Low 4K-32QD Read score, for M500 120GB?

[VirtualLarry]

My friend claimed his rig was slow again. I think it's a monthly thing for him. I usually try to throw some hardware at the problem for him, but I'm tired ($$$) of doing that at this point. I've advised him to just get a newer PC altogether.

He has an ASRock 780G AM2+ mobo, an AM3 Athlon II X4 640 (3.0Ghz stock, not overclocked), 2x2GB DDR2-800, a NV GT610/620, and an M500 120GB SSD. Win7 HP 64-bit SP1.

Originally, when he said things were slow, I upgraded his 30GB Agility SSD, which was running out of room, with the 120GB M500. (He was getting "pauses" with the old SSD.)

Then I upgraded him from his IGP (which had HW Accel disabled in Flash Player, because it never worked quite right on his board), to the NV PCI-E card, for watching 1080P Twitch streams. (What he does most of the time.)

I tried upgrading his RAM to 8GB, because sometimes he runs out of 4GB of RAM, but that didn't go so well. (Nothing but problems, with cheap Chinese 4GB DDR2 sticks.)

I did a CDM benchmark of his M500 120GB, and he is on a SATA2 port. I got 180MB/sec sequential read, and 24MB/sec 4K-32QD Read. Which seems a bit low.

I double-checked, and his mobo was set to IDE mode. (I apparently FUBARed that when it was initially installed.)

When he was upgraded from the 30GB SSD to the 120GB, I gave him the option of a fresh install, or a clone. We did the clone, because he couldn't find his Win7 retail package that I had given him, with the key.

But this being on IDE mode, is not a new thing.

He and his GF came over to my place recently, and he used one of my OCed G3258 rigs running Linux Mint 17.1. I think that he just got spoiled by the speed, and when he went back home, his PC felt slow. At least, that's how I'm diagnosing this current issue, since I couldn't see anything wrong with his current PC, other than being stuck in IDE mode rather than AHCI mode.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

http://anandtech.com/bench/product/808

The 120GB M500 is not a speed demon by modern standards. Heck, it's not even really bottlenecked by SATA-2.

Doing a clone rather than a fresh install... well... never pass up an opportunity to do a fresh install.

And hey, if all he does is watch movies, maybe he should be running Mint. My dad is dual booting Mint and Win8, and Mint is definitely snappier on the same hardware.

 

[VirtualLarry]

http://anandtech.com/bench/product/808

The 120GB M500 is not a speed demon by modern standards. Heck, it's not even really bottlenecked by SATA-2.

Doing a clone rather than a fresh install... well... never pass up an opportunity to do a fresh install.

And hey, if all he does is watch movies, maybe he should be running Mint. My dad is dual booting Mint and Win8, and Mint is definitely snappier on the same hardware.

Thanks. I agree with all of the above.

I know that the M500 isn't the fastest drive around, but certainly it was faster than the Agility 30GB that preceded it.

I would have preferred to do a fresh install, and changed the BIOS to use AHCI, but that didn't work out.

I had that thought to push him to upgrade to Mint 17.1. At least a dual-boot. I feel that selling him on the point of "no viruses" is a good thing.

Edit: I always forget this - the same reason that my HTPC is on Win7 and not on Mint - MagicJack. PC has to be on, and running Windows, 24/7, to recieve calls.

That, or splash out $70 for a newer MagicJack Plus with wifi support.

 

[LTC8K6]

I installed an SSD in a factory built computer. I knew about the AHCI mode setting. The SATA mode was RAID. The BIOS info said that RAID also enabled AHCI, so I left it alone, thinking it would be okay.

Well, the SSD didn't like it. I needed to set it to AHCI.

So I went searching, and found two set of instructions pretty much the same, from different sources.

The below worked like a charm, except I had to find the one for RAID and set it to 0.

You start with step 1 while you are still in windows in IDE mode.

1) Run the Registry Editor (regedit.exe)
2) Navigate to Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci
3) Set the "Start" value to 0 (zero)
4) Navigate to Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Pciide
5) Set the "Start" value to 0 (zero)
6) Shut down
7) Start up again, but before Windows boots go into the BIOS configuration screens and change the disk mode to "AHCI". Save the new BIOS configuration and restart so that Windows boots.

When Windows starts, it will detect the change, load new disk drivers, and do one more reboot to start up with them.

 

[Charlie98]

I bought an M500 120GB SSD for my daughter's old laptop (2007 Dell... so, SATA2, maybe?) While it read faster (in benches) the write speed was about the same as the 60GB Agility3 it replaced... in fact, I could hardly tell a difference. As it turned out, I put the Agility back in the laptop, and put the M500 in the HTPC where it sees very little writes.

 

[alyarb]

I wouldn't spend too much time on QD32 scores. It's not a real-world test scenario at all...

 

[Cerb]

Swapping to AHCI is pretty easy. Try it.

More RAM should help, but I bet the CPU is just as much of an issue.

Assuming you got a decent OC on the Pentium, and it has an SSD, and then that it's running Mint...he's gonna need a Core i3, minimum, to match that, and then keep his Windows Installation pristine, on top of that.

I'd spend more for an i3 or i5 any day, but the Pentiums are still much newer CPU cores than Athlon IIs, and they feel it, especially on heavy websites (the kind that are Javascript apps more than HTML pages).

 

[BonzaiDuck]

In what year was his motherboard released?

It might have been limited to PCI-E 1.0, or it might have offered PCI-E 2.0. If the latter, he could get a small SATA/RAID storage controller card to use instead of the mobo for $60 or $70. If you don't care about RAID5 or 6, or you would rather use an AHCI-mode configuration, some of those boards will simply auto-configure to Windows' native MSAHCI drivers.

People may have different future needs, so they'd have a varying pattern of PC ownership, maintenance and disposal.

 

[VirtualLarry]

In what year was his motherboard released?

It might have been limited to PCI-E 1.0, or it might have offered PCI-E 2.0. If the latter, he could get a small SATA/RAID storage controller card to use instead of the mobo for $60 or $70. If you don't care about RAID5 or 6, or you would rather use an AHCI-mode configuration, some of those boards will simply auto-configure to Windows' native MSAHCI drivers.

People may have different future needs, so they'd have a varying pattern of PC ownership, maintenance and disposal.

His AM2+ 780G board is from 2007-2008, I think. It's lasted a good long time, and thanks to AM3 CPU's backwards compatibility, it was able to see an upgrade to a decent quad-core. I think it's PCI-E 2.0, but I'm not 100% sure. I do have some PCI-E 2-port marvell-chipset SATA6G cards. I think that they will run with MS's MSAHCI driver in Windows 7.

But the problem with being on IDE rather than AHCI was simply a configuration error on my part, when I installed Windows 7. Actually, now that I think about it, it was probably intentional. Let me explain, he used to have a Windows XP install on a separate HDD. So in order to facilitate him being able to dual-boot, with the minimum of hassle, I simply installed Win7 on his SSD in IDE mode too. So all he would have to do is change the boot order, and not have to worry about keep changing the SATA mode while dual-booting.

He no longer dual-boots XP, so I can probably change it to AHCI.