X-25M write speed half of what is should be...grrrr

[Mako88]

Just installed an X-25m in my Core i7 desktop (Vista 64) and the benchmarks aren't where they should be.

Disabled prefetch/superfetch, disabled indexing/defraging, enabled write-caching and advanced performance, all the usual tweaks but the drive's write performance is about -50% of where it should be along with the read performance being erratic.

Few benchmarks, not sure what I missed:

[safan80]

what do you expect when your using the motherboard to control the SSD. if you want the full speed of the drive you should buy a raid controller.

[Mako88]

what do you expect when your using the motherboard to control the SSD. if you want the full speed of the drive you should buy a raid controller.

I'm not using the drive in a raid setup skippy, it's standalone. No reason why the ICH10 can't handle a single SSD (far below bw saturation point).

[rge]

some setting is off or something funky with the drive. My intel X25m 80gb ssd with core i7 writes 84mb, and that is at default settings, no tweaking of any kind just plug and play into ICH10.

[Mako88]

some setting is off or something funky with the drive. My intel X25m 80gb ssd with core i7 writes 84mb, and that is at default settings, no tweaking of any kind just plug and play into ICH10.

Yeah, your scores are right where I've seen dozens of others online, not sure where mine is having trouble. I doubt it's a bad drive, problems out of the box are more rare with these for the most part.

Other owners are saying that I have to wait for the optimization routine in the controller to settle down, but benchmark results like yours are very typical, no matter what the controller is doing.

Frustrating, can't seem to figure out what setting in Vista 64 is having an impact.

[Speederlander]

what do you expect when your using the motherboard to control the SSD. if you want the full speed of the drive you should buy a raid controller.

Actually, drive doesn't go "faster" with a RAID card, the card and cache just cover up crappy SSD random write performance.

[Mako88]

Just did a full format/reinstall of Vista 64. Didn't change anything besides turning off the page file and indexing. Same benchmark scores. Reads seem ok, but the writes are badly off still.

[safan80]

Actually, drive doesn't go "faster" with a RAID card, the card and cache just cover up crappy SSD random write performance.

There's write performance issues with most of the SSDs because the lack of onboard cache. why did you think the intel drive would be any different? the old standard hard drive had cache added to them for this very reason of freeze issues while writing. I bet the X-25 doesn't have any onboard cache and that's why there are "problems". look at the spec of the drive http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167005

Sequential Access - Read Up to 250MB/s
Sequential Access - Write Up to 70MB/s

of course random writes are going to be crap.

I'm not using the drive in a raid setup skippy, it's standalone. No reason why the ICH10 can't handle a single SSD (far below bw saturation point).

you can use a raid controller in pass thru mode that would allow you to use the full speed of the drive without the need to setup a raid array and no the ICH10 can not handle it. If you had done your research you would know that.

[jcool]

In fact the random write problem of current MLC model SSDs is only in part due to the missing cache.. it is also the crappy Jmicron controller that fails badly with writes. The Intel SSDs use a different (better) controller, which is why they shouldn't stutter (and they don't from what I have read and seen so far).
Something is off here, but I can't tell what exactly either :/

[Vapor]

I'm not sure what's wrong here either....sustained writes should be 2x that.

Block size might need tweaking? (or does that not matter with non-RAID?...been a few weeks since I was near a PC )

[WRC]

There's write performance issues with most of the SSDs because the lack of onboard cache. why did you think the intel drive would be any different? the old standard hard drive had cache added to them for this very reason of freeze issues while writing. I bet the X-25 doesn't have any onboard cache and that's why there are "problems

actually the intel x25M has a 16MB onboard SDRAM@133Mghz cache . You can even see it if you take the drive apart, it's the same chip found in some platter drives

[dinos22]

a friend of mine has two intel drives

they have been steadily getting worse and worse in performance.....he says they are degrading

we are talking mainly benching here. he knows his data and has redone setup from scratch every time for original to recheck figures

they are just getting worse and worse

that is not good from a few months old drives that see an occasional benchmark here and there

it could be that yours was crappy out of the box

i would get RMA if you've spent time to make sure you are doing everything right and definitely dont get the advertised performance

[Vapor]

a friend of mine has two intel drives

they have been steadily getting worse and worse in performance.....he says they are degrading

we are talking mainly benching here. he knows his data and has redone setup from scratch every time for original to recheck figures

they are just getting worse and worse

that is not good from a few months old drives that see an occasional benchmark here and there

Yikes!

[Speederlander]

a friend of mine has two intel drives

they have been steadily getting worse and worse in performance.....he says they are degrading

we are talking mainly benching here. he knows his data and has redone setup from scratch every time for original to recheck figures

they are just getting worse and worse

that is not good from a few months old drives that see an occasional benchmark here and there

it could be that yours was crappy out of the box

i would get RMA if you've spent time to make sure you are doing everything right and definitely dont get the advertised performance

Could he post that up in some detail. There are a lot of people probably buying this drive who would be well served by knowing this.

[dinos22]

he is just dealing with intel regarding this

once he has clarification i think he'll post some info

i think he just wants to be 100% sure so that he doesnt look like a tool if its some simple user issue lol

[rge]

I've had mine for a couple months. Write speeds are either faster or the same speed as my western digital perpendicular drive depending on size file, read speeds are over twice as fast. Loads an identical game about 50% faster. No stuttering ever, dont even know what that is. So far I havent seen any degradation in performance either subjectively or in benchmarks. My OS will never see a hard drive again.

