New Kingston SSD has slow performance.

[LittleJ]

I just got one of the new Kingston 40 gig ssd's from newegg. I just connected it as a second drive for now just to test it, I'll install a new OS later. I started windows xp, initialized and formatted it. Then ran Hdtune.

I was only getting 128 MB/sec for reads. The min and max where the about the same, the graph was a perfectly flat line. Burst rate was around 90, access time was zero.

My mobo, asus k8s-mx only has sata I. I thought would get I 150 MB/sec. If I bought a SATA II controller card do you think I would be able to realize the full potential of the ssd?


Would this be a good option
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816132008

Thanks for your input,

Jason

 

[EarthwormJim]

It's your system drive, it's being used while you're running your tests.

If you want to make a fair comparison to quoted specs or review sites, test while using another disk for your OS.

You didn't buy an SSD for sequential reads/writes anyway, SSD's main advantage are their random read/write performance.

 

[LittleJ]

the ssd IS empty. Only formatted. thanks for the reply

 

[RollerBoySE]

I have Intel X25-M G2 SSD's in two machines, one of them only have a SATA-1 controller. There is a difference in speed when sequential reading big chunks, like when booting the OS, but it's only around 25%.

In normal usage you will hardly notice the difference though since most disk activity on a system disk to a large part consists of randomly reading/writing smaller blocks and even Intel SSD's (Kingston 40 is a scaled down X25-M), fast as they are, can't saturate a SATA-1 speed interface when handling small blocks.

 

[DrBombcrater]

My mobo, asus k8s-mx only has sata I. I thought would get I 150 MB/sec. If I bought a SATA II controller card do you think I would be able to realize the full potential of the ssd?

There's a bit of overhead involved, so SATA-I can't actually exceed about 135MB/sec in practice. But there's no need to worry about it, only the SSD's sequential read speed is bottlenecked by SATA-I and that's not going to slow the drive's overall performance very much.

 

[LittleJ]

so only having sata I should not make boot up any slower or make programs start slower, as compared to sata II?

 

[RollerBoySE]

so only having sata I should not make boot up any slower or make programs start slower, as compared to sata II?

Like I wrote in my earlier post:
There is a difference, but it's only about 25%.

Can you really tell the diffence between 0.5 and 0.625 seconds without a stopwatch?
If you can: Go ahead and buy a new controller. But beware, most cheap add-on controller cards are considerably slower than the on the motherboard integrated controllers (especially if they are part of an Intel chipset).

 

[pcslookout]

How big of a difference is there really between running a SSD in IDE vs AHCI mode? Can you really notice it ?

 

[rcpratt]

How big of a difference is there really between running a SSD in IDE vs AHCI mode? Can you really notice it ?

Yes, huge.

 

[RollerBoySE]

How big of a difference is there really between running a SSD in IDE vs AHCI mode? Can you really notice it ?

That difference is actually probably bigger than between SATA-1 and SATA-2 speeds, especially if you do more than one thing at a time (NCQ really helps when the disk is handling multiple requests).

 

[pcslookout]

That difference is actually probably bigger than between SATA-1 and SATA-2 speeds, especially if you do more than one thing at a time (NCQ really helps when the disk is handling multiple requests).

Ok then AHCI is for me because I love to multitask! I did hear it can hurt single requests though. Not sure how true that is. Shouldn't really matter though.

 

[pcslookout]

Yes, huge.

Then I am glad I wasted 2 to 4 hours trying to get AHCI to work. It wasn't a waste of time even if I couldn't get it to work yet.

Now I just hope I can enable it without redoing my system all over again. If I have to though so be it! Worth it to me! Like people said without AHCI there is no point in using a SSD! I agree that is why I spent 2 to 4 hours getting it to work.

 

[pcslookout]

Interesting looks like I just found out TRIM is on right now even though I am not running in AHCI. Going to try to find out more though. Really curious about this even though I prefer to run in AHCI. I want to know if I can't get it working. It is my second best option. To really say I never thought TRIM worked in IDE mode either.