AMD 990FX Slow SSD Issues

[Krazed]

I purchased a used PC off of craigslist recently for my fiance to play games with me. The computer works fine, everything loads, no errors, no weird windows problems. However the SSD performance is abysmal.

The issue: Loading games (Such as The Division) or changing zones on WoW, or copying files to another folder, extracting zip files... all is incredibly slow. Copy/Extraction speeds are a terrible 24-30 MB/s.

Keep in mind, I have used all of these SSD's on my other PC, which is an intel i5 with a MSI Z97 Krait motherboard and they were very fast! I just wanted more space so I replaced them.

Things I've done to attempt to narrow or solve the issue:

I've replaced the new Samsung 840 SSD with an older Crucial MX100, and a Crucial MX300 (I had them laying around from my previous PC build and they worked fine) This didn't speed anything up or solve any issues. Same slow SSD performance.

Reinstalled windows fresh after a "Secure Erase" using the samsung SSD MAgician software. Fresh driver downloads (to combat any possible corrupt issues) and clean install of windows 7, followed by the standard SSD settings. Fresh game donwload, same slow SSD Performance. 24-30MB/s

I scoured every Asus website and setting I could find to make small changes to strange BIOS settings and things people could think of that worked for them, without any luck.

I made sure that the SATA ports it was using were the correct 6 Gb/s ports , not he Asmedia ones for slower performance.

I replaced the motherboard to an MSI 970A-G43 and did another fresh windows install with new drivers downloaded. Same issue, even doing bios tweaks.

Please help, I'm very confused and about to give up on my AMD purchase and go back to Intel stuff. This was my first dive into AMD since early 2000's and so far I'm not enjoying it.


Thank you all for any help I receive, I haven't been this stumped in ages!

Computer Specs:

Processor: AMD FX-8350 at 4 Ghz
Motherboard: Asus Crossfire Formula Z
Memory: 8gb 2x4 gb sticks DDR3 Corsair Vengence
Video Card: AMD Radeon R280
PSU: Corsair 750w
SSD's : Samsung 840, Crucial MX300 and MX100

 

[Mr.Scott]

SATA set to AHCI when OS was installed?

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

I would replace the SATA cable and you may be required to go back to Windows 8.1 or 7 SP1!

Windows 10 appears to have a buggy AHCI driver!

 

[Mr.Scott]

I would replace the SATA cable and you may be required to go back to Windows 8.1 or 7 SP1!

Windows 10 appears to have a buggy AHCI driver!

Did you even read the post?

Reinstalled windows fresh after a "Secure Erase" using the samsung SSD MAgician software. Fresh driver downloads (to combat any possible corrupt issues) and clean install of windows 7, followed by the standard SSD settings. Fresh game donwload, same slow SSD Performance. 24-30MB/s

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

Just a heads up: Windows 10 has an issue where you may get a warning in the event log with the following message:

Source: storahci

Reset to \Device\RaidPort0, was issued.

And Windows 10, especially later in the installation routine, hangs and the drive light goes solid.

Additionally, this issue is more likely to occur with SSDs!

So, Windows 7 is the better choice...

 

[EarthDog]

Interesting tidbit RJA... can you please tie this in with the OP's issue for us?

 

[t1nm4n]

All 3 of those SSDs work well in another PC? I have 3 Intel SSDs with the same MB and they all work great.

I do have one Idea, but it sounds totally goofy, you don't by any chance still have a HDD hooked up in that PC do you? Have you run any of the Disk Benchmarks out there? where are you getting this 24-30MB/s? Do you have all the data saved on an HDD and your transferring from the HDD to the SSD, if this is the case that's your answer, if you are transferring from one SSD to another there is some sort of bottleneck in there or something.

I just ran these to show you can have SSD speeds on this MB.



Edit: I'd have to go with Mr. Scott there, it's the ACHI setting when installing.

 

[EarthDog]

I recall ssd being notoriously slower on the amd side for whatever reason. Perhaps that is what's going on here. Troubleh is, we have no idea how fast it's supposed to be due to the number and size of files to transfer.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

I believe that the PNY 120 GB SSD that I was using was fine with my Sabertooth 990 FX R 2.0. Before I gave the rig to someone...

Actually, I can't recall any problem (other than when I had a poor SATA cable connection) with the above mentioned setup...

And I can't find evidence of a problem like this on my Gigabyte GA-F2A88X-D3HP...

 

[Krazed]

Sorry I haven't replied sooner! Been busy with family weekend things.