For whatever reason, pc mark 5 hard disk performance does decrease slowly over time, just like on regular hard drive, and defragging brings it back to normal, just like on hard drive. Done it twice over 2 months, and it is a repeatable 10% immediate change. (note, I will ignore posts on SSD defragmenting uselessness or the wear level boogeyman...not to mention this drive will be obsolete in a year or two anyways).

[dinos22]

I've had mine for a couple months. Write speeds are either faster or the same speed as my western digital perpendicular drive depending on size file, read speeds are over twice as fast. Loads an identical game about 50% faster. No stuttering ever, dont even know what that is. So far I havent seen any degradation in performance either subjectively or in benchmarks. My OS will never see a hard drive again.

For whatever reason, pc mark 5 hard disk performance does decrease slowly over time, just like on regular hard drive, and defragging brings it back to normal, just like on hard drive. Done it twice over 2 months, and it is a repeatable 10% immediate change. (note, I will ignore posts on SSD defragmenting uselessness or the wear level boogeyman...not to mention this drive will be obsolete in a year or two anyways).

erm
he was talking about that himself
but his doesnt come back

i'll tell him to defrag the SSD and try lol

[T_M]

Ill definately have to check on my setup once i get established and running again!

[Nostromo]

The ICH Controllers are pretty good I think.
This pic was from 6 I-rams on an ICH9 P5K deluxe..
With a Q6600 at 3.7-3.8
I feel this speed was only limited by the stripe block size . the higher I made it, the faster the speed, but matrix only went so high.


To the OP, it's been awhile since I have used the ICH and matrix disk manager, but you have selected write back cache in matrix manager? and if it doesnt show for one drive, can you make a one drive raid and then do it?

Also OP Can you disable the X25 cache and just use the ICH write back? just for the heck of it, see what results you get. I have read the cache is not to cache any data, but for the intel drive to store it's on the fly
wear leveling data...

I have two of the x25's myself trying to figure it out, but i am on nvidia 790i

EDIT: BTW the I-rams have no cache.. using only ICH write back.. and they are SATA I 150mb's each max.


Nostromo

[Mako88]

I've had mine for a couple months. Write speeds are either faster or the same speed as my western digital perpendicular drive depending on size file, read speeds are over twice as fast. Loads an identical game about 50% faster. No stuttering ever, dont even know what that is. So far I havent seen any degradation in performance either subjectively or in benchmarks. My OS will never see a hard drive again.

For whatever reason, pc mark 5 hard disk performance does decrease slowly over time, just like on regular hard drive, and defragging brings it back to normal, just like on hard drive. Done it twice over 2 months, and it is a repeatable 10% immediate change. (note, I will ignore posts on SSD defragmenting uselessness or the wear level boogeyman...not to mention this drive will be obsolete in a year or two anyways).

Yeah it's strange, I'm wondering now if my benching has influenced the controller routines, meaning I have to wait for the drive to "adjust" back to a higher sustained write level.

Even that doesn't make much sense though, the controller isn't going to reduce write performance by 50% no matter what you do to the drive, so I don't hold out much hope there.

I'm thinking it must be something within Vista 64 on an X58 chipset, meaning a feature or setting I somehow left on, or off, that needs to be toggled. It's tough because there are so few people on this platform (ICH10 + Intel SSD), so the knowledge base isn't there yet.

Thanks to everyone offering solutions. Sidenote to safan80, you are beyond clueless about this tech and topic based on your comments. We're talking about dozens of other ICH9 and ICH10 users with the same drive geting 2x the write performance out of the box in NON raid setups. Wake up.

[BenchZowner]

Quick question.
Are you running the ICHxR on IDE ( Legacy Mode ) mode ?
If yes, that's the culprit more than likely

[ I'm not joking, I'm pretty serious about this ]

[Mako88]

Quick question.
Are you running the ICHxR on IDE ( Legacy Mode ) mode ?
If yes, that's the culprit more than likely

[ I'm not joking, I'm pretty serious about this ]

I tried both IDE and ACHI and the differences were small. I thought for sure that would solve it when I did it, thinking that NCQ was somehow the answer.

Good thought on your part.

[BenchZowner]

There have been reports of SSD Cap-ing with the ICH9R/ICH10R and switching them to RAID Mode ( without setting any RAID arrays if you don't want to create one ) solved the issues.
Remove all the HDDs, let the SSD alone and try RAID Mode.

[Mako88]

There have been reports of SSD Cap-ing with the ICH9R/ICH10R and switching them to RAID Mode ( without setting any RAID arrays if you don't want to create one ) solved the issues.
Remove all the HDDs, let the SSD alone and try RAID Mode.

Will try it tonight, thanks.

[Mako88]

There have been reports of SSD Cap-ing with the ICH9R/ICH10R and switching them to RAID Mode ( without setting any RAID arrays if you don't want to create one ) solved the issues.
Remove all the HDDs, let the SSD alone and try RAID Mode.

Strange, I get a BSOD+reboot consistently, as soon as windows begins to load. The Intel raid controller sees the drive correctly, labels it as a Sata-II unit, but then it craps the bed.

My board's BIOS has a legacy-mode disable toggle when a drive is set to IDE, changing it on/off didn't change any of the benchmarks.

In fact it seems that it's now worse than prior, with strange gaps in HD Tune, which means the fresh install didn't do much: