SSD Hard Drive Benchmarking Testing and Tuning - Part I

To many people, I’m just a nerd and most of them don’t know what an SSD drive is and why they are taking over. In short, Solid State Drives are a much faster technology for hard drives that is more expensive but also  smaller. There are no moving parts and are used in many portable devices such as iPods and in smart phones and tablets. Throughout this article, I’ve put links to key terms in case you want to learn more.

Starting out with my old Patriot Torqx 60GB drive, my Windows Experience Index (WEI) was at a 5.9 as my slowest feature for disk performance. I was determined to bring this up.

New Drive: Corsair Force 3 GT 120GB

The reason I selected this drive and purchased it from NewEgg is that it had just a bit extra performance, was red and matched the red Corsair Dominator memory that I have, and was much cheaper at NewEgg than elsewhere. The drive also won a performance award for “Fastest/Best Performance”.

If you are wondering why I’m writing this it’s because I knew that getting that kind of performance that is promised, wouldn’t be easy but I’m determined to do my best trying. J Upon base installation of the drive my WEI score for disk went from 5.9 to 7.4.

Enabling AHCI Mode

This is the most important part as you will get blue screens and other issues if you just try to enable it. This is the default Microsoft driver that needs to be set at 0. If it’s set to 3 it’s in IDE mode. You can see the path in registry in the screenshot. If you have an Intel chip, you have to also change the iaStorV entry the same way.

If you’re wondering what AHCI mode is, it’s an acronym that stands for “Advanced Hosting Controller Interface” that is designed to work with faster equipment and is used instead of the standard IDE interface.  Integrated Drive Electronics is the legacy technology with some limits that AHCI gets past.

Trim Enabled

Trim is a new technology created for SSD drives so that their speed can be increased and their lives extended. SSD drives have a finite amount of writes available to them so the Trim command handles deletes and garbage collection differently. If you are running Windows 7 and have an SSD, you should enable this.

Modern drives will automatically be detected and have this enabled but it doesn’t hurt to double check.

Running the command below will enable Trim in Windows 7.

DisableDeleteNotify = 1 (Windows TRIM commands are disabled)
DisableDeleteNotify = 0 (Windows TRIM commands are enabled)

Test #1

SATA 3 - Marvell Controller (I/O Connectivity Syba SY-PEX40032)

SATA 3 – Green SATA Cable

Test #2

In test two, I simply swapped out the green “SATA 3” cable for a standard run of the mill red SATA cable that comes with most hard drives. This cable was pre-SATA 3 and I wanted to see if that would make a difference. I had heard that the cables didn’t matter and this was simply a marketing gimmick. It turns out the performance was almost identical.

Test #3

In this test, I switched over to my onboard SATA 2 controller. As an FYI, I kept blue screening and was unable to boot until I switched to the bottom set of SATA ports that were previously for RAID only. After scratching my head on this and staring at the bios screen, I noticed that the only place I could change things to AHCI was on the SATA-RAID setting which gave me the clue to switch to the bottom set of ports.

I’ve got a MSI MF980-G65 motherboard which I also bought at NewEgg. I don’t believe they make it any more as it’s ancient at two years old. It was near top of the line when I bought it. I always by right under the top of the line because I’m not made of money. This board has been solid since I bought it and was the best choice for me when I got two Nvidia MSI GeForce FTX 360 Core video cards. Many of the motherboards were either Intel/Nvidia or AMD/Radeon.

As you can see, my performance really jumped by quite a bit. If you notice, each of the tests starts to top out. What I am beginning to think is that my SATA 3 controller is a piece of junk and I’ll need to go premium to get the most performance. I decided to re-run the WEI and I was very happy to see the disk performance jump to a 7.8 out of 7.9.

Next Steps

From what I can tell here, I’m still capped at the top speeds capable by SATA 2. I need to get a better SATA 3 controller and take full advantage of this drive. I’ll update this post as soon as I have more information. I’m on the hunt for a new controller. J

-Paul @SolarCurve Drew

References

Googling helped for most of this but the Corsair forums were very helpful with a consistent voice from Yellowbeard who is the community manager. I am impressed with their products and their support of their users.