Yes, I installed windows 7 with sp1 and with AHCI enabled. That's always been enabled and clean installs or not, it hasn't made a difference. I went so far as to find very specific AMD drivers for AHCI sata use from their website and forced windows to use those without any change in speed.

I tried removing any non-SSD items from the sata ports without any change either. I also tried multiple different SATA cables I had laying around, including stealing some from a known good PC (this one i'm typing on).

My speeds are file transfer speeds of my drivers folder. It's a combination of large 1gb ZIP files, and random other files. I've copied them back and forth on several computers, including my i5 laptop with samsung ssd, and my i5 desktop with samsung ssd too, they both get 100-150MB/s copy speed to different folders on the same drives, as well as 85-90MB/s zip file extraction speeds. This is just standard windows file copy, no fancy benchmarks.

I did benchmarks and it gives me the speeds it's supposed to. 480-500MB/s read and 350-375MB/s write for everything but 4k which was 35-40MB/s read and 100MB/s write as standard SSD's go. But this AMD system refuses to do what my intel systems do during standard windows procedures, including copy files and game loading. It's 2-3x longer doing anything beyond just opening Chrome and web browsing.

I tell you what, it's extremely frustrating to not have any kind of apparent or simple reason for this to be happening.

 

[Johan45]

Have you tried a different BIOS ?

 

[Krazed]

Yes, this problem started on an older bios version, and I updated the bios to the most recent as one of the troubleshooting things I did.

 

[Johan45]

You have me, I have a CHVz, Sabertooth and a couple other AMD 9xx boards and can't say I have noticed anything. AMD is always a "bit " slower and I don't always install the AMD drivers. Have you tried reverting to the windows driver?
What type of CPU settings any OC ?

 

[Krazed]

Nope, no OC or custom settings beyond turning off some Asus ROG stuff.

I don't think I've tried just using the windows drivers. I've uninstalled and rebooted, but it always comes up as "unknown hardware" and want's a driver. Windows updates doesn't find anything in that regard.

I guess I'll mess around with trying to get generic drivers working and see what happens. It's about the last thing I'll probably do to it before grabbing a PCI SATA Controller and see if that helps.

Thank you guys for all the suggestions!

 

[EarthDog]

PCIe based is what you want. Not PCI.

 

[Johan45]

There are a couple not so public hotfixes for FX and Win7 you could try these. One is for the scheduler and the other has to do with core parking IIRC. Not saying they;ll make a big difference but they do help most everything.View attachment hotfix.zip

 

[Krazed]

PCIe based is what you want. Not PCI.

Right, I just left out the E part.

 

[zPacKRat]

I've never had any luck with the AMD AHCI drivers, just use the Windows supplied driver.

Sorry I haven't replied sooner! Been busy with family weekend things.

Yes, I installed windows 7 with sp1 and with AHCI enabled. That's always been enabled and clean installs or not, it hasn't made a difference. I went so far as to find very specific AMD drivers for AHCI sata use from their website and forced windows to use those without any change in speed.

I tried removing any non-SSD items from the sata ports without any change either. I also tried multiple different SATA cables I had laying around, including stealing some from a known good PC (this one i'm typing on).

My speeds are file transfer speeds of my drivers folder. It's a combination of large 1gb ZIP files, and random other files. I've copied them back and forth on several computers, including my i5 laptop with samsung ssd, and my i5 desktop with samsung ssd too, they both get 100-150MB/s copy speed to different folders on the same drives, as well as 85-90MB/s zip file extraction speeds. This is just standard windows file copy, no fancy benchmarks.

I did benchmarks and it gives me the speeds it's supposed to. 480-500MB/s read and 350-375MB/s write for everything but 4k which was 35-40MB/s read and 100MB/s write as standard SSD's go. But this AMD system refuses to do what my intel systems do during standard windows procedures, including copy files and game loading. It's 2-3x longer doing anything beyond just opening Chrome and web browsing.

I tell you what, it's extremely frustrating to not have any kind of apparent or simple reason for this to be happening.

 

[caddi daddi]

krazed, when you access the non boot, hdd, are the files and folders listed in blue and not black?
if it's blue it's seeing it as an external or something, this happens with my saberpus when I use the hot swap bays and it can get really slow writing it to the ssd.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

krazed, when you access the non boot, hdd, are the files and folders listed in blue and not black?
if it's blue it's seeing it as an external or something, this happens with my saberpus when I use the hot swap bays and it can get really slow writing it to the ssd.

Blue is supposed to mean compressed by NTFS...