Crucial m4 slow 4k write/read speeds.

Hello kind people of Notebook Review.

I'm a new user, and while I was not registered yet to the forums, I was browsing the for SSDs tips and tricks and whatnot.
Last night I've finelly decided to drop a brand new Crucial m4 256 gb SSD into my Alienware m17x R3.
After browsing the forums here and there, I have installed it in the bay #1, made a fresh Windows 7 installation and installed all the drivers.
The SATA connection method in the BIOS is set on RAID.
Everything is good and smooth, had no stability issues whatsoever, but there's something that concerns me.
To make sure the SSD was running on SATA III speed, I downgraded the BIOS to A08, downloaded from DELL drivers page (after installing Windows, but I don't guess that makes any difference, does it?)
Whenever I run benchmarks as AS SSD or CrystalDiskMark, I keep getting very low write/read 4k values.
Looking at the values in the screenshots below I'm positive that these values are definitely wrong. Intel RST shows that the SSd is running at SATA III speed tho.
I'm thinking to reinstall Windows 7 switching to AHCI, could that solve it? Or did I missed something along the way?
This is the very first time I installed something within a laptop, so try to keep it simple please

I thank you in advance, looking forward to an answer!

 

I had similar issues with an Intel 520 series that I installed in my M17 and someone suggested Paragon Alignment Tool. You can find it via Google.

It isn't free but it's not super expensive and it definitely made a major difference.

 

So you think it might be an alignment problem?

 

I don't know enough about them to say with certainty but I do know that when I had a similar issue I was told about the Paragon Alignment Tool and it solved my issue. My score jumped to well over 600 overall and my write speeds increased dramatically.

 

I'll run Crystal on my desktop, it uses a Crucial M4 256.

My M17 just did this on a SanDisk Extreme:

Seq R 490.4 W 284.4
512k R 444.2 W 280.4
4k R 30.36 W 50.07
4k QD32 R 219.4 W 235.8

Bios is set to RAID, forgot to switch it before I put the drive in. Doesn't seem to affect the performance though, at least from the benchmarks I have looked at.

 

You need to turn Write Caching on.

 

Seems that switching to AHCI made the trick. The benchmarks I'm getting now are way better. I'll post a screen later tonight. I didn't made a full reinstall of windows, but I'm ventilating the idea of doing that just to be sure everything is fine.

 

I think the reason for that is that SSD work best when TRIM is enabled in the OS. If you are running from Raid then TRIM doesn't work except in the newest Intel OROM (which has yet to be released I think).

 

TRIM is enabled on mine and it's on RAID.

 

Yep, while I was on RAId it said it was enabled for me aswell.

 

Ahh ok. Then I'll stand corrected then. It must not depending on controller support then. It must depend on if you are actually doing a Raid at all. The array hides the drives so I thought it might be the controller doing it.

 

I fought with this same exactly problem with my SSD for about what ?? 10 month more or less and I already give up. Switch from Bay 0 to 1 doesn't work, PCM Fix not much help, Update my SSD firmware, Switch the system to AHCI, Switch to modded A08 BIOS and still my AS SSD Benchmark won't go faster.....

Now, I'm getting paranoia to buy another SSD to put it on my system.....

 

These are my new benchmarks, which seem way better now

 

what changes did you make?

 

First of all I reinstalled windows with AHCI drivers, and then I simply activated cache writing (which I deactivated to test, but I was getting the same results as the first screen. Cache writing is enbaled by default.)