F120 in Atto drops to 60 - 100 mb/s from 2K onwards

Hi,

I just bought an F120 a few hours ago and managed to clone my new company notebook harddisk (320Gb) running Windows 7 Enterprise on it. The original Win 7 Ent installation had only 1 partition and was using 46Gb of the 320Gb space.

The procedure I used to do the cloning was as follows:

1. In the Disk Management of Win 7, I shrunk the partition size to 50Gb so that it would fit in the F120.

2. Downloaded HDClone 3.9 free edition, created a boot disk from it.

3. Restarted, booted into HDClone, did a hdd to hdd clone with 4K realignment.

4. Swap the hdd for the ssd and booted. Failed to boot.

5. In BIOS, change SATA mode to IDE, rebooted. Went into Windows splash screen. BSOD. Because original mode was AHCI.

6. Switch back to AHCI in BIOS, this time everything worked. Booted into Win 7.

7. Expand the partition to 114Gb, the max size of F120.

8. Change the drivers to msahci.sys. Reboot.

9. Run ATTO, got this,

http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i204/mailsign/atto.gif

The write speed suddenly drops when it reaches 2K. Any ideas what could be wrong?

I did some more tests but the poor performance persists...

Used Paragon Alignment Tool to find out if my partition is 4k misaligned but it doesn't seem to be:

http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i204/mailsign/pat.png

CrystalDiskMark also shows bad performance and a 4K IOPS of only 5481.5! Waaaaaay below the 50000 IOPS promised...

http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i204/mailsign/cdm.png

My drive is already on firmware version 1.1. This is getting really upsetting...

Ok, I've done more research on this issue of mine. It doesn't seem like an issue with the F120 (or any other SSDs for that matter).

Seems that all notebooks equipped with the series 5 Intel chipsets are affected by this problem of poor 4K performance. Refer to article

http://www.storagereview.com/how_improve_low_ssd_performance_intel_series_5_chipset_environments

For comparison, I swapped out the F120 with an Intel 80Gb G2 and it was also not performing to spec. I managed to alleviate the problem a little on both SSDs by following some registry hacks posted on the site but still no where near those popular published benchmarks.

Bummer... :(

Damn it... there's nothing I can do to improve the results.. I've disabled just about every power saving feature in my T410 and the results still around the same...

ATTO

http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i204/mailsign/28-09-201011-46-11PM.gif

CDM shows improvement in random 4K but drop in seq write

http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i204/mailsign/28-09-201011-29-03PM.png

I've given up on this... at this point it could be anything... chipset, drivers, firmware, color of my underwear, etc...

Anyone out there with a similar problem? F series SSD that sucks in a Intel Series 5 chipset notebook?

I must also add that it's not just the benchmarks that bother me. The usual snappy feeling I've gotten used to with my Intel 80Gb G2 launching everything almost instantly is really lacking in the F120. Testing with both drives in the T410, the F120 is always a couple of seconds slower in doing everything. E.g. opening a word attachment from Outlook is instant with the Intel drive but on the F120 takes 2 seconds, launching firefox takes 2 seconds with Intel and 4 seconds with F120, launching Eclipse takes 15 secs on Intel and 20 seconds on F120, etc. It all adds up and is very noticeable.

Weird results. I seem to be maxing out at appx. 85MB/s on write in CrystalDiskMark, which I guess is because I only have a tiny NTFS boot partition.

After fixing the jjb-hack (http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardware-components-aftermarket-upgrades/513313-laptops-w-intel-series-5-chipset-can-not-take-full-advantage-fast-ssds-63.html#post6699987), my 4k results increased to 26/56 (from 18/30).

However, in ATTO my results look normal - maxing out at 270/270(which I believe is because atto only writes zeroes. You can check this in crystaldiskmark too, by changing the "Test Data" pattern in the menu.) It is VERY weird that your write performance in atto is decreasing as the page size increases.

