Restoring performance on Vertex 3 without TRIM?

[etamin]

Hi, I recently purchased my first SSD, which was a used unit off a forum. While I have had no experience with SSD's, I have been reading SSD reviews on Anandtech for a year or two now so I know some basics. However, I come to you with many questions in order to better understand this drive.

Background:
-- Bought 120GB Vertex 3 second hand for a terrific price of $65. It has ~100 days of uptime on it and was probably not TRIMed because the original owner used it in a Mac.
-- Popped into primary X58 rig, updated firmware from 2.02 to 2.25 and secure erased with OCZ Toolbox
-- Moved into Asus U3S notebook from late 2007 and clean installed with Vista Business 32-bit. It runs a C2D proc with GM965 Express chipset which supports SATA II but no AHCI, only "Enhanced mode." (I don't know what that means)

Bootup and program loading is noticeably faster, but my old drive was only a 160GB 5400rpm snail. Boot time was literally cut in half, but it still takes almost a minute to get to the login screen. Running CrystalDiskMark, I got this:

As you can see, 4K and 4K@QD32 is quite poor. My guess is that the lengthy installation process of the OS and programs + OS updates (many of which had to be rerun because Vista is stupid) wore out the drive. Given my circumstances, I am not able to TRIM the drive (more on that in a bit). It was suggested on another forum that I try secure erasing unused disk space with CCleaner, a process I am familiar with on HDDs. Even with my limited understanding of SSDs, I had my suspicions, but I didn't have any other leads and thought it wouldn't hurt to try.

Well, it hurt. Here is the result:

Hoping the SandForce GC could improved the situation, I let the drive sort itself out while cruising the internet for answers over the next hour. I then reran CrystalDiskMark and got this:

So GC is working to an extent, but why are my 4K read and writes so slow? what exactly happened on a logical level? and what are my options now? I can't pop the drive into my primary Win7 rig to let it TRIM because that rig is running in SATA RAID mode for my primary RAID 1 array. I don't want to change the RAID mode to AHCI and risk breaking the RAID 1.

Looking forward to words of wisdom. Thanks! (sorry for the lengthy post)

 

[Eeqmcsq]

Perhaps you need to align your SSD's partition to match the SSD's erase blocks? I have no idea how to do that in Windows, but that's one idea that comes to mind.

 

[etamin]

Perhaps you need to align your SSD's partition to match the SSD's erase blocks? I have no idea how to do that in Windows, but that's one idea that comes to mind.

Do you use Linux and do that? I have never used Linux before but can probably use the old HDD to install Linux on and run off my primary rig.

 

[Mr. President]

I bought a used Agility 3 and suffered a similar issue where secure erase did little to help performance. I actually had to fill the drive with garbage data then delete it (on Win7) in order to trigger the TRIM command that properly cleaned the drive. TRIM support is actually somewhat lacking in Win7 as it never actually triggers the command on a diskwide basis. Win8 now has such a means in the defrag applet but Win7 only TRIMs the blocks that a file uses when you delete it.

I strongly presume that your laptop supports AHCI even though it's called something else as it should be built into the chipset. If you want to give your disk a cleaner slate then you could install Win8 temporarily and let it clean it out for you before reinstalling Vista. You can still download the Release Preview without having to buy the entire OS and it would help you ensure proper partition alignment.

 

[extreme oc'er]

Well the obvious issue here is that you are using a sata II interface, you will only get the 500mbs r/w speeds if you are pairing that with sata III interface, i know this becuase i have two of these exact drives, one in a sata II board and i get the exact readings, whcih are not much better than an HDD, but i get the full ptoential of 500mbs when in my gaming rig which has sata III interface, also you have to configure this to raid.

 

[Mr. President]

^ The difference between SATA interfaces isn't going to cause those kinds of differences in 4k operations. The more likely explanation (especially regarding the latter score) is that IDE mode doesn't support command queueing.

 

[tweakboy]

What is all the noise about. Those Crystal scores are correct. SATA 2 max is 250mbps

Do you have it connected to a SATA 2.0 port ?

Scores are fine if its in SATA 2.0 mode. Is that Vertex 3 sata 3.0 ? If so then the scores would be 500mbps. gl

 

[ryderOCZ]

GM965 chipset does not have a proper AHCI mode. Check your device manager under "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" is there anything about AHCI listed there? Like "Standard AHCI 1.0 controller"?

 

[Mr. President]

GM965 is the north bridge; the accompanying south bridge should be ICH8M (judging by the laptops product literature) which does support AHCI. It's not unusual for laptop makers to call IDE/AHCI other names like 'compatibility' and 'enhanced' or 'legacy' and 'SATA Mode' or similarly vague wordings.

 

[Eeqmcsq]

Do you use Linux and do that? I have never used Linux before but can probably use the old HDD to install Linux on and run off my primary rig.

Yes, I do use Linux to create an aligned partition, but it requires using the command line tool "fdisk" to do it. If you're really interested, I can tell you the commands I use.

One problem is that I don't know if the Windows installer will simply install on this partition, or if it will erase the partition and create one of its own.

 

[Yellowbeard]

GM965 is the north bridge; the accompanying south bridge should be ICH8M (judging by the laptops product literature) which does support AHCI. It's not unusual for laptop makers to call IDE/AHCI other names like 'compatibility' and 'enhanced' or 'legacy' and 'SATA Mode' or similarly vague wordings.

Actually, Eric used the term correctly. "GM965" is the complete chipset nomenclature for the entire chipSET, NB + SB.

http://ark.intel.com/products/29821/Intel-82GM965-Graphics-and-Memory-Controller

 

[Mr. President]

Yer, I guess I'll concede that. But, more importantly, the site lists 82801HM/HEM under its components which is the ICH8M. The laptop should support AHCI from what I can tell.

Intel's naming policies do tend to be convoluted (to say the least) so I'm not quite staking my life on it. I'm just saying.

 

[etamin]

Wow, thanks for all the replies guys.

First off, I want to clarify that I am very much aware of the SATA II limitations and was not complaining about sequential read/write times. The random read/write times were what bothered me. For reference, here are two examples I found of the 120GB Vertex 3 running on SATA II:

*note, the left one is on a basically empty drive, and I suspect the sample on the right is moderately dirty. Either way, the 4K r/w speeds are much higher than what I am getting.

ryderOCZ and Mr. President, that was a nice find on the chipset support for AHCI. I looked up the specs on ICH8-ME before but only to verify the SATA generation as it never occurred to me to look for AHCI (since I didn't see it worded that way in the BIOS).

I just looked it up in device manager, and there is indeed an Intel(R) ICH8M SATA AHCI Controller-2829 under ther IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers!

Eeqmcsq, I appreciate the offer and advice, but that would be a last resort for me as I am not confident in my ability to do anything command line related at least I think I have a lead to work with now. I'll see if the AHCI mode can be enabled.

Thanks for your wise words

 

[etamin]

Update:

I found this little article on enabling AHCI in Vista and Win7:
http://www.mydigitallife.info/how-to-enable-ahci-support-in-windows/

It turns out that the registry change advised in that article was already applied, hence why I am seeing the AHCI entry in Device Manager already. So I must already be running in AHCI. I also ran AS-SSD benchmark which says "msahci-ok," supposedly meaning the drive is in AHCI mode already.

I also just disabled and deleted the system's pagefile to reduce background writes. So far CrystalDiskMark is not showing any improvement. I am going to let the system idle for a while and try again.

Maybe this is all just Vista's fault for not supporting TRIM. If I install Win7 on this notebook, will the Vista drivers work? Asus only provides Vista drivers for the U3S and I can't find any documentation online about making the OS upgrade.

 

[ryderOCZ]

If you are in AHCI and using the MSAHCI driver, that is good. To improve 4K performance, install the Intel AHCI drivers for that board. Which, are going to be quite old, but should give SOME (maybe 1-2 MB/s, maybe 10) increase in 4K.

Those drivers should be on the download page for the laptop. You can use the newer 10.x or 11.x RST drivers, but the ideal situation is to match the driver to the OROM that is in the bios. Since your bios/OROM is so old, using a new driver isn't the ideal situation. If you cannot find it there, I suggest this version:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Det...=17412&keyword=Matrix+storage+driver&lang=eng

It seems to be the latest that mentions AHCI support on the 965 Chipset.

 

[ryderOCZ]

I should also note that with every SSD I have tested, platform makes a big difference. Laptops ALWAYS underperform compared to their desktop equivalents.
I have a Sandy Bridge Dell Laptop and when I bench any of our SSD's, the 4K's are lower in the laptop compared to P67/Z68 and X79/Z77 desktop boards.
It has to do with the power saving that laptops go for in regards to battery life.

If you set your power plan to High performance instead of balanced you may get a little more as well.

 

[etamin]

Excellent ryderOCZ! Installing Matrix Storage Management seems to have done the trick! (Asus did not offer any specific AHCI drivers)

Here are the new speeds in CDM:

High queue depth 4K performance is now perfect and 4K performance has also impoved. I'm completely satisfied with these figures. also, the benches were all run on high performance mode set up via RMClock Utility.

Another question though, is Matrix Storage compatiblity determined by the chipset or by the OS? If I switch over to Win7, should I install Intel RST or MSM?

 

[ryderOCZ]

Chipset, although Matrix was out way before Windows 7, you might have to try the "oldest" version of RST.

You can try the newest version too, it may show better performance, but you might pay lose some stability.