Intel 510 SSD Seen as 3Gbs Drive

[idata]

I just built a system on an Asus P8Z68 Deluxe motherboard that includes two Intel 510 256Gb drives. One is drive C and the other is drive D on ports 0 and 1 respectively of the Intel controller. I am not using the Marvell controller. I was dissapointed in the Primary Drive WEI score so I opened the Intel RST Management panel and noticed the C drive is reporting a SATA Transfer Rate of 3Gbs while the D drive is reporting a 6Gbs transfer rate. The only difference between the two drives is the C drive is running the PWG2 firmware while the other one is running the PWG4 firmware. Does anyone have any thoughts on what may be holding this drive back?

[idata]

/thread/24037?start=0&tstart=0 And here's the link to that thread.

LPM also slows down with me under the 510 SATA IIHowever, not much. But it's all about speed here, not the point.More Speed Brakes: SpeedStep and C-states.

One reason for the problem of this thread I see is not.

Hotplug and port swap will probably be considered.

[idata]

Thanks for the suggestion parsec. I enabled Hot Plugging for both the drives but drive C still reported 3Gbs and drive D was still at 6Gbs. So, that doesn't seem to be the root cause in at least my case.

[idata]

Not turn on "hotplug", but off!

The same goes for "LPM"!

[idata]

Thanks for the suggestions Ricki. HotPlug was disabled by default so I get the same result whether it is enabled or disabled. There isn't a setting for LPM so I can't turn it off in the EFI and I am not going to make a bunch of registry edits to turn it off. I wouldn't turn it off anyway without understanding the ramifications of doing so.

[idata]

Hi,

I've been following the suggestions and trying the ones I could access on my system but no luck either. So after reading a lot about AHCI and RAID I decided to take a risk and set up a RAID 0 and re-install Windows. It was pretty easy to setup and Windows installed in next to no time. I've rebooted about 10 times so far and both drives in the array are staying at 6gb/s.

I also ran CrystalDiskMark benchmark again to see if there was any difference in speed overall and there most certainly is! Here is the benchmark with the 2 drives in a RAID 0 array:

This is quite a sizeable increase over the speeds I was getting from AHCI even when they were both running at 6gb/s:

So, I'm going to stick with my RAID 0 array. It's a lot faster and the drives stay at 6gb/s after reboots.

The one drawback is that I can't use TRIM from the SSD Toolbox but after reading up it doesn't appear to be a major problem as the drives have other methods (garbage collection?) for keeping themselves in shape. At first I got a really low 4k benchmark (lower than AHCI) but enabling Disk Data Cache in the RST tool solved that.

I feel a bit of a coward for running away from this issue about AHCI and I do hope you find a resolution.Perhaps after I've re-installed everything the problem will re-appear in my RAID array and I will be back.