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Performance significantly degraded


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Hello,

 

I used to have a 64GB Performance 3 that I purchased in March 2011 and it worked perfect for a few months until I upgraded. That drive never lost any performance and still gave seq. read speeds ~350mb/s when I checked AS SSD in September 2011.

 

So I decided to get a higher capacity 128GB Performance 3 because I was so amazed with the reliability of the 64GB drive. Anyways I purchased the 128GB one in September and everything was great in the beginning (getting seq. read speeds ~365mb/s) but around February 2012, the performance began to decrease significantly. My seq. read speeds went from ~365GB/s to about 250GB/s. And now, it is performing a lot worse than my 7400rpm mechanical drive:

 

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a268/ghy135/corsairssd.jpg

 

Yes I am using SATA III and have tried different SATA ports on my motherboard. I have also tried different SATA cables. But even if it was a driver issue or a cable, it shouldnt be performing worse than my mechanical drive right??

 

-Please help

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Hello,

 

I have tried both ACHI and IDE, still the same. This cannot be right because the SSD is now at half the speed of my mechanical drive. Also I borrowed a friend's SSD (different brand) to make sure its not my motherboard. And as suspected, the speed from his SSD is normal in my rig. Average seq speeds around ~280mb/s. Whereas my Corsair Performance 3 gives me ~59

 

One thing I have not tried yet is testing my Corsair SSD on his motherboard. He has a an ASUS Maximus IV board with an i7 2600k so we will see if it is my board's controller that is causing the problem or not. I plan to test it on saturday. I will keep you guys updated on the result

 

-Thanks

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Those speed drops seem to correspond with SATA version levels. Like when you were getting 350MB/s+, then you were within the SATA3 envelope. When the speed dropped to around the 200MB/s mark, then it was within the SATA2 envelope. And now that's it's around the 100MB/s mark, it sounds like the speed has dropped to SATA1 levels. I wonder if your SSD is having trouble negotiating the proper speeds with its connections? Maybe it starts to fallback to lesser and lesser levels.
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Those Marvell SATA controllers just keep on causing more and more issues. It's always been questionable whether or not the TRIM command is passed to SSDs on a Marvell SATA controller. That could be a major part of the issue.

 

Is that SSD filled to near it's capacity? Free space on a SSD is important, particularly if TRIM is not reaching it.

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Alright I have tested the drive on my friend's Maximus IV motherboard and the same slow speed shows up on his rig as well.

 

I then plugged my mechanical drive to my SATAIII port to see if it affects the speed. My seq. read and write speeds for my mechanical drive are ~90mb/s. I usually have my mechanical drive plugged into my SATAII. ANyways I plugged the mechanical drive to SATATIII to see if it drops down to ~50mb/s but no it remains at ~90mb/s even on SATAIII.

 

So then I plugged the Corsair SSD to my SATAII port to see how it affects the speed. AFter plugging the SSD to my SATAII, the seq. read speed decreased even further..

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a268/ghy135/hddsata2.jpg

I then plugged it back to the SATAIII port and the speed rose back to ~59mb/s.

 

I have tried my friend's SSD on my SATAII and SATAIII ports and both scenarios gave read and write speeds much much higher than these speeds Im getting with my CorsairSSD. I dont understand how it could degrade to below my mechanical drive.....

 

I take good care of my SSDs. Ive never had this problem with my 64GB Performance3 SSD and Ive used that one for many months. It has never lost a bit of performance. This is how my 64GB SSD used to perform:

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a268/ghy135/AHCI.jpg

 

Also, I cannot secure erase this drive because I do not have a DVD/CD burner, blank cd or dvd, or a USB harddrive mount. I do not wish to purchase all these things just to MAYBE fix the issue. And I have tried reinstalling windows 2 times already in case anybody is wondering.

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If secure erasing is possible using just a bootable USB, I will definitely try this. Please give me a few days and I will keep you guys updated on how it goes.

 

Thanks

 

Don't forget to make a backup image of your drive before erasing.

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Well guys, tonight I secure erased the drive using Parted Magic and USB and then reinstalled windows one last time. And the final result...

 

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a268/ghy135/Capture12.jpg

 

:headbang::headbang::headbang::headbang::headbang::headbang::headbang:

 

I immediately began noticing the difference after the secure erase even before doing the benchmark test. Its really strange that it just degraded that much though, what could have been the cause?

 

Anyways Im very glad my drive is back to normal. Thank you guys so much!

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Glad that worked for you.

 

I'm wondering if the performance decrease seen here was caused by the TRIM command not reaching the SSD because of the Marvell chipset? Usually using the msahci driver tends to improve the Marvell's performance, but that does not guarantee that the TRIM command is reaching the SSD.

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