To me it seems like your problem is related to internal fragmentation of the drive. Could be because you have cloned it from another disk. Is trim activated?

Weird results. I seem to be maxing out at appx. 85MB/s on write in CrystalDiskMark, which I guess is because I only have a tiny NTFS boot partition.

After fixing the jjb-hack (http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardware-components-aftermarket-upgrades/513313-laptops-w-intel-series-5-chipset-can-not-take-full-advantage-fast-ssds-63.html#post6699987), my 4k results increased to 26/56 (from 18/30).

 

However, in ATTO my results look normal - maxing out at 270/270(which I believe is because atto only writes zeroes. You can check this in crystaldiskmark too, by changing the "Test Data" pattern in the menu.) It is VERY weird that your write performance in atto is decreasing as the page size increases.

 

To me it seems like your problem is related to internal fragmentation of the drive. Could be because you have cloned it from another disk. Is trim activated?

Is there a way for me to find out if internal fragmentation is the cause? I thought SandForce controllers weren't affected by such things? And yep, TRIM is on as per the instructions on this forum. Are there any tools I can use to "defragment" my F120?...

Btw, are you using your F120 in a laptop with an Intel Series 5 chipset?

Yep, I'm running a macbook pro 2010 (with a series 5 chipset) running under bootcamp (windows 7).

For internal fragmentation you could try filling up the disk (or at least filling it mostly) with one or more huge files (Preferrably 1GB or more), and then deleting them again. I believe this will help only if you have recently enabled trim, though.

Yep, I'm running a macbook pro 2010 (with a series 5 chipset) running under bootcamp (windows 7).

For internal fragmentation you could try filling up the disk (or at least filling it mostly) with one or more huge files (Preferrably 1GB or more), and then deleting them again. I believe this will help only if you have recently enabled trim, though.

Well, I tried that and it didn't work. I even tried shrinking my partition, formatting the unused space then expanding the partition back. Also didnt' work.

I'm wondering if the disk I have is a lemon... but I can't tell for sure

Hy,

I bought recently an F120 ssd. I've installed the ssd on port 2, and secure erased it. Afterwords is did a test with ATTO.

The results are with the msahci.

I simply cannot make the drive reach it's advertised speeds. Where am i going wrong?

Hy,

I bought recently an F120 ssd. I've installed the ssd on port 2, and secure erased it. Afterwords is did a test with ATTO.

The results are with the msahci.

I simply cannot make the drive reach it's advertised speeds. Where am i going wrong?

what's wrong with your F120 speed? What are you expecting? And where's your 2K, 4K, 8K?

Here is crystal's results.

I asked because in the reviews i read f120 reaches 275 writes and 285 reads. I am just asking what can i do to reach those numbers?

Here is crystal's results.

I asked because in the reviews i read f120 reaches 275 writes and 285 reads. I am just asking what can i do to reach those numbers?

Those numbers were obtained using ATTO. Please test with ATTO and post your result.

I posted atto results before i posted crystal.

ATTO looks normal. I'm not sure I see your issue.

I looked here: http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/3375/corsair_force_f120_120gb_sandforce_solid_state_drive/index5.html, and i thought something is wrong.

And another thing, when an OS is installed on the ssd is it normal to lose performance? When win 7 pro was installed on my ssd numbers were way lower.

Post a screen shot from ATTO with it as the O.S. drive. But yes that is normal to loose some performance when you are booting the O.S. from that drive. Because of the O.S. over head.

ATTO looks normal. I'm not sure I see your issue.

I looked here: http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/3375/corsair_force_f120_120gb_sandforce_solid_state_drive/index5.html, and i thought something is wrong.

And another thing, when an OS is installed on the ssd is it normal to lose performance? When win 7 pro was installed on my ssd numbers were way lower.

Look again at the ATTO results in your link from Tweaktown. The tested drive is :D drive, not :C drive. They tested it as attached slave storage, not as the OS drive. As noted, your drive is functioning normally.