Port 0 / Sata III Speeds Dropping To Sata II Speeds

I think i follow you now. Look what I found.
Dell SSD Laptop & Notebook Hard Drives : Hard Drives - Internal : Storage, Drives & Media | Dell

 

Well guys, the parts list was compiled by ChrisM so maybe the LiteOn's are no longer issued - I know that when I have looked online, there has NEVER been an option to choose sata III over sata II.

 

This is true, but i found how he did it though.

 

Well, I think those you can buy from Dell "aftermarket" but are not offered for configuration. I think its pot luck as to wether you get a PM810 or a Liteon Vangogh, which as the parts list states, is Sata III

I know Amo ordered via my rep and got his drives installed at factory, not aftermarket. Basically showing that Dell do stick 'em in at production.

Very odd though, I must admit. We will have to ask Amo to confirm but I could swear he had it already in when his rig shipped. I remember as he had issues pretty much right away - I think he had a PM810 and a Vangogh in Raid 0, so obviously dragging down to Sata II speeds.....

Maybe he was sent one as a replacement....heck, the UK website doesnt even tell you if its sata II or III.....madness!!

 

I was looking for his benchmarks, but i haven't found them yet.

 

Guys - I got a reply from DELLChrisM and he is going to let the right people up the chain know about the issues identified in this thread.

 

cool. sounds good.

 

Thanks Foxxy!
Hopefully it is a quick and easy fix.

Cheers.

 

Will have to wait and see what we hear back from DELLChris_M or Dell-Bill_B. (They both got my PM.) I hope so, too.

 

after 3 hours and my drives never once dropped out of sata 6gb speeds on the dt.

 

Thanks for the heads up, guys. We have this one in front of the appropriate teams. Chris escalated it up the chain over the weekend, and I added another team to the email string. Once the dust settles a bit on our side, Chris or I will post some kind of detail back.

 

Bill - we appreciate everything. Thanks to both of you!

 

just to let you guys know, my system shipped with sata III raid 0, the liteon drives are sata III, very good drives, just im having this problem with drive failure. im going to try another benchmark software to see if it happens. do you guys think i could have dud drives? worth a replacement?

proof they are sata 6 liteon

Spoiler

 

That's good to know, bro. What is it that makes them "very good" if they are failing? What are the symptoms you are experiencing?

Hopefully, SATAIII 6GB/s SSD is the only spec Dell will be shipping in the M18x going forward, even though the order configuration page suggests they only offer the slower SATAII 3GB/s SSD for the M18x.

 

good performance, only twice they failed but i have not had to reinstall everything. and ony at 80% for some reason, hopefully someone can shed some light on this for me.

 

80 percent? Is that 80 percent full?

Do you have and speed test? Thanks.

 

when they were fresh from install


now


the drives were failing at 84%-85% full, but now ive cleared some space it is performing the test no probs.

Also, i didnt know about garbage collection working only when the system is idle, so for the last 2 days ive been leaving my alienware on login screen all night.

 

this is what it says when it failed, i just clicked reset and all was fine.

 

Hummm, I would get the failed on Port 0 and do what you did to reset it. And that could happen at any given time. Including but not limited to during a fresh os install.


In your case...i would off load a bunch of stuff to a esata or usb 3.0 laptop drive.

 

RIght that doesn't seem to be an issue with reverting to SATA 2, if that was the case your read speeds would drop to 400/500...

That is definitely a GC related issue, as stated, leve the PC on for a few days and the speeds will go back to where they were, just make sure the PC is IDLE.

 

Maybe the next release of Intel RST will help out as we now have TRIM (or will have soon) for Raided SSD's....'bout time too.....I am still inclined to think that it could be something mobo related as other users or the same RST experience no drop outs, right?

TRIM or RAID 0? SSD owners will no longer have to choose -- Engadget

This should help out nonetheless....

 

Finally got my SSD to behave, and accept an OS

Anyhow, here's the bench's on each port:

 

Port1 looks awesome. Port0 looks... not awesome. I'm sure it still feels really fast, but I've got to say it is a huge disappointment to see that.

