M1330 and Intel X25-M SSD

Hi all,

I installed the Intel X25-M SSD in my 1 year old M1330 today, adn installed Visat x64 ultimate on it. Initially i felt some performance increase, but maybe not as much as i had hoped for. I then ran benchmark test (read) in HD Tune Pro, and averega eonly turned up as being 105 mb/s. I have read several test and reviews of the X25-M and none of them showed those rates. Almost all of them showed about 210 mb/s (read). My burst rate is 82.5 mb/s, cpu usuage 26.3%.

Could any one perhaps tell me why there is such a big difference in the tests? I should have all the latets drivers and firmware updates.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

It sounds like Vista might still be indexing and configuring itself for use. You might want to temporarily disable SuperFetch and all indexing services, and permanently turn off ShadowCopy (which is useless if you ask me and will eat up around 15% of space peak on the drive).

 

Al the services you mention is already disabled (read some guides on tweaking vista with ssd) - but no improvement in performance :-(

 

I should perhaps mention that i have not downloaded any drivers from DELL's own driver download site - all drivers are the ones Vista found during installation and Windows update. If any should be changed, which should i look at?

 

So i just installed the Intel Matrix storage driver, and that helped a bit - but not quite there.

Results are now;
Average 133,1 mb/s
Burst rate 115,9 mb/s
CPU usage 16.4%

 

You have the latest Matrix Storage Manager Software 8.8.0.1009 running, right?
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Det...OSs=150&OSFullName=Windows Vista* 64&lang=eng

And your SATA port in the BIOS is configured to AHCI?

Yes, you are right the X25-M should have >200MB/s in sequential reads.

On the other hand sequential reads are really not that important. Maybe you got a new firmware version, which sacrifized som sequential read performance for 4kb write performance (improving on write combining and write amplification issues).

Properly benchmarking drives requires some skills (iometer etc.), however there is an easy tool available which includes sequential, 512kb and 4kb block performance:
http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html

Running this one allows better to understand whether your SSD performs normal or not.

And besides stupid sequential performance: How does the SSD feel compared to the HDD? How do real life applications perform? You should be able to notice such big differences as these:


http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

(the entire article - though long - is an excellent SSD information source. It also explains several restrictions and shortfalls of current SSDs. Very much worth reading!).