03-09-2010 06:21 AM
I've got three 80 GB X25-M SSDs in RAID 0 using the SATA RAID option on my motherboard (Intel ICH10R.) I flashed the drives to the latest firmware on 3-4-10. I am using Vista64 on an i7-920 system.
READ speed is fantastic; 4k WRITE speed is DISMAL - like 4 mb/sec - OR LESS- no matter what benchmark I use. Using AS SSD benchmark I get the following results- What am I doing wrong? Is there some setting I goofed up somehow? I spent $650 on these drives and my system is WAY SLOWER now than it was with a WD Raptor!
Solved! Go to Solution.
03-09-2010 05:48 PM
I suspect your partitions are not properly aligned to erase boundaries based on the screenshot of AS SSD (31k - BAD).
Use this calculator to figure out proper alignment for your disks and then repartition:
03-11-2010 11:49 AM
I couldn't put my original partition image back on the aligned partitions without all kinds of trouble. So I restored the partition completely from an Acronis image then used a GPARTED under Debian live CD to offset the partition by 1025 k. This worked OK. However write performance is a bit better but still slow BOG SLOW. Maybe I'll try a hardware RAID card, I have an open PCIe slot, but they're all so damned expensive for decent ones...
03-11-2010 01:18 PM
Anyone here know if using an Adaptec RAID 5405 will provide any significant performance increase over using the fake raid from my motherboard? (especially write performance!)
03-12-2010 01:46 PM
Use HDDErase 3.3 version to fix those SSDs. I had same problem with Raid 0 2xSSD 80gb drives and nobody was able to help here. For some reason a lot of people thought that Intel X25M-80Gb was G2 but G1. I had same bad write process.
Befor you use HDDErase 3.3 which will properly format your SSDs switch from Raid to IDE in your BIOS.
After doing this your SSD will perform better then brand new one out of Intel Fab.
03-30-2010 12:21 AM
I broke apart the motherboard-based RAID, connected the drives as IDE, booted into Vista and used the HDDErase program and also the Intel SSD toolbox to condition the drives. This had **NO** impact on performance. None at all. These are new drives, I wouldn't an erase program would speed them up.
04-08-2010 03:47 AM
Adaptec tech support pointed out that I had mistakenly set up my three X25-M drives as a SPANNED PARTITION and not RAID0! I GOOFED! Changing over to RAID0 and copying the backed-up drive image back onto the array did the trick!