 

Yep. I agree. Port 1 is running sata II speed.

 

Its the same drive tested on each port, as you can see port 0 dropped to SATA II.

 

Sorry - got my ports muddled there for a moment but definetly not how it should be. Strange how some are having port 0 drop out and some have port 1 drop out.

I dont know if there is some incompatability between OCZ and M18x but it seems to be a problem raising its head with OCZ owners ??? - seems that John, Dan and Shiandy ALL have OCZ drives and have the problem whereas Myself, Mr. Fox and tetsussaiga have other SSD drive manufacturers and do not have the problem ..... Amo's problem seems to be GC related, not port/sata dropout.

 

Am I correct in assuming you can run SATA III & SATA II drives on the same connection, or is the SATA II drive, dropping the SSD to SATA II ?

Reason I ask is when I first tested the drive on Port 1, the SSD was the only one connected, when I moved it over to Port 0 I also connected my hybrid drive.

 

Both ports should run Sata III regardless. If you have a Sata II drive on either port, it will be Sata II. If you have a Sata III drive on either port, that should be Sata III.

There is a trend emerging here where OCZ drives are the ones having the issues.....

 

I take it, I can just swap the drives ports, or is there a reason the boot drive should be on Port 0 ?

 

It does not matter. Just set the BIOS to boot whichever port has the boot drive.

 

if anyone has sata 2 speeds where they should have sata 3 you need to get a motherboard replacement, that was the only fix for me. when m18x first came out i think i had 3 replacement systems of which two had the hard drive issue.
quickest and easiest way to check would be to go into intel rapid storage technology and check the advanced drive information.

or do you guys have a different problem and i am talking out my... ?

 

I spoke to an L3 today and he said that new rigs are shipping with Sata II SSD's - when I asked why this was when the chipset is capable of Sata 6gbp/s, the response I got was that using a Sata III drive may cause instability in the system.

Now, to me, that sounds like one of two things:

i) A bunch of rubbish to avoid the added expense of shipping these beasts with Sata III enabled SSD's

ii) There is a known issue with this chipset dropping sata speed - maybe Dell know about this and that's why they ship with Sata II drives.

Personally, I cant see the logic in NOT shipping with a Sata 6gbp/s drive, when the HM67 is capable of 6gbp/s on two ports, unless one of the above is true.

 

And now it would seem that this is a possible confirmation.

 

If you randomly phone Dell, you do seem to get a selection of clueless people. Given Dell-Bill_B is looking into it (who based on previous evidence a) knows what he is talking about and b) gets things done), and doesn't yet have a definitive answer, I wouldn't take that as any kind of confirmation.

The web chat is even better:


Whereas from what I can tell it's likely to be 16/32G depending on the processor selected. Bizarrely,

Intel® Core? i7-2670QM Processor (6M Cache, 2.20 GHz))

says the max supported RAM is 16Gb, but you can configure an M17xR3 with a 2670QM and 24Gb on dell's site. Given that I suppose it's no surprise the reps get confused

 

mdw211 - welcome to the NBR community. Sorry that I had to pull the quoted chat message out of your post. To post such content is against forum rules.

Depending on which system you are referring to, the http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m18x/575859-official-m18x-owners-lounge-thread.html or the http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...ial-m17xr3-owners-lounge-thread-part-3-a.html is the best thread to post a question about maximum memory capacity for the M17xR3 or the M18x.

We're glad you joined us and we look forward to seeing more of your posts in the future. Below are some threads that will help you get off to a great start in our community.

USEFUL THREADS FOR FORUM MEMBERS

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...ion-how-search-forum-read-before-posting.html

http://forum.notebookreview.com/site-suggestions-help-announcements/109941-forum-rules.html

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sit...5516-reputation-points-power-user-titles.html

http://forum.notebookreview.com/site-suggestions-help-announcements/137713-forum-guide-how.html

 

Not sure what ram has to do with is. can you enlighten me?

