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Hey, TL! I was hoping you could help me with this!
I recently got a 128GB Kingston SSD, primarily for booting up my PC, a couple games (Mostly Starcraft) and a couple of applications faster, like I assume most people use it for. I still store my music, photo's, etc. on my original 1TB harddrive.
Tonight I finally installed it into my PC, formatted it, put Windows 8 Pro on it, while afterwards formatting my Hard Drive and then to have the fun work of re-installing and downloading alllll your programs etc! So that's what I spent this night on! When I was finally done installing programs like Steam, Mumble, Skype and Chrome (I don't put my Steam Games on this SSD either, don't worry!  ), I tried to reboot and then boot up Starcraft - It didn't go as fast as I assumed. Windows 8 loaded up pretty quick (25 seconds until it was on desktop), but Starcraft took more than 10 seconds to get to the login/authentication screen, which, according to the videos and posts I've seen regarding SSD's in combination with Starcraft, is a tad long.. 
So now I ask for your help!
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/GDy4oDM.png)
That's the benchmark I did and comparing it to others of the same size - it's really mediocre. So I must be doing something wrong.
I have formatted the SSD, put the bios setting into AHCI and there's only about 45GB of files on it. Could anyone assist me here? Much appreciated!
Just a real quick SSDlife check, aswell:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/10zb9T9.png)
One more edit: My mobo is an ASrock 870 Extreme3.
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AHCI enabled? Write-Cache-Buffer enabled?
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On December 17 2013 08:08 CrankOut wrote:
AHCI enabled? Write-Cache-Buffer enabled?
Yeah, I did enable AHCI, but after reinstalling Windows if that matters.
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On December 17 2013 07:44 Thalandros wrote:That's the benchmark I did and comparing it to others of the same size - it's really mediocre. So I must be doing something wrong. I have formatted the SSD, put the bios setting into AHCI and there's only about 45GB of files on it. Could anyone assist me here? Much appreciated!
Are you sure that you have enabled AHCI? "pciide - BAD" means you're in IDE mode.
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On December 17 2013 09:12 Mindcrime wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2013 07:44 Thalandros wrote:That's the benchmark I did and comparing it to others of the same size - it's really mediocre. So I must be doing something wrong. I have formatted the SSD, put the bios setting into AHCI and there's only about 45GB of files on it. Could anyone assist me here? Much appreciated! Are you sure that you have enabled AHCI? "pciide - BAD" means you're in IDE mode.
That's what I've been wondering myself when taking a closer look at it. I have 2 questions, though.
1. Can setting it up after installing Windows 8 affect it?
and
2. Would it hinder my speed thát much?
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i think you are supposed to install windows while AHCI is already activated otherwise it wont install/load the ahci drivers after installation
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Gigabyte mobo by any chance?
You have to reinstall, at least I did when I had a similar problem. Win8 allows you to select AHCI drivers during install, just before the region options, where you can either load the drivers from your mobo cd or download the newest from their website and use those by putting them on a USB stick.
or maybe this link is something worth trying.
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On December 17 2013 10:14 a176 wrote:
i think you are supposed to install windows while AHCI is already activated otherwise it wont install/load the ahci drivers after installation
That's not quite right. You can enable AHCI after installing windows, but you need to make a change or two in the registry as well. If you change the SATA mode without the registry edit(s) then the pc shouldn't even be able to load the os. With the edits, there shouldn't be a problem.
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Yes you need to change some windows registry values, then reboot and enable AHCI.
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Your low "4K-64Thrd" scores are probably because of AHCI not running. That should get fixed when you switch it over.
When you say you compared to other people, I think you did not compare to other people with a Kingston V300. I have a 60GB SSD like this in an old notebook and the "Seq" performance numbers look similar. It's just a slow SSD, can't do more than 130MB/s or so sequentially.
Here's that 60GB SSD benchmarked:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/maxc5Sr.png)
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On December 17 2013 16:03 Ropid wrote:Your low "4K-64Thrd" scores are probably because of AHCI not running. That should get fixed when you switch it over. When you say you compared to other people, I think you did not compare to other people with a Kingston V300. I have a 60GB SSD like this in an old notebook and the "Seq" performance numbers look similar. It's just a slow SSD, can't do more than 130MB/s or so sequentially. Here's that 60GB SSD benchmarked:
Actually I've read a number of reviews, just general benchmarks that say and show these should outperform even many 256GB drives, so especially when considering that, this it very low.
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United Kingdom20285 Posts
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/LwiMZFt.png)
^my c300
new ssd should be way better
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Perhaps the bad results are caused by an old SATA controller on an old motherboard? The notebook my Kingston V300 60GB is in, and where I made that screenshot, is some pretty old Thinkpad with Core 2 Duo CPU.
It's btw. still crushing an HDD even if it looks slow. Here's the same benchmark I ran on an HDD a while back because I was curious (takes forever to complete): + Show Spoiler +
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United Kingdom20285 Posts
Having only 130MB/s sequential really hurts though, with a weaker ssd like an m4 still pushing >500. The whole point sata 3 over sata 2 is to remove sequential limit of effective ~270MB/s
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I'm pretty sure if I have just Sata 3 ports as Asrock describes:
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/870 Extreme3/
I've just set the AHCI in my BIOS and it to my surprise Windows 8 did NOT crash afterwards and I'm running it now. I however am seeing little improvement: ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/cUumXrZ.png)
In the meantime I've downloaded ATTO disk benchmark and tried running that. The MB/s of both writing and reading is improved by much but I'm not sure how seriously to take either of these two now, given that booting Starcraft up still takes a considerable amount of time:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/ElrDQ0k.png)
I'm still considering just reinstalling my OS with the correct setting from the get-go but I've gotten a lot of mixed responses so far so I'm holding off from that for a bit still.
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Thanks for you guys's advice so far, but I'm still having issues. Some more screenshots though!
I decided I'd try the ''safe mode'' method first and after that didn't work, I'd take a step into the deep and went for the regedit way. Before I went into regedit I went into my BIOS again and changed it back from AHCI to IDE because that's what the guide told me to. Upon arriving in the wanted folder, this happened: ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/xY6580V.png)
It was Already on 0. That's really weird considering I just changed it back and my AS SSD benchmark tool still told me the pciide = bad. Really weird. I'm starting to narrow down my options
Just to clarify, this is what I changed to AHCI and back, and which didn't seem to do anything:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0HxxFab6jqja2tqeU5lb2FnX28/edit?usp=sharing
edit: It appears I clicked the wrong file. I''ve now done it correctly (can give picture) but it's still giving me pciide = bad.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/7mWALdL.png)
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Another question I do have: will enabling AHCI allow me to reach my actual speeds considering reading/writing? Because 130 MB/s isn't really optimal and I'm not sure if enabling it is going to make me reach 3/400 MB/s all of a sudden.
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Perhaps what's happening is that you might need to install some sort of driver for the chipset on your board? I'm guessing Windows 8 simply does not come with AHCI drivers that work for your board.
The performance will not go up for the max speeds from what I've seen in screenshots other people have shown about this. What will increase are the "4K" and "4K-64Thrd" numbers which are about a lot of tiny reads and writes to the drive.
What's actually important about AHCI is the "TRIM" command. That's something to tell the drive that blocks are empty after files got deleted. The SSD needs that information or its performance will degrade over time. That speed degradation is nothing permanent that happens to the drive. It is fixed the moment you run those TRIM commands over empty space.
For some drives, there's tools from the manufacturer to do that manually if it's used through IDE.
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My quick takes on this:
The 25s boot time on Win8 (particularly on an SSD) seems abnormally high. I was anticipating closer to 15s, since Win8 is incredibly efficient and much quicker than 7 when it comes to boot time. The other concern of mine is that AMD Southbridges have traditionally (and continue to) be fairly average in I/O when compared to Intel solutions. The SB850 is fairly old, so it wouldn't surprise me that this also somewhat reducing your scores too.
+ Show Spoiler +
But yeah, OP should be closer to 463 / 163 (read and write respectively) on AS-SSD. Anyway, if he's getting 130MB/s on write, maybe that's the best he's going to get. As for read, he should still be getting closer to 400MB/s - accounting for the worse performance on an AMD southbridge haha :p. He is still nowhere close to that, so there's still bigger fish to fry on that front.
A quick search found this thread, which may/may not be related to the OP's situation. See this thread on the 890FXA-UD7, which is using the same SB850 southbridge as your mobo:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1216130/performance-ssd-sata3-on-sb-850-890fxa-ud7/0_50
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/WLHNYIF.png)
