240 GB benchmarking at half speed

Just did a benchmark test of the drive and it’s going about half the speed that it possible.

Specs

  • Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (Cloned from old 500 GB drive)
  • Intel i7-2600k
  • 16 GB PC3200 Ram
  • Lenovo Motherboard (I’ve tried and tried to get exact specs on the motherboard but Lenovo isn’t saying)
  • Using both a port and a cable that reads ‘sata 3’

Is there any SanDisk specific tuning software or otherwise able to tweak my SSD for better speeds?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Please read this forum post - it is identical to your question and most likely the answer is the same, too. Sandisk Extreme 240GB Benching slow (Win 7 + Asus P8Z68-V Pro)

AS SSD uses uncompressable data for the benchmark. Try using ATTO and see what the speed is. 

@drlucky: And what should using a benchmark that uses compressable data change if the transfer speed is obviously already constrained? 

If the data is incompressible you will get a slower sequential transfer speed. At this point it is not clear whether the transfer speed is actually being constrained. Once we see the ATTO results we will have a better idea which direction to go. 

Here’s the ATTO results. Looks like I’m still getting half speed?

@Memrob: No, it’s not the same issue. The other guy has 2 or more SATA 3 ports, some Marvel controllers, some using Intel cotrollers. I have one SATA 3 port using an Intel controller. The fix for him was to switch ports from the Marvel controller to the Intel one. I obvioulsy can’t do that.

@Memrob: No, it’s not the same issue. The other guy has 2 or more SATA 3 ports, some Marvel controllers, some using Intel cotrollers. I have one SATA 3 port using an Intel controller. The fix for him was to switch ports from the Marvel controller to the Intel one. I obvioulsy can’t do that.

I think this is my  problem, having 2x sata 3 ports being used.  How do Ido the swicth please

@Macsure: This is just the best answer I can give off the top of my head, and only because I’m bored and waiting for a reply to this topic, so plaease don’t take this as scripture or help from the far more experienced admins. That being said…

From what I understand, there is not as of yet a industry wide standardized motherboard color coding format for various SATA type ports, speed or controller type. You’ll need to get the spec sheet on your particular motherboard and make sure you have your SSD/s plugged into the Intel controlled SATA 3 slots.If you have trouble finding the spec sheet the admins here are usually wizards at finding it. Again, this is an outsider’s persepctive, I’m not making any claims as to what they can or can’t or will or won’t do. But it’s probably true if you ask nicely, they’ll help.

Also, if you have more than one harddrive with OS’s you’ll want to make sure the harddrive you want to run Windows is actually doing that. (It’s unliklely that you’ll have more than one OS at any time, but there are certain reasons you might. For example, following the clone of my old harddrive, I had two with an OS.) There are a few ways to do this.

In my case, after the clone of the old harddrive, the only useable SATA 3 slot is in position 3 on my motherboard. (My guess is the architects of my motherboard never intended the SATA 3 slot to be the primary data port position but rather an extra data storage slot.) So I had to switch my SSD to the slower primary (SATA 2) slot and format my old harddrive so that when the computer boots it gets past position 1 (the original harddrive, which is now just a slave sotrage drive) and goes to the only OS which is on the SSD.

Hope that helps a bit. Good luck to you.

the speed you are getting looks like you are connected to a SATA 2 port. Can you get us your motherboard make and model so we can look up specs?

Hah, that was it! I had the cable connected to the #3 slot on my motherboard, not the SATA 3 slot. My board simply labels them SATA 1, SATA 2, SATA 3. And because my giant video card blocks 2 of the SATa ports, I couldn’t read the labels. Misleading. Turns out the #3 slot is the only SATA 2 slot on the whole board.

New benchmarks:

Write speeds still going a little slow for some reason. Any way I can tweak that a bit?

I don’t know what you are talking about. The write speed looks perfect for an SSD that has been used some days.

Other get nearly the same results, see last post in the thread I linked in my first post: 

http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/SanDisk-Extreme-SSD/Sandisk-Extreme-240GB-Benching-slow-Win-7-Asus-P8Z68-V-Pro/td-p/278556 

The write speed is always slower that read speed.

Yes, that post illustrates my point exactly. He is getting write speeds of 500+, while mine tops out at 450.

The write speed is very dependant on the wear leveling algorithm. 

Therefore it is common that the write speed differes from SSD to SSD. It depends on the total number of bytes written to the device in it’s life-time, how many space is free on the device (or better know to be free by the device), internal fragmentation (no, this means not the fragmentation of the file-system!), … 

Hence a difference of 50MB/sec on the maximum write speed is nothing. If the difference is about 200MB/sec we can start discussing about it.

I need to free up some space on my device then? Cheers!

Thant is how all SSDs more or less work. Now you can imagine how important the TRIM command is, otherwise the SSD never knows what block belongs to a file or is already free agaian because of a deleted file.

Hence the general rule is to keep at least 20% free on an SSD, otherwise the write speed can significantly decrease. Additionally this increases the lifetime of the SSD.

That’s helpful. Thanks for the advice.