Crucial MX200 m.2 500GB rather slow 4K write speed

Hey everyone!

So I just received and installed my Crucial MX200 m.2 500GB and am a litlle bit dissapointed that the 4K writes don't match reviews...

As per the reviews of the MX200 2.5" 500gb (wich should be slower since it doesn't benefit from dynamic write acceleration like the m.2 counterpart) this thing should be hitting at least 132 MB/s 4K writes but instead it's capping at 111MB/s.

The rest of the specs are practically the same as reviews...it's only 4k writes that are off.

At the momment the drive is completely empty and has been tested as a storage drive under win 8.1 (wich is installed on a classic HDD)

I've turned off drive indexing and optimised it in win defrag. Also AHCI is turned on and I reinstalled IRST...before reinstall the drive was capping at 77MB/s 4K writes. The drive is formatted as NTFS with default sector size under GPT.

Can anyone give me some pointers as to how I can acces the full potential of this drive?

Does anyone have this drive and get better results?

P.S. testing has been done with Crystal Disk Mark and results compared to the results in the same benchmark from online reviews of the 2.5" model.

 

Even my previous Samsung 850 PRO 256GB only gets 120 MB/S so expecting 122 MB/s is not realistic and probably only achieveable in synthetic benchmarks in a test machine which has no software or anything installed but just used for benchmarking. Be happy with your score.

also, when posting a performance issue with a drive, it is always wise to include a screenshot of both AS SSD Benchmark and CrystalDiskMark so we can tell you if other benchmarks, latency, alignment, are fine or not....

here is my previous 256GB Pro 256GB Results:


AS SSD Benchmark with MSAHCI Default Driver (W7):



AS SSD Benchmark with IRST 12.0.7.1002 (W7):



AS SSD Benchmark with IRST 12.8.0.1016 (W8):



CrystalDiskMark with IRST 12.8.0.1016 (W7):

 

@Matrix Leader6

Sorry I forgot to post my Crystal Disk Mark

I was expecting 132MB/s in Crystal disk mark wich is indeed synthetic as that's what reviews where showing.

My computer isn't really loaded with software.

From what I can see your 850 PRO is hitting 155 in CDM.

My guess is I haven't optimised ecerything properly and that's why I'm getting lower scores.

I haven't run Anvil Storage yet ...I'll run it later this evening as I'm not at home right now.


Before reinstalling IRST


After reinstalling IRST

 

Your scores are just fine, there is not much room left for improvement really if you're on Windows 8 + have the IRST Driver.

You can do like me, disable hibernation which is not really needed with fast SSDs plus will save you some space but that wouldn't increase performance.

Also, turn off the Windows Write-Cache Buffer:

 

@Matrix Leader6

I see you are actually getting better scores on Win 7 ?!?

I hate win 8.1 and the only reason I used it was because I thought it was better optimised for SSD's. Is this not so?

Should I install win 7?

P.S. hibernation is disabled and anyway windows is not yet Installed on the SSD.

 

Windows 7 gives better scores but I cannot use it due to my OCD and wanting everything to perfect.....you see, I cannot deal with this EVENT ID 18 Error and althought I thought I had it fixed, it came back, happened with every Alienware 18 laptop I owned (owned 3 so far) and on every single CPU, 4700MQ, 4800MQ, 4900MQ, and now on my upgraded 4940MX. I know others who have this issue but choose to ignore it, I can't have such a fatal error in my event log and ignore it