Dell laptop - Agility 3 SSD poor performance =(

I have just purchased a Dell L502X and placed an agility 3 120GB SSD inside it. Performance seems to be improved but not as much as i expected, in particular compared to my desktop ( running an I7 920 and using SATA 2 ).

Bare in mind this is the exact same drive on both machines.
Even the performance numbers arnt that great for a decent SSD. Any help?

In my desktop i got the same sequencial reads, the writes were pretty much at 170-190
The 4K scores were approx 100Mb/s Read and 70Mbs Write
The 4K-64K were much closer to the sequencial writes. And access times were pretty much the same.

The drive is set to AHCI, i have rapid storage installed and all appropriate chipset drivers are working. This laptop is the latest gen Sandy bridge along with Sata 3 and a Quad core I7....

http://www.boxrick.com/Agility3.png

Southbridge underclocked on laptop to save power maybe?

I thought something like that but i forced performance mode and tried disabling speedstep and pretty much same results... =(

Speedstep and performance mode is only on the CPU. I think you cannot change the clock on the mobile southbridge. I could be wrong as I do not know what your laptop is running but I think it is defaulted for lower power consumption.

the fsb or qpi or HT (depending on what u have) is alot slower on a laptop, so u wont get any ware near the performance of a desktop in bench marks (and storage speed is nerfed). the main reason for the ssd in a laptop is to save power and remove seek time.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by boxrick

I thought something like that but i forced performance mode and tried disabling speedstep and pretty much same results... =(

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speedstep is not what needs to be disabled to fix this problem. You need to disable "C-states" or something like that with a C in it. That is the power saving feature that shuts down entire cores of the CPU.

There is pretty much nothing in the bios of this laptop which is ashame.

probably locked to sata 1 speeds. most laptops are. your chipset will be capable of sata2, but they lock it out as a power saving feature. this will not stop them from marketing it as sata 2 either LOL. and when you will call them they will give you the same line i just gave you.
trust me, Internets full of people who've found this out. a quick google should help you find more!

Well, he has 205 MB/s sequential read, so it cannot be limited to SATA 1.5Gbps.

There are things you can do to get better performance on laptops.
I've tried the tweaks and they work but at the cost of battery life and I personally care more about battery life than the small RL gains.
So, you'll hardly notice the tweaks in real-life but you will in benchmarks.

Link to notebookreview

The drive was causing my laptop to crash and randomly freeze up for long periods, replaced its original drive for the moment and its stopped.

Ordered myself a Crucial M4, will wack the agility 3 in my main PC.