Crucial M4 raid0 seems slow

I got raid0 128gb Crucial M4 x2 just a few days ago and I am a little disappointed+confused with the performance. I'm using the latest SSD firmware, drivers on motherboard, and Intel Rapid Storage. The laptop is plugged. My much slower 6 year-old desktop boots 5 seconds faster and loads games just as fast. Both have the same amount of files.

AMD Athlon 64 x2 6000 3ghz dual core with Samsung OEM SATA II 128gb SSD

vs

Intel Core i7-2670m with Crucial M4 raid0 SATA III 128gb SSD x2

 

Use HDtune to get some benchmarks for the read and write speed (random and sequential) for both setups.

If the SSD configuration is showing normal performance values, then we can rule out bad drives.

 

Will do. Thanks!

I will post the results right after.

SATA II - it's actually Toshiba, not Samsung





Raid0 Crucial M4





Crucial M4 definitely looks faster on the benchmarks, but it doesnt explain how my desktop is faster. My desktop loads Windows startup before the logo even finishes forming whereas my laptop takes 5 seconds longer (from the moment Windows loading screen shows up, not starting from BIOS). Starcraft 2 opens at the same time.

I also have a i5-2500k 4ghz overclock with Crucial C300 64gb on a z68 mobo at school. It boots about as fast as my older desktop here at home and loads games just slightly faster. So then based on my experience, is it safe to say that SATA II vs SATA III vs SATA III raid0 performance gains are negligible?

 

Have you tried recreating the array and reinstalling Windows? My RAID 0 320 series array is usable in like 10 seconds..

 

I'm using a fresh install of Windows and I'm pretty lucky to get the 6990m updated to latest driver, so I'm not sure I'm willing to reinstall Windows right now

I just used a stop watch to test boot times (from 'Starting Windows' to Windows Desktop post-mouse icon loading)

Old desktop - 14.6 secs
Alienware m17x R3 - 19 secs

Well 5 seconds wont hurt my life But I did not pay $200 to get beat by a really old SATA II ssd

 

Well are you sure your SSDs are good? Try installing Windows on each invididual one and see if one has issues. I tested out both of my 160 GB SSDs and RAID 0 went perfectly fine.

Your HDDTune scores are okay, here is my 320 series 160GB RAID 0 scores

 

I found the problem!!
Read this thread. I downgraded my BIOS from A10 to A08 and look at my benchmarks now

 

Huntress, run a crystaldisk mark...A09 and up will downclock to SATA2 so it is definitely good you went back to A08

 

Those writes are abysmal, try the registry tweaks in DR650SE's signature.

 

The write speeds seem right, at least on seq and 4kqd32. Crucial rated it as "up to 175mb/s write," but I will check those registry when I get home.

 

huntress, you can compare your numbers to this...this is 128gig M4 Raid 0

 

Awesome! Thanks! I will run the benchmark again later using the same "3 , 1000mb" settings. I used 5 and 50mb, maybe that skewed my benchmark a little bit.

Here are the results.




Something doesnt look right. I've also followed all the instructions on the SSD tweaking guide. Maybe I've been running the benchmarks too much. I also started using the Windows Boot Time software. I get 19.8 secs here and 13.5 secs on the SATA II desktop.