I have a Toshiba laptop with an i7 740qm processor and the mobile HM55 Express Chipset I recently installed an Intel 320 !60gb SSD and discovered some interesting information regarding primarily 4k read/writes to this drive. The issue is that Intel's cpu power management drivers (probably in conjunction with turboboost) cuts 4k read/write performance in HALF!
There is a widely disseminated registry tweak that substantially mitigates this effect as follows:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Processor
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Intelppm
Change on both the "Start" from 3 to 4
I would really like to hear from anyone who has used this tweak over a substantial period of time and learn what they discovered regarding heat, performance etc. However, what I would like even more is to hear some official response from Intel on this issue and this proposed 'fix'.
It has also been noted that 4k read/writes improve dramatically if you turn off processor idling or set the minimum processor state to 100% in Windows power management advanced settings...but at the cost of significantly higher processor heat readings. Some people also suggest addressing the issue by disabling P States in your BIOS.
Since Intel has written an SSD optimization routine into their SSD Toolbox software it seems they should give serious consideration to including some variation of this fix since it represents such a significant performance improvement.
Anyone who has a mobile Intel processor/chipset should be clamoring for Intel to respond!
