X25-M SSD Performance Question

[idata]

I recently installed an X25-M SSD in my system and although the Windows Experience Index rates it a 7.7 and CrystalDiskMark shows very good read/write speeds for this drive, I seem to be having issues with it while playing games. While running Fraps in my background I have been experiencing FPS spikes and freezes at certain times on a very non-demanding game that only uses a single core of the processor. I used to run this same game with a Western Digital Caviar Black Sata 6gb/s and had never experienced this kind of shakyness. I have installed the proper drivers for the video card and it just seems convenient that this started occuring when I installed this hard drive into my system.

Specs:

Motherboard: ASUS p7p55d-e

CPU: Intel Core i7 860@ 2.8 GHz

GPU: XFX Radeon HD 4870

RAM: Patriot Sector 5 Series DDR3 4GB

Primary HD: INtel X25-M 80GB (Windows 7 Ultimate)

Secondary HD: Western Digital Caviar Black 640 GB SATAIII (Windows 7 Ultimate, still has an operating system since it used to be my only HD)

I checked the firmware using the firmware upgrade tool and it is up to date. The drive was set in AHCI mode when I installed the operating system because I read about people getting better performance rather than IDE. Any feedback is appreciated.

[idata]

By default Win 7 installs its own ahci driver. If you want to change that you need to F6 the driver, however there is nothing stopping you installing the RST drivers after Win 7 has installed. i.e you could update the driver on your existing copy of Win 7. Just run the driver package and it will install.

Also check out the Intel thread I linked for other options to trouble shoot.

Regarding the performance if you can run AS SSD Benchmark it will tell if the drive is aligned, what driver you are using, your access times and read/ write performance in random and sequential test patterns, which will enable me to see how your drive is performing.

http://www.alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/downloads.php?cat_id=4

[idata]

Thanks for the advice. I understand that I can install the RST drivers, but I don't have a floppy drive to do it with. I guess I was asking if it would be better to buy an internal floppy drive or if an external USB one would suffice. Or, if there were some other way to do this without "slipstreaming" the windows 7 setup disk with the RST drivers supplemented. I'll Supply Screenshots of the AS SSD Benchmark program below:

Interesting how CyrstalDiskMark showed slightly higher results than this program.

[idata]

As I mentioned you only need to use a floppy or USB drive if you want to use the F6 method during the OS installation processes to use the latest Intel drive. If you have already installed the system you can update the driver without a floppy or UBB drive by downloading the driver and installing it from your desktop in the operating system environment.

You can find the driver installation package here:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=2101&DwnldID=18859&lang=eng http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=2101&DwnldID=18859&lang=eng

Looking at your results I'd say (by looking at your write speeds) that the drive is slightly degraded, but as you are running the default msahci driver and Win 7 it should be automatically running to trim to get it back to top specs. Weird.

If you have an 80Gb drive your sequential writes should be around 80mb/s. If you have the 160GB drive your writes should be around 100MB/s. Your 4K writes also seem low.

Why not try this: install the latest RST driver. Download Intel SSD toolbox and run a manual trim command. Then retest to see if things have improved.

Toolbox is here:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=18455

EDIT:

To better answer your question you can get by without a floppy drive, but it can be a pain sometimes unless you make a bootable usb device. Its not necessary to make a bootable device to F6 the drivers as you can simply locate the location of files in the usb device and install from there, but with some firmware updates etc a bootable usb device is needed if you don't have a floppy.

Hope that helps

[idata]

I installed the RST drivers from your link and ran the Toolbox SSD Optimizer and the results I got are below. Everything seems just a bit lower except for sequential read and writes. I can see the change from where it had msahci to iaStor, which i assume refers to rapid STORage technology.

[idata]

Boy that sucks. Sequential speeds are spot on, but random speeds and access times are off. It's like you're using the JMicron port but that benchmark shows the Intel driver so it can't be. (Worth double checking though. The JMicron SATA port on that board would not perform as well as the Intel SATA ports).