Intel X-25M 80Gb slow 4k and poor acc times

[riteon]

Hi, I've bought a Lenovo X201s and taken its standard drive out in order to put in an Intel X-25m. In fact, I didn't even boot up the PC, I just put the Intel in and did a fresh install of Windows 7 x64.

Now sometimes I feel that the drive is slow, it hangs sometimes and doesn't feel as 'snappy' as I'd expect of a SSD. It's not all the time, but just sometimes.

I've attached a couple of grabs from AS Benchmark, first with the 02HA firmware and then with the 02HD firmware which I placed on it thinking it may help with the speeds and access times.

My PC is a i7 620LM, 4Gb RAM and the Controller is an Intel 5 Series/3400 Chipset Faminly 6 port SATA AHCI Controller - 3B2F.

The drive is SSDSA2M080G2GC.

The Intel Drive had been used in a few other PC's beforehand, just for testing and installing OS's. Would it need to be reset? or would HDD Erase be a good thing to do? Also, if I was to do a HDD Erase, would it be wrong for me to Acronis an image to an external drive, do the HDD Erase and then Acronis back the image (or does this negate any benefits?).

Sorry for all the Q's, but I'd like to be getting the figures seen on this page http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=242059

Where access times are in the region of;
Read: 0.057 ms
Write: 0.084 ms

Compared to mine
Read: 0.208 ms
Write: 0.222 ms

And 4k's are;

Read: 21.69 MB/s
Write: 52.24 MB/s

Compared to mine
Read: 12.9 MB/s
Write: 18.28 MB/s


Thanks in advance for any tips or advice!

[skid00skid00]

Those scores are just fine for a used drive.

[One_Hertz]

laptop controllers are much slower than desktop ones. No surprises... My laptop is just as slow.

[riteon]

Those scores are just fine for a used drive.

Thanks for the reply. It's only been used for 600 hours (according to one of the tools - and is a month old). Kinda surprised at it's degredation so soon ...

[riteon]

laptop controllers are much slower than desktop ones. No surprises... My laptop is just as slow.

Thankd One_Hertz, that really makes sense to me - I'm going to put it in my i7 desktop system and run a test on it there. If I'm getting the higher results for the 4k reads/writes, then I can put this to bed. Will do that over the next few days.

[Soulburner]

It's very possible it is the controller, but I'm not convinced.

Have you tried different drivers? Try the default Windows 7 drivers vs the newest Intel and see what happens.

[riteon]

It's very possible it is the controller, but I'm not convinced.

Have you tried different drivers? Try the default Windows 7 drivers vs the newest Intel and see what happens.

Hi Soulburner, thanks for your reply. I installed the iaStor Intel Drivers (9.x) and still have the same results. In the AS bench the only diffrence was that it said iaStor rather than msahci.

[Soulburner]

Well looking at my setup which is about identical, minus the controller, that has to be it. Same OS, new install, same drive.

You're right, your 4k and access times are on the low side for this drive, but it still blows away every computer with a mechanical drive. Those are going to show around 15ms for access time and maybe 1-5MB/s for random read/write.