Is my drive absurdly slow? (OCZ Vertex 4)

MyAdler · Jan 27, 2015

I've had my SSD for awhile and I never really considered its performance until recently. It seems to me as though its REALLY slow compared to what I should be expecting.

Its a 128gb OCZ Vertex 4.

Windows assigns it a score of 6.9 in the Windows Experience Index.
I ran PerformanceTest 8.0 from Passmark and the disk achieves a score of 1537, pretty good for a harddrive, pretty terrible for an SSD. I have more specific results as well if anyone is interested.

I looked at other peoples score with the same SSD and some people achieve a score well above 5000 with the average being 3425.

The drive has the latest firmware according to OCZ's tool.

I have the disk partitioned nearly 50/50 ext4/ntfs.

Am I missing something?

ATMINSIDE · Jan 27, 2015

What's the rest of the system?
Are you in AHCI mode?

MyAdler · Jan 27, 2015

ATMINSIDE said:
What's the rest of the system?
Are you in AHCI mode?

Good question, here's my specs:
Motherboard: SuperMicro X7DWN+
Processors: Pair of Xeon L5410's
Memory: 16GB of pc-5300 fully buffered
Video Card: Geforce GT 640
Secondary HDD: Some 500GB drive

I'll have to reboot to check if I'm in AHCI.

EDIT: AHCI mode is NOT enabled. Enabling it crashes Windows, I'm googling for the solution...

Mandrake4565 · Jan 27, 2015

Here is my info if it helps, my Vertex 4 is at least a year and a half old. It's not as fast as the newest drives but certainly not slow.

MyAdler · Jan 27, 2015

I enabled AHCI and my score has jumped to 1793. Not bad for such a simple fix though I still feel like something is wrong. Mandrakes results for Sequential Reads put mine to shame.

Is there reason to suspect the fullness of the drive? I only have 2.5GB free...

EarthDog · Jan 27, 2015

When stuffed that full... That can be a problem, yes. That said using ocz toolbox, TRIM the drive, then run atto and see where it's at.

MyAdler · Jan 27, 2015

I ran the same benchmark as Mandrake so its easy to compare, here are my results.

There is a clear disparity with reading.

EarthDog said:
When stuffed that full... That can be a problem, yes. That said using ocz toolbox, TRIM the drive, then run atto and see where it's at.

I TRIMed the drive and reran the test above and found the results unchanged. Is there something special about ATTO or is CrystalDiskMark sufficient?

EarthDog · Jan 27, 2015

Atto will show you factory specs or there about.

ATMINSIDE · Jan 27, 2015

You're motherboard only supports SATA II, that's why you see the difference in sequential

EarthDog · Jan 27, 2015

ATMINSIDE said:
You're motherboard only supports SATA II, that's why you see the difference in sequential

Winning.

Mandrake4565 · Jan 27, 2015

ATMINSIDE said:
You're motherboard only supports SATA II, that's why you see the difference in sequential

Nice catch Atmin

dejo · Jan 27, 2015

was going to say offset, but looking at the 4k's thats not the issue. has to be the fullness of the drive

MyAdler · Jan 29, 2015

ATMINSIDE said:
You're motherboard only supports SATA II, that's why you see the difference in sequential

Great, now I feel like an idiot.

Does that also explain my slow 4k speeds?

Are the super cheapo chinese PCIE cards worth anything? (this one for example: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/360902356773)

EarthDog · Jan 29, 2015

It will let that SSD stretch its legs... But can your board boot from PCIe (see your manual), as not all can.

ATMINSIDE · Jan 29, 2015

No, the slow 4K speeds are due to the drive being jam-packed full.

MyAdler · Jan 29, 2015

I'm afraid something else must be happening. I shuffled around the partitions to give my windows install an additional 25GB. The test are similar to worse. Notable 512k Write.

ATMINSIDE · Jan 29, 2015

You've only got ~25GB free of 128GB. You're not going to get the same speeds as an empty SSD.
Period, end of story.

Speeds look fine for a (mostly) full SSD.

Especially one that's being tested while in use as an OS...

EarthDog · Jan 29, 2015

MyAdler said:
I'm afraid something else must be happening. I shuffled around the partitions to give my windows install an additional 25GB. The test are similar to worse. Notable 512k Write.

View attachment 159280

Did you TRIM the drive after this move and before the benchmark? 25GB should be plenty (its ~20%) to run where it should. But again, you are on SATAII.

MyAdler · Jan 29, 2015

EarthDog said:
Did you TRIM the drive after this move and before the benchmark? 25GB should be plenty (its ~20%) to run where it should. But again, you are on SATAII.

Alright, I TRIMed it and ran the benchmark with the iterations set to 5.

Things are slightly better. I guess this is as good as Ill get it until I upgrade to SATA 3.

EDIT: Windows seems to think things are slightly better. Its gone up in its rating from 6.9 to 7.1

EDIT EDIT: By the way, thanks for all your help everyone.

EarthDog · Jan 29, 2015

Windows rating... means almost nothing. Stick to ATTO or this.

Is my drive absurdly slow? (OCZ Vertex 4)

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