SSD Problem

[Kessian]

Greetings all,

I recently bought 2 Samsung 830 128GB SSDs. They are plugged into the red sockets of my x58 classified motherboard. I just used AS SSD benchmark and they only road 120mb/s. My OS drive (Corsair x128 SSD) only reads 200mb/s aswell. Even when converting to RAID 0 (bio red sata ports both as RAID) and then set them up as RAID0 using ctrl j produced same performance.

Samsung Magician also doesn't recognise the drives...

What am i doing wrong?



Disk 1 - Corsair X128
Disk 2 - Samsung 830
Disk 3 - Samsung 830

Cheers for your help.

[OS-Wiz]

The Samsung 830 series SSDs are SATA III 6gb, but I don't think there are any SATA III 6GB ports on your mobo, when I did a quick check. So the best you could expect would be around 300mb/s non-RAID. Try formatting them as Simple/Basic, default NTFS, and bench them separately. Also, they'll run best in AHCI mode if you can set that in your BIOS.

[Kessian]

I did bench them separately, and they bench exactly the same speed. I can't run AHCI as my OS drive (the corsair), resets when it hits the windows screen. From what i understand anyway, there is little performance between AHCI and IDE anyway. Yes there are no sata 3 ports, but they should be running at that speed, so i don't know whats happening. I also notice that when i mount them, i lose quite a lot of space off them. This is getting rather annoying. I don't know if it's because i haven't set them up properly.

[Kessian]

I also believe the red sata ports use JMicron drivers. Could this be the problem? Is there anyway to fix this or am i out of luck and have to buy new mobo, ram, cpu?

[OS-Wiz]

AHCI mode is faster on 3rd gen SSDs like the Samsung 830 series. If you want to approach speeds near 6GB and higher when using RAID, you will be better off getting a mobo that has SATA III 6GB ports. You might consider a PCIe card with SATA III ports but they may be cost prohibitive for you. Here's my non_RAID Samsung 830 256GB drive on an Intel X79 native port:

AS SSD Samsung 830 256GB Intel X79 Port.jpg

[Kessian]

I know that i won't approach 6gb/s speeds. The point is, even at sata 2 speeds, 120mb/s for stand alone AND raid seems to be ridiculously low. I've heard running raid on the 2 red slots doesn't work well due to the JMicron, so i will try running raid on 2 of the black ports.
I don't particularly want to get to the point where i have to replace mobo (therefore memory and cpu as well). And if i were to consider getting a raid card, i might aswell just buy the above, as they are quite expensive.

[Kessian]

Found the problem, was running them both in the red sata ports. Plugging them into 2 of the black in raid 0 produced 550mb/s read.

[OS-Wiz]

That's sounds about right given your hardware, etc. Glad you finally got it sorted out.