Storage Solutions Low SSD Speed on AMD 990FX on SATA III

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aasimenator

aasimenator

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Hey guys i think i have some issue here but not sure what it is,

I have a HomeServer as I call it, which has about 6TB Raid 5 Drive, 2 x 1 TB drives and a OCZ Agility III 60 GB SSD. I purchased AIDA64's latest version as I frequently use it on all my computers and servers.

The Motherboard i have is ASRock 990FX Extreme4, which has all 8 ports as SATA III 6Gbps

I ran a disk Benchmark "Read Test Suite" in AIDA64 and got very low results. Attached is the image.
Benchmark-60GB-SSD.png


I ran the same test suite on my i7 Machine which has ASUS P8Z77 V Pro motherboard also all 8 ports are SATA III 6Gbps. Attached is the results.
Benchmark-120GB-SSD.png


When i compare the two storage information i see the similar details, and it shows that both are on SATA III 6Gbps ports.
HomeServer-Storage.png


MainPC-Storage.png


So what can be the problem here.
 
the native AMD controller is only 4 and all 4 of them have 2 TB drives with RAID 5... and the SSD is on the Marvell controller.

- - - Updated - - -

the board specification states that it has 6 sata III ports on AMD SB950 Controller but the problem is that only the port 1 -4 supports raid 5 and the last 2 doesn't, my 2tb hard drives on those ports were not detected in RAID configuration in BIOS. so i had to switch ports move all 2TB drives to ports 1 -4 and left port 5 for SSD & port 6 empty and the two 1 TB drives are on the Marvell controller.

- - - Updated - - -

So Something definitely wrong here... I will try to switch to port 1 and see if there is any difference.
as-ssd-bench-OCZ-AGILITY3.png
 
Your AMD system has a 60GB Agility 3 and your Intel system has a 120GB Force 3. Obviously the 60GB drive will be slower.
Edit: Check your BIOS, you're probably running in IDE mode. You need to change it to AHCI, but not without modifying the registry first.
 
Just an observation, in addition to what Eddy already said, block size varies in the two tests, that may be an issue?
 
aasimenator said:
the native AMD controller is only 4 and all 4 of them have 2 TB drives with RAID 5... and the SSD is on the Marvell controller.

- - - Updated - - -

the board specification states that it has 6 sata III ports on AMD SB950 Controller but the problem is that only the port 1 -4 supports raid 5 and the last 2 doesn't, my 2tb hard drives on those ports were not detected in RAID configuration in BIOS. so i had to switch ports move all 2TB drives to ports 1 -4 and left port 5 for SSD & port 6 empty and the two 1 TB drives are on the Marvell controller.
Click to expand...
Marvell controllers are notorious for poor performance. Be sure to try the AMD controller, if only temporarily.

And the specs for P8Z77-V PRO say only 2 from Intel controller and 2 from ASMedia controller are 6 Gbps. Rest 4 ports are 3 Gbps from the Intel controller. Are these specs also wrong? Typically they SATA 6 Gbps ports will be of a different colour.
 
Ok guys so, i removed the OCZ Agility 3 from the amd machine and connected it to the i7 system below is the screenshot. I still think its slow but let me know.
Benchmark-OCZ-60GB-i7.png

@Crazy_Eddy I have RAID mode enabled so i cannot enable AHCI, In BIOS its set to RAID.

Though I still don't get why a 60 GB SSD is slower than a 120 GB SSD, both the OCZ Agility 3 & Corsair Force 3 has the same controller. so how is it that one is slower or faster than the other & that too by such a big margin.
 
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Your results are completely inconsistent with my experience. My Agility 3 60GB (same drive as yours) delivers over over 400MB/s read on pretty much AMD chipset (that's all I use) in 60% full condition, and over 500 on the same drive after TRIM. I had two of them, one on a Asus 880G and the other on a Gigabyte 990FX. In both, they were connected to the first SATA3 port. Due to renovations I have packed the drives and systems away and even sold off one of them so cannot duplicate your results for a while now, but I clearly remember it was nowhere near these numbers.

You should be able to set the interface mode to AHCI for the ports not used by RAID. For Asus boards that would be port 5 and (where available) port 6.
 
Because of the number of NAND die in the drive. The 60GB drive will have about 4 dies, while the 120GB drive will have 8. More die = more channels on the controller used = more speed. This page should give you a rough primer on dies and channels : AnandTech - OCZ Vertex 3 (240GB) Review

Edit:
There are other factors that could be affecting performance like amount of free space and whether your drive has had time to execute TRIM. After all the heavy benching, your drive could be a mess. Also try using a standard disk benchmark like AS SSD or Crystal diskmark or Atto rather than AIDA.

Edit 2: cranky : Are you sure about the speeds? I remember reading toolius complaining that the Force 3 drives gave nowhere near the claimed 500+MB/s speeds because of the Async NAND (which the Agility 3 uses as well).
 
In ATTO, yes, but not in AS-SSD. I don't have the screenies saved, but the performance on uncompressed data is way lower than AS-SSD, close to 300MB/s. In ATTO though, I got about 600MB/S out of two drives in RAID 0 and just touch under 530 on a single drive. I would run the tests again but I don't have a SATA3 motherboard in service at the moment.

If you look at this review: OCZ AgilityReview You will see that the performance on ATTO is excellent, but the moment you go to AS-SSD, the speed drop is massive because of the way SF-2281 and Async NAND work together. Anandtech has a nice article that covers this. Basically certain synthetics will show up these drives to be great, and maybe manufacturers cherry-pick those for advertising.

I must point out in this light, that the results across benchmarks are not strictly comparable for this exact reason. The results that the TS has got using his software may not be really comparable to the ones posted on other sites. I should have mentioned that in my previous post.
 
cranky said:
In ATTO, yes, but not in AS-SSD. I don't have the screenies saved, but the performance on uncompressed data is way lower than AS-SSD, close to 300MB/s.
Click to expand...
Is it a typo and it is actually "uncompressible" ? Or