e4300/ ICH9M + SSD

I have invested in an OCZ Agility 2 SSD, which has a rated read speed of 285MB/s and 275MB/s write.

First thing I did was, of course, run some speed tests. These were lower than I had anticipated, so I ran the majority of the tweaks I found online (changed IRRT to AHCI, ran another tweak tool).

Still the performance, particularly write performance is very low. I mean obviously it won't be quite as high as the rated, but I'm only getting a <150MB/s write speed the majority of the time. That's only about half the rated speed.

I know the bandwidth is there because the read speeds are high enough. Firmware and all drivers are up to date. OS is Win7, clean image.

I have attached an ATTO Benchmark screenshot.

Am I making some amateur mistake? What could be going wrong?

 

I wouldn't say that the drive is underperforming with those numbers, the rated speeds may only happen once in a lab somewhere and never in actual usage. I wouldn't worry too much about it unless you really need every MB/s you can get.

 

I have seen multiple reviews with benchmarks showing write speeds around 200MB/s at least. I'd just like to get what I paid for.

OCZ Agility 2 Extended 60GB Review - Page 8 - ATTO & SiSoftware Sandra

 

Keep in mind that the system used for testing also plays a part and would be out of your control since your settings seem fine to me.

 

I'd be willing to bet it's your laptop, OCZ benched those drives using ATTO and I have always been able to reproduce that bench. Chances are the notebook can't keep up with it. I've seen plenty of notebooks that choke on SSD's.

 

I pulled out my the SSD and put it in my desktop. The write is still capped at the same speed. Is there anything else that could be affecting it do you think?

 

Have you done a ton of benchmarking to it? If you run a bunch of benches the drive will slow itself down. I would do a HDDerase to it which will completely wipe the drive of all data, but restore it to near factory speed. If that doesn't fix it, I'd try updating the firmware (1.11 is the latest I think). If you still don't get anything, check out the OCZ forums.

Sandforce - Vertex2/LE/Pro, Agility2, and Vertex2/Agility2 EX Drives

Edit: What kind of desktop are you testing with?

 

Desktop is an asus P5Q motherboard, Q6600, 4GB ram.

I have since got a much better result after aligning the partition, however I used normal format since sanitary erase kept returning "error response = 01".

I haven't been able to find the meaning of this error anywhere.

 

OCZ has been known to mix higher and lower quality flash chips in their lineup for some time. Performance is never exactly guaranteed with these drives as a result. This is not something you see from Intel or Corsair or Samsung, just OCZ.

The biggest benefit is the short term sub-1ms response time that you will see with most name brand SSDs.

I'm also seeing that you are benching the SSD with 8KB file sizes? Try 1-4MB file sizes for testing writes. All SSDs exhibit lower throughput with smaller files.