Bad Performance G.SKILL FM-25S2S-128GB MLC

[cdrov]

Hi there, i recently got G.SKILL FM-25S2S-128GB 2.5" 128GB SATA II MLC from which i am very dissappointed in terms of performance. I have done the various tweaks but nothing. I get a lot of lagginess while sometimes it makes the PC responds as a Celeron (instead of i7). The worse comes when i try to write a DVD which takes arount 2,5 hr. Sometimes the Hard Disk Led remains lit and i need to wait until it becomes available again. I am using the ssd as the boot to OS disk only while i have 4 more installed as secondary disks. When i cloned the same data to a Raptor the PC became more responsive and of course i am not going back to SSD.

So the point is IS THERE ANYHTING I CAN DO to improve performance?
Is this a common issue with SSDs when they are used as Boot drives?
My G.SKILL FM-25S2S-128GB 2.5" 128GB SATA II MLC is not in G.Skill's site is it a FALCON?
Does it have a firmware update that may improve performance?
Could the specific Drive be defective?

Regards Dimitris

[singlewind]

you may got a faulty one or wrong configuration. since I run very fast under windows 7 RTM with an AMD CPU

[gr8bob]

Seems like the model you're having is the older bird (Falcon drive I mean). The newer ones are FM-25S2S-128GBF1

[Razlak]

Unless the drive says FALCON in huge letters on it, or says says Falcon in device manager, you have the older drive that uses a JMicron controller, which has these stuttering issues. See this article on Anandtech for details: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...px?i=3531&p=17

[Tradesman]

Sounds like you have the original MLC drive, it's specs call for 155/90 R/W, but those are the best speeds they could achieve, which is far from the norm. They also have/had stuttering issues which were a result of the jMicron controller mentioned above. After the MLC drives, they had the Titan drives for a while which also had some major issues, and now have the Falcon drives.

There are a number of tweaks available to improve performance (real world), but the drives are what they are....don't expect major gains.

Tman

[cdrov]

Yes it seems to be the older one. It does not say Falcon though anywhere....Just the Model. Is there anywhere a firmware upgrade for the drive???? Could it be Titan?????Regards

[180kmh]

I have a G.SKILL FM-25S2S-64GB 2.5" and also experience stuttering as well while running on xp. guess its a common fault..

[Tradesman]

It's primarily the jMicron controller, no firmware updates I'm aware of , though there are numerous tweaks available, the ones that will help the most on these drives are those that help eliminate writes to the drive i.e. if you use a virtual drive/RAM disk put it on another drive, any programs that do auto save or timed saves, set those to another drive, set all your tmp/temp/etc directories set those up to a different drive, set the caches for any and all browsers to another drive, downloads to another drive....etc. You want as few writes going to the drive as possible. What you primarily want on the drive is your OS (same with it though-redirect temp stuff to a different drive), and PURE data (not data you will constantly be changing. Also, infrequently used programs or programs that run automatically (like, virus/spyware programs), put the on a different drive.

And don't forget the other tweaks like turning off defrag, et al.

Tman

[cdrov]

I have to admit that i am very dissappointed..... Despite that for psycological reasons can i use the firmware from Falcon to update the drive (Is it a Falcon???)? Thanks

[cdrov]

I have seen a picture of Titan and it looks like mine without the "Titan" logo.. SO what is my Drive (G.SKILL FM-25S2S-128GB MLC) a Titan or a Falcon????

[Tradesman]

Neither - it's the original MLC drive that had no 'fancy' name - if you check back on the post in Feb/Mar or so, those are primarily your drive, They came out with the Titan line towards end of April/early May I believe and the Falcons weren't far behind. The original MLC had stuttering problems and weren't near as fast as advertised, The Titans were some better, but also used the jMicron controllers and then came the Falcons, which are the only ones that have had a firmware revision (to 1571, I think it is) and I believe another is on the way

[TwoCables]

I have to admit that i am very dissappointed..... Despite that for psycological reasons can i use the firmware from Falcon to update the drive (Is it a Falcon???)? Thanks

I'm only replying to reinforce what has already been said: it's not a Falcon or any of the other named SSD drives. It doesn't have the internal hardware that these newer SSDs have (such as the Falcon), so using the Falcon firmware is not possible.

At this point, your best option is to buy a new Falcon or some other drive that you know for certain uses the Indilinx or the new Samsung controllers.

One way to spot one of these drives is to look at the read/write speeds: in general, if the read/write speed of a 128MB SSD is approximately 220/170 or somewhere up in that range (that's Read/Write, respectively), then you can bet that it has either the Indilinx controller, or the newer Samsung controller and thus the performance will be far superior to that of the one you have.

For example, the 128 GB Falcon that has the Indilinx controller has a Read/Write of up to 230/190. But the one you have is only up to 155/90. 155/90 is not that much better than my 150 GB VelociRaptor, which gets approximately 108/110.

So, it's true that the reason you're having to deal with these problems is because of the older JMicron controller.