 

Oops, sorry about that -- the redacted version is from a web chat with a dell rep they weren't sure how much RAM the 17xr3 can take. AFAICT it depends on processor (the link posted is the Intel specs which indicate the 2670QM supports 16Gb of RAM at most), and I was told 16Gb was the max, but if you go to the site you can order 24Gb of RAM with any CPU (the other CPU options can support 32Gb, which is obviously also m/b dependent so I still don't have a definitive answer there). So basically no wonder the Dell reps get confused. Anyway, the idea was, don't take what the reps say as confirmation!

 

ROTFL - Really hard!
You're a funny guy!
+1 For being funny!

 

m18x on A05 BIOS.
2 x OCZ Vertex 3 Man IOPS running firmware 2.15 in RAID 0, 64Kb stripe.
Intel RST 10.8.0.1003.

I see this problem intermittently. It's only ever port 0 that drops to 3 Gb/s. I don't yet understand when or why it drops from 6 to 3 as I certainly do get 6 on both ports some of the time.

One thing I've noticed is having any external USB storage (HD or key) always drops port 0 to 3 Gb/s. However it happens at other times too.

My current theory is that external USBs are hitting the same bus somewhere. I don't think I've ever seen 3 Gb/s when I had no USB devices connected at all but it's hard to prove a negative.

 

So, the discussion back in August on the other thread was never finished. What was the secret, Xeneize? LPM fix or something else?

My Crucial M4 is rock solid 6GB/s on Port0 but flat-out refuses to run at 6GB/s without disabling LPM.

Joe - how often do you get the drop to 3GB/s without a USB device connected? This seems like a slightly different problem than what John and Dan are experiencing, although there are some similarities. Even so, it is interesting that connecting a USB storage device would affect SATA Port0/1 speeds.

 

So, brother John. That looks super, but is it sticking like that now in RAID0? How long?

 

That was my desktop brother Fox.
Now when i get my new rig, i will see what it has to say. I did that testing to show it had nothing to do with my drives.

 

Oh yeah. I saw that the other day. I was excited for a minute and thought maybe you had miraculously healed your M18x. Wish it were so.

 

Agreed! LOL. I wasn't sure where he was going at first either, but the explanation makes sense and makes win all at the same time. +rep as well.

 

**CAPTURE REQUEST. CAPTURE REQUEST.**

OK, guys I need 2 captures. I can confirm that M18x is the only laptop currently shipping that is supposed to support SATA III. We need to investigate based on your feedback to determine best course of action. To that end, please PM me if you are interested in a capture and new system exchange. You and your box must meet these criteria to qualify for capture. ("Qualify" as in engineering terms qualifying a set of parameters- not qualify as in this is a contest and you're about to get hooked up.)

1. Your shipping address needs to be U.S.
2. Your system needs to have been purchased in the U.S. or Canada.
3. Your system must exhibit reproducible dropping of SATA transfer rates from SATA III to SATA II, or your SATA III drive transfer rate is always 3 GB/S or less.
4. The drive experiencing the SATA II speeds MUST be one that shipped with the system. We are not going to troubleshoot 3rd party drives we have not qualified for M18x. Besides, we have no way to pay you for the drive you bought from someone else.
5. Please save a text doc on your desktop with issue reproduction steps, what troubleshooting you have tried, and any notes for the engineer. (not a requirement but a nice to have.)

 

Me too

We were talking drives and sata ports and his example was about memory. Then... That we just jump on the gravy train and believe everything. That's why I was LOL'n. He needs to hang around a bit longer with us..

Well, darn. I would have jumped all over this. Cause that port dropping was driving me up a wall!

 

Where's the box? Back at Dell?

 

Yes Sir.
Sent Back, Refunded, Re ordered

 

@ Bill

As I mentioned earlier Bill, one of the guys I spoke to regarding SSD's that are being shipped with M18x told me that "Dell only uses Sata II drives as Sata III would cause instability within the system" - like you said above, the M18x is Sata III compatable, so I am not following the logic with that......

The Dell parts list compiled by ChrisM shows that there is a Sata III variant made by Liteon...I just dont understand why new rigs would ship with a Sata II drive instead of the Sata III variety?