Intel 330 Series Maple Crest slow write speeds

[TAly]

Hi,

I have a 120 gig 330 with low write speeds. I have done several things to improve speeds, including these things: http://maketecheasier.com/12-things-you-must-do-when-running-a-solid-state-drive-in-windows-7/2012/0... 12 Things You Must Do When Running a Solid State Drive in Windows 7

I also aligned the disk last night.

I also have AHCI enabled in BIOS.

I am running:

AMD Phenom II X4 955

ASRock 970DE3/U3S3

Windows 7

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

[idata · Accepted solution]

Might not be much you can do, but some explanation needed about your Crystal benchmark.

It looks like you have the data used for the test set to Random, the default setting. Click on File, and then Test Data to check or select the type of data for your test. Crystal's random data is what is called incompressible, or non-compressible data. Other data is considered compressible, which means special processing can be done on the data to make it take up less space (compress it) before it is written to a disk, and the data is restored to its normal form when it is used. The usual mix of data that PC users use, is about 70% compressible, 30% incompressible.

SSDs that use SandForce controllers, like your 330, have a built in feature that compresses data, if possible, before it is written to the SSD. While that process actually results in not saving any space (oddly), it increases the write speed of the SSD. But, if a SandForce based SSD is given all incompressible data to write, it becomes slower. That is what you are seeing in your test. If you change the test data to All 0 Fill or 1 Fill, your write speed results will be much higher.

Also, given your read speed results, and that you have an AMD system, your SSDs performance is being limited a bit by the AMD SATA controller. For some reason, the AMD SATA 6Gb/s controllers are not as fast as the Intel SATA 6Gb/s controllers. Any and all speed specs for a SSD are done with an Intel 6Gb/s controller, and also under the best circumstances possible, as in no OS on the SSD, fresh never used SSD, etc. You can also get higher speeds by if you over clock your CPU.

You might be able to increase your performance by looking for the latest AHCI driver from AMD for your particular AMD SATA controller. That would be available directly from AMD's web site, or check your mother boards download page, but usually those are not the most up to date.

I know some AMD users use the AMD RAID driver, in RAID mode, but just with the drives used by themselves, not combined into RAID arrays. You should still have TRIM working on the SSD, even in RAID mode, as long as it is not part of a RAID array. Check or post in your mother boards forum for some suggestions about this, or where to find the best AHCI driver for your board.

[TAly]

Thank you for a timely and well informed response! These numbers look better.

I have the latest AHCI drivers for my motherboard and I'll just keep looking for tweaks but they'll probably be marginal at best. Again, thanks for the lengthy explanation; this is my first ssd so I'm still learning about them.

[NvanS]

I have AHCI enable and Using Intel SSD 330 60GB & 335 240GB on Windows 7 64bit. The 335 on SATA III gets 492MB/s Read & 232MB/s write, the 335 on SATA II gets 245MB Read & 199MB/s write, however on the On the 330 on SATA II get 259MB/s read 64MB/s tried with 1 2 3 levels cache

I use As SSD Benchmark for results.

Operating SystemMS Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1CPUIntel Core i3 370M @ 2.40GHz

Arrandale 32nm Technology

I get the results on SATA port on Toshiba motherboard or on eSATA cable

All drives are aligned and Intel RST loaded.

What can I change?

[jbenavides]

Hello Dreamwork.Nico,

We will respond to your inquiry in the new thread you created for this matter: