I ran crystal disk mark and AS SSD benchmark and this was after i had internally erased my ssd and restored it again and updated the firmware to 4.2 Previously i used to score around 70ish in my 4k write score but i now only score around 50ish. Does anyone know why? I'm using the gskill phoenix pro 120GB ssd.
Is TRIM working correctly? There's an easy way to check it from the command prompt (just Google it). More importantly, does SSD seem noticeably slower in general use? If not then I really wouldn't worry about the results from artificial benchmarks.
Make sure your drive is also properly aligned. Follow this to be sure about everything http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds but other than that you should probably ask this on the gskill forum
TRIM isn't used on Sandforce, just garbage collection. So whether it's enabled or not is irrelevant. As for the reason behind the drop, could be a ton of things. 4K performance IIRC goes down when there's less free space/freespace fragmentation.
Trim is used when all the drive's nand is not fresh. OP let your pc sit in the bios after you do a clean. ie ccleaner/disk cleanup for an hour or two. my gskill needed it after a while. speed it up nicely because GC never does work for me while im in the OS. i only notice a difference if i let it do it in bios.
lol no i didnt mean do it in bios. i meant let it clean up some space in windows, delete your old restore points, and empty out the windows/softwaredistribution/downloads folder. i also would do this batch file that clears out all logs in event viewer(in a old os ive seen it stack up to hundreds of MB, they are useless logs). http://forums.windowsforum.org/index.php?showtopic=46107 after all that, let your system idle in the bios for an hour or two and let garbage collection do its work.
my installation is kind of new i suppose. I don't have restore pts. I use 3rd party ghost software to backup and then restore.
4K @ what queue depth? qd0 shouldn't be affected by anything... as IIRC it generally only writes to one chip at a time - so load-balancing is a non-issue. -scheherazade
If you align it before hand, your fine. If you use Clonezilla or Windows Image, those 2 programs will copy the alignment to the new drive automatically.
First hand Experience. had a bunch of dell 760s at a place i did some work, so i decided to do one OS and copy all the drives. one publisher wanted it as fast as it could so i put in an agility 3 from ghost copy and it was acting kinda slow. so i checked the alignment of the drive, and it wasnt aligned. reinstalled and it fixed the speed. If you need hard evidence, use google. Also, SSD nand have 512kb block sizes and by defualt windows 7 uses 4096kb cluster sizes(which is fine for regular drives) if its set higher than 512kb the SSDs have to atleast double their writes which reduces lifespan overtime and loses write performance.
Guys i'm using acronis which i read is one of the best to create image of your HDD. My HDD is partitioned into 2 drives. How do i check if it's misaligned?
Guys i have paragon alignment partion tool cos once i had to change the size of one my drives and i used it to correctly align the drive. That was done months ago. I ran it today again and it says my SSD drives are perfectly ok so i suppose it's not the alignment that's causing the drop in 4k.
I'm going to test this myself with Windows Backup and see what I find. As for your second point, there's no need whatsoever to change the cluster size from the default 4096 BYTES (Not Kilobytes). 4KB is the optimal balance between available space and file system performance with ANY modern drive. Check them units dawg, they matter.
I just tested the first point and it turns out that if you use Windows built in system image creator, it preserves alignment after a restore. I can't speak for other utilities, but the built in one definitely works. Also I accidentally hit quote instead of edit...
Yes there is a point. If its not 512bytes then there will have to be multiple writes across several blocks of data when there should only be one write because 4096 will not fit inside the nands 512byte block size. which =s reduced nand lifespan and performance Also not exactly why i said kb lol. must have been tired or something Btw, i am talking from first hand experience, ive had a total of 7 SSD drives. Done lots of tests and 512bytes is by far the optimal cluster size. Write speed is reduced by half for me when using 4k cluster size. For my main OS drive(2 agility 3s) i hit 1200mb/s sequential read and 1000~ write using 256 cluster size. by default windows 4k my write was not even hitting 600mb/s. same story for my 2nd raid array for games, significantly reduced write speeds.