X25-M seems to be running slow.

[idata]

I have a ThinkPad X200 with an Intel X25-M SSD. The machine is running a clean install Vista SP2. For some reason I can't figure out, my machine doesn't be running very quickly. When I run the benchmarks everything seems to check out, but the latency just doesn't seem to be there. It doesn't seem to boot very qucikly, taking about a minute or so to complete. Things open with about the same quickness as the Seagate platter based drive. I think I must have missed something, but I don't have clue what it woud be. Anyone have a suggestion for getting this straightened out? Thanks for any help.

[idata]

At this stage I'm going to guess that your on-board sata speeds are gimped, which is something you can't do anything about. Just because the specs say SATA 2.0 it does not mean you necessarily get the full potential speeds of SATA 2.0. You could ask Lenovo about the SATA specs or you could try the drive on a workstation to see how it performs. There are some benchmark comparisons between ahci and ide here, but as you will see ahci does not really help 4k or access times:

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1022/11/ http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1022/11/

Sadly I think it is the SATA interface on the laptop that is the problem.

[idata]

Thanks Redux. I'm curious in what possible way could the SATA controller be gimped? My laptop uses an Intel chipset with an Intel SATA controller. Would not Intel make SSDs that are compatible with their own chipsets? Thanks for the help so far.

Edit: Does it matter at what point I apply the Rapid Restore Driver, like before or after formatting?

[idata]

Hard disk drive performance has never been enough to utilise the full bandwidth that a SATA 2 interface could deliver so "economies" could be made without anyone noticing…..that was until SSD came along. "Economies" may be due to power saving features or how the chip is wired up. I'm assuming your laptop has SATA 2, but it could be a lower spec. I had a quick look at the specs sheets and it didn't say, although I noticed that an SSD was an available upgrade option. Best bet is to ask Lenovo to confirm the SATA specs and if the SATA interface is capable of running at the full specs.

Regarding the drivers, as long as you use a trim compatible driver the format command in Win 7 will work correctly. MS trim compatible drivers are installed by default. You could F6 a trim compatible driver or you could do the install on the MS default driver and then upgrade after the install to whatever driver you want to use.

You can't switch between ide and ahci mode without first changing the appropriate registry settings. There have been a few posts on this forum on how to do that if it is something you need to do.

EDIT:

This makes interesting reading. I know it's not your model but it gives a clue to what be occurring.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/4882948-post44.html

[idata]

It's not the controller. Here's my AS SSD Bench under Windows 7. It's perfoming much better, but the question remains, why is Vista so much slower? I though Vista and Win 7 were pretty close.

[URL=http://img291.imageshack.us/i/aswin7.jpg/][IMG]http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/8600/aswin7.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

[idata]

That looks a lot better, but it's still not optimal. Your SATA interface is probably carrying some overhead, but I really doubt you would notice any difference between what you have now and the optimal performance available.

When you were using Vista where you running trim manually with the Intel Toolbox? The only thing I can think of is that maybe your drive had degraded due to a lack of trim functionality. With Win 7 trim occurs automatically if you are using trim enabled drivers, which is a big advantage over Vista.