F3 90GB - Performance deterioration after 1 month of use

I have 2 Force 3 90GB drives, one per computer. One of the drives has shown data transfer deterioration upon running ATTO benchmarking. Whereas initially I was able to reproduce advertised read speeds of up to ~550mbps, now the maximum is around 410, after just one month of use. Write speeds are halved... Installed firmware was already v.1.3.3 at the time I purchased the drives.

 

The disk has 54GB of data on it. It has my OS (Windows 7 64-bit), a couple of games, some drivers, nVidia software - really not much. I have followed the steps of minimizing disk use listed in the stickies on this forum (e.g. no paging file, moving all the temp folders to my HDD, etc.), so I am uncertain what could have caused the drop in performance so soon. S.M.A.R.T. is enabled.

 

Attaching my latest ATTO benchmark result here. If anyone has ideas for what might be causing the speedy deterioration, please let me know!

 

For comparison, the second screen capture is the benchmark of my second Force 3 90GB on my other computer. This one is still operating well with no noticeable deterioration. It has a bit less on it (1 game). One thing to note is that I never used a paging file on the second (good) drive, but I did use a paging file of 1GB min / 2GB max for some time on the first drive, as that system only has 4GB RAM.

 

Deteriorating drive:

 

Good drive:

Some more information here, as I am still trying to diagnose the problem.

 

The motherboard the worsening SSD is on is Gigabyte GA-770TA-UD3. It has 2 Marvell-controlled SATA3 ports, and other ports are SATA2. Both of the SATA3 ports give inferior performance now. Drivers are up to date. Disk cache is enabled in device manager SSD properties, and S.M.A.R.T. is enabled. As far as I can tell, I don't have any C state changes, and my system is set to "performance" mode in Windows. Re-running ATTO benchmark with all Phenom II x4 cores set to 3.6GHz, no downclocking of any sort, does not improve anything.

 

Here are more benchmarks from the past 20 minutes, even worse now. The first one is on one SATA3 port, and the second is on the other SATA3 port.

 

The speeds are normal for a Marvell Controller.

Hmm. Well I wouldn't worry so much if I had seen these numbers from the beginning, but initially the speeds were the same as they are on my Intel set up (i.e. >500MB/s on ATTO Benchmark). I know it's not a good indicator, but I was refreshing Windows experience index yesterday, and the SSD rating went down to 7.6 from 7.9. There's been a real change in speeds since the initial installation.

Results from today... I'm really worried about this daily deterioration I am seeing :( I'd really love to hear any suggestions about the source of the deterioration (faulty drive or something else? my motherboard?)

 

 

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This run is with a brand new SATA cable. Somewhat better results, but interestingly capped at the top range of speeds - could this be enlightening for anyone?

 

I'd suggest you avoid benchmarking the SSD too much as it may temporarily slow it down.

Thank you - yes, I have stopped since the last one; just wanted to check that it wasn't the cabling. Just been reading at this point and investigating the Marvell controller issue, if that is it. I'm just confused why I saw significantly better performance at the start on it if it's not a true SATA III port. The difference in performance is what I'm puzzled about, as I've only had these drives for about a month.