical and related to the real world (as it is said on the internet), I've attached my drive, for now, to the first port in SATA2 untill there are more crucial evidence that the marvell chip is generally better. I'm confused myself and I'm new in the SSD world to tell the difference myself.

 

[Cr00zng]

There are no issues with the marvell chip except that the IOPS results for my drive when connected to SATA 2 are generally better than the IOPS results when connected to marvell!. I haven no idea what chip is powering the SATA 2 because it says nothing in the manual other than 6 x SATA 3 Gb/s connectors & since the results given from IOPS are more practical and related to the real world (as it is said on the internet), I've attached my drive, for now, to the first port in SATA2 untill there are more crucial evidence that the marvell chip is generally better. I'm confused myself and I'm new in the SSD world to tell the difference myself.

In my view...

Most of your activities on your PC are read files, such at times when the system boots, loads applications, etc. While with Windows there's always some writing, like log files, performance data, etc., you really don't write that much to the drive. As such, connecting your SSD to the Marvell chip would result in faster performance vs. having the same SSD connected to the SATA 2 port.

IOPS performance of a drive is overrated in my view for desktop systems; however, it is certainly important for servers that are used by number of other servers and people. In your case, I seriously doubt that your activity on the system is going to max out the 39K+ IOPS of the SSD. You or your system would probably use 10% the most, if that in extreme cases.

I'd suggest that don't look at the performance number, just use the system and see how it performs for about a week. Then switch to the other ports and see which performance you like better.