I’m using a Z77 chipset desktop board.
Your benchmark results clearly show you are running at SATA III speeds, otherwise your sequential read speed would not be over ~270MB/s. Ironically, the Intel IRST Windows UI will show the actual link speed, but that is not a question anymore.
If you’re just looking at the final “score”, then AS SSD needs some explanation. Your actual read and write speeds have not changed that much. AS SSD gives more points for high 4K-64Thrd speeds, lose a little there and you lose more points. That test puts 64 I/O requests in a group and sends them to the drive all at once. NO PC user does anything that creates that workload, so it is a worthless test.
Check your read and write sub-score in each benchmark. The Read score went down by 1, and then 2. The Write score dropped by almost 40 with FW R211. Note the 4K-64 Thrd Write speed in each, it dropped. That is what lowers the final score the most.
I also wonder, when using the iaStor driver, if Write Caching is enabled on your SSD. Check it in Device Manager, in the Policy tabs. Actually, if it is checked, uncheck it and click Ok. Then go right back in, check Write caching, and click Ok.
Finally, AS SSD is the toughest benchmark to run on a SandForce based SSD. Try ATTO or CrystalDiskMark, with the test data set to all 0 or 1.
