Phoenix Pro - Low write speed

[ramarlv200]

I purchased the 120 GB G.Skill Phoenix Pro, installed windows 7, upgraded to firmware 3.1, and set BIOS to AHCI mode. My benchmarks are as follows:

ATTO:



The write speed is half of what it should be. Do I need to RMA?

[stratontrack]

Phoenix Pro 3.1 Firmware

I had a real hard time updating the firmware to my drive. I finally realized that I had installed the new AMD ahci drivers and found the firmware would not install until I uninstalled the AMD drivers and reverted back to the msahci drivers. After updating the Firmware I reinstalled the AMD drivers and saw an actual performance boost over the msahci drivers. The new AMD drivers now pass the trim command. Everything seems a bit more snappy. I am getting 255mbs writes and 279 mbs reads. Not to shabby. The best bench marks are gotten from the intel ahci drivers.

[ramarlv200]

@stratontrack

Thanks for the reply. I am not sure why this is happening to my drive. After reading through a few threads, it seems as though it could be a "bad" drive, but I just want to make sure before I do anything stupid

I will take a look at my drivers, and check to make sure everything is okay.

[ramarlv200]

Intel drivers

Okay, I did a quick check, and I do indeed have the Intel AHCI drivers installed.

[TedH777]

This may be a shot in the dark but if you installed Win 7 before switching to AHCI is it possible that Windows did not detect the drive as 4K sectors and now you do not have an aligned partition. This would cause a performance loss. I don't know for sure how to verify this but it is something to check if you can.

[ramarlv200]

@TedH777:

****, you're right. I just used EASEUS disk partition manager to check the properties.
My SSD is indeed not aligned for 4KB sectors.



So, in order to correct this, I just need to reformat and reinstall windows 7, right?
How do I ensure that this does not happen again?

[TedH777]

That should do it if you have AHCI turned on when you create partitions with Windows 7 or the Win 7 installer as it is 4k aware. Formatting will not fix a misaligned partition you will need to repartition. Be sure to backup your data and remove the existing partitions first. There are also some tools mentioned on these forums if you do a search, that can fix the alignment problem but most people recommend repartitioning as the way to go even if you use these tools. Let us know if that fixes your poor write performance.

[ramarlv200]

Update
Well, I reformatted, and re-created the partition with AHCI mode on in BIOS
Again updated to FW 3.1, Intel AHCI drivers installed.

I checked EASEUS again, and obtained the following:



*uber sad face*

In any case, I ran ATTO again, just for kicks. Here are the results of that:



MUCH better. Still nowhere near the 275 MB/s advertised, but it is a big improvement. Reads are showing a slight increase as well.

However, it seems (at least to me) that windows 7 is aligning my partition with the standard 512B sectors, 4096B clusters configuration. Very strange indeed.

[grits]

Alignment

Hi,

I recommend using AS-SSD Benchmark tool to check your drive's alignment.

This thread has a good explanation.

http://www.gskill.us/forum/showthrea...ight=alignment

I also recommend leaving your computer on for a period of time so the SandForce garbage collection can do its thing.

grits