confused about SSD speed on SATA2 pc under crystal disc mark

[Unique]

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/storag...ow-v200-120gb/


i got one of these last week, the kingston V200+ 120gb SSD at a bargain price of £73 to use as a boot drive in an old machine i use daily

i was confused as i ran crystal disc free version and it was showing about 160MBs read and 150MBs write in crystal disc mark (on the top line sequential). i understand using SATA2 instead of SATA3 i wouldn't get the full speeds of 500MBs or whatever, and there were likely to be pie in the sky anway, but i understood SATA1 was 150MBs capable and SATA2 was 300MBs capable, so expected the drive to run at about 300MBs without a sweat for reads at least

but now i look at the review as i type this at work, and see that the benchmark is showing 211MBs read and 148MBs write, using a much newer/faster/better SATA3 pc

so obviously i'm not understanding something, and my SATA2 system is giving me reads of about 75% of maximum and similar writes. i was thinking that maybe something else was wrong, i checked TRIM is enabled and the drive appears to be aligned, the mobo doesn't seem to have AHCI

so the speeds i mentioned, do they seem about right for SATA2? why is the review saying it's closer to 500MBs and crystal disc mark is much lower? is there another good free checking program that shows figures along the same lines as the 500MBs advertised speed

i'm confused as i don't know if it's performing well or it the pc is just crap or if i need to tweek more. it's win7 64bit. i also tried using a PCI-e sata card but it ran slower in that, so i'm sticking to the (intel based i think) on board controllers. it's an E5200 2.5ghz dual core CPU with 4gb ram if that gives indication of the age etc. i've only used about 50gb of space and just cloned the boot drive from my HDD

[Phage]

Sounds like a mis-aligned install. You really should do a clean install when moving rom HDD to SSD.
I'd reinstall W7 to the SSD and then run the bench again. (Bearing in mind that too many benches will degrade the performance of the SSD)

NB Use Windows 'easy transfer' to get all accounts settings and documents from one setup to another. You'll need an external drive.

1) Change storage to AHCI in BIOS (dunno why you wouldn't be using this in the first place though)
2) Unplug old HDD, Plug in SSD to first sata port
3) Install W7 64 to SSD from DVD or download.
4) Install all important system drivers (chipset, graphics, Intel RST).
5) Open RST in system tray and check that disk data cache is enabled
6) Disable file content indexing (optionally turn it off completely) for SSD and double-check that Windows has correctly disabled scheduled defrags for SSD
7) Run WEI
8) Plug old HDD back in.

[Unique]

thanks, but there's no AHCI option in the bios, and i looked online for something to check the alignment which said to look for something and if it divides by 4096 then it's aligned, and i checked TRIM was enabled. i forgot about the file indexing but i normally turn that off anyway so it should be disabled, likewise most non essential start up processes i disable via services.msc. re-installing is a major PITA for me

on another pc a couple of months ago i did the same thing on a newer pc that's still SATA2 only and that seems to be running faster, but it has 8gb ram. i suppose i should run the same benchmark and see what it comes up with, although it's a different SSD it's the same size and controller (sandforce)

it's just that the review stats were only about 25% different to mine, so it sounds like i'm not understanding the benchmarks properly

[kalniel]

Change test pattern from random to all 0 or all 1s.

Sandforce controllers are much slower for random data.

[GoNz0]

to be fair they are also a very low end SSD as well so the chance in it using all the sata 2 ports very slim.

[Unique]

Change test pattern from random to all 0 or all 1s.

Sandforce controllers are much slower for random data.

that gave about 233MBs read and about 238MBs write which is closer to the max SATA2 speed. i thought i'd get closer to 300MBs. it's still about 3x faster than an HDD though