Dell laptop - Agility 3 SSD poor performance =(

[boxrick]

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....

[thebad]

Southbridge underclocked on laptop to save power maybe?

[boxrick]

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

[thebad]

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.

[zanzabar]

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.

[johnw]

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

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.

[boxrick]

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

[Computurd]

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!

[johnw]

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

[Anvil]

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

[boxrick]

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.