Laptop SATA II issue

I have a Dell Inspiron 1720 with a fresh windows 7 install. It has a PM965 Intel Chipset with ICH8-ME according to CPUZ. It has the latest BIOS release from dell which is A09 7/11/2008. AHCI is enabled in the BIOS.

The issue is I put my OCZ Vertex 3 in the laptop after a secure erase with parted magic using my desktop. I then installed windows Vista (came with the comp) and found it to be no better than the 5400rpm toshiba drive it came with. I did Crystal disk benchmarks a few times and the best read/writes were 135MB/s. I found an Intel Matrix Storage Manager that told me the vertex 3 was running SATA generation 1.

I then tried to securely erase the vertex 3 with parted magic again using the laptop. It said it was frozen. I didn't read the message that it was going to do an external erase so it came up with the external erase window and it showed that it was erasing the disk at the speed of 230MB/s-260MB/s. That made me feel good. After getting 7 installed, I ran Crystal again and found that I was still getting 135MB/s at most. I also tried ATTO this time around and found that it got up to 140MB/s.

I have tried a couple of drivers but nothing from dell or intel has yielded better results. Can you come up with any suggestions?

Details about the laptop:
T5250 1.5ghz core 2 duo
nVidia 8400m gs
OCZ Vertex 3 60GB
8 cell battery
PM965 Intel Chipset with ICH8-ME
Anything else?
I should also note I prefer AMD. So my familiarity with Intel and its website is low. I did find out that the ICH8-ME does provide SATA II functionality. Also this disk has been tested in my SATA II desktop to run at ~250MB/s.

The theoretical limit of SATA 1 is ~190MB/s but overhead drops that to 150Mb/s, so your right in the right ballpark. The speed isn't really where an SSD shines (they are much faster then an HDD), it's the access speed that makes them "snappy". Your old 5400RPM drive has an access time somewhere around 10-20ms, your new SSD has an access time of ~0.1ms, pretty much regardless of link speed.

edit: after searching it seems that the controller is a SATA II controller that has been limited to SATA I on that laptop (found here).

Psykoikonov, that link you found showing likely issues with the daughter/link board was a good find. I found plenty of speed issues with the PM965 Intel Chipset with ICH8-ME and on laptops of course. But I had found nothing that showed thru trial and error that the ICH8-ME was likely going to be a lost cause for tweaking out more speed. Again, very good find.

Psykoikonov said:

The theoretical limit of SATA 1 is ~190MB/s but overhead drops that to 150Mb/s, so your right in the right ballpark. The speed isn't really where an SSD shines (they are much faster then an HDD), it's the access speed that makes them "snappy". Your old 5400RPM drive has an access time somewhere around 10-20ms, your new SSD has an access time of ~0.1ms, pretty much regardless of link speed.

edit: after searching it seems that the controller is a SATA II controller that has been limited to SATA I on that laptop (found here).

Click to expand...

So is Vista really bloated compared to 7? I noticed 7 uses 3-4gb less for a clean install compared to vista.
Before running these tests I thought 7 was better because the technology of the hardware had become more powerful.
Thanks for the notebook reviews find. I had seen a few things about the t61, but I didn't delve to deep into the reading.
Is there a program for testing ssd speed for parted magic that I could run? I am still interested in the fact that it erased the contents of the drive at ~250MB/s.

Something I forgot to mention is I changed the setting from AHCI to ATA and read speeds were able to jump up to 190MB/s on the first two READ tests but worse on some of the other tests. I should take a screenshot so I can compare ATA and AHCI side by side. NCQ and hot plugging are the only differences between AHCI and ATA right?

Glaze132 said:

Something I forgot to mention is I changed the setting from AHCI to ATA and read speeds were able to jump up to 190MB/s on the first two READ tests but worse on some of the other tests. I should take a screenshot so I can compare ATA and AHCI side by side. NCQ and hot plugging are the only differences between AHCI and ATA right?

Click to expand...

Basically yes, AHCI is what allows Windows to "unlock" NCQ and Hot Swap in ATA-7 (SATA). The daughter board might not even have those capabilities at all (there is software that could be used to check).

SSD's are not so simple to bench, it could be that AS-SSD ran in a "clean" are of the drive when it was benched in IDE mode and conversely ran in a "dirty" area when it was ran in AHCI mode, multiple runs of the benchmark might be needed to determine a definite difference.

Personally I would let the laptop sleep in S1 mode for some time (overnight would be more than plenty), the drive will clean "dirty" blocks during *full* idle time. Then run the test for say IDE, then do the same for AHCI. After an install or some "heavy" drive use is it important for the drive to "clean" dirty blocks.