topic Re: Does this look right? in Archive

Does this look right?

idata — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 08:16:40 GMT

Hi my SSD seems a little slow i ran the AS SSD benchmark and got these results

Does this look normal or should it be faster than this?

Thanks

Re: Does this look right?

idata — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 09:07:22 GMT

Well, in terms of benchmark performance, you could do a lot better. Three things which can be improved upon are the firmware, the partition alignment and the storage driver mode.

Firstly, the firmware in use is quite old (2CV102G9) that I think it was the first firmware of the G2 drives, and it doesn't support TRIM.

Roughly in chronological order:

02G9 (first version of G2 shipping firmware?)

02HA (retracted FW)

02HB (shipping FW I've seen on a few SSDs but wasn't available via update AFAIK)

02HD

02M3 (current firmware)

You'll find it will be recommended to upgrade to the latest firmware on that puppy.

Secondly, the partition alignment is out. This doesn't seem to affect the performance of Intel SSDs as much as other drives, but it's something that you may as well take advantage of.

Thirdly, it looks like you're running in IDE compatibility mode (AHCI mode is typically the preferred mode for SSDs). Also, given it's using the pciide driver, I'm guessing you have a non-Intel chipset motherboard/confguration? It might pay to list your motherboard and confirm OS.

Re: Does this look right?

idata — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 09:54:58 GMT

ok thank you for the reply, I cant figure out which motherboard i have (all programs report motherboard unknown) but i know it is made by ASUS

my operating system is windows 7 ultimate 64 bit

how would i go about updating the firmware to the latest version, and how can i change to AHCI mode?

Thank you.

Re: Does this look right?

idata — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 10:44:16 GMT

Wow I just changed to AHCI mode using a registry edit the difference is amazing,

will updating the firmware give me further improvements?

Can i get some detailed instructions on how to do that please. Does it really require a cd to be burned?

Re: Does this look right?

idata — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:01:49 GMT

i just finished updating firmware to latest version and i ran the test again, another improvement

The only thing left to do is the bad sector, How could i go about fixing that?

Thank you sooo much

EDIT:

Since updating the firmware there is a "safely eject hardware" icon in the toolbar which lists the SSD with an option to eject it. How can i remove this? im not planning to remove the SSD ever. i dont need this eject option

Re: Does this look right?

idata — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 14:44:13 GMT

The benchmark tool in question reports things in a very stupid way. "31K - BAD" doesn't mean you have bad LBAs on your flash drive -- it means the partition it's using for file I/O (benchmarking) is not aligned to a proper boundary, thus your performance will be greatly decreased. "31K" is the offset, "BAD" means "non-optimal". This impacts file I/O performance, not just benchmarking-related tests -- meaning, your drive could be operating much better if the partition were aligned properly.

You'll need to recreate the partition with proper alignment, or possibly "move" it. There are tools for both. I believe a common one people use is the (commercial) Paragon Alignment Tool.

Re: Does this look right?

idata — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 09:12:56 GMT

Is there anything besides the paragon alignment tool that can fix this problem? 25 dollars to fix a single problem that i will probably never encounter again is not worth it. Are there any free tools that can do this?

thanks

Re: Does this look right?

idata — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 15:46:18 GMT

Probably, but I know of none that are "simple to use" and will actually resize your partitions without impacting your data (possibly GPart, but I've had that thing crash on NTFS resizing resulting in 100% filesystem loss). Also the question of data integrity comes into play; what if one of the tools (commercial or free) causes your filesystem to disappear or break? Oops, there goes all of your data.

With that in mind, you could simply recreate the partition, properly aligned, and the issue is solved. This also means backing up all of your data/reformatting, which you should be doing anyway.

Proper partition alignment (during creation) can be achieved using either diskpar.exe or diskpart.exe. They're completely different utilities. The OCZ forum has a http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?48309-Partition-alignment-importance-under-Windows-XP-%2832-bit-and-64-bit%29..why-it-helps-with-stuttering-and-increases-drive-working-life. decent post explaining how to do it with diskpar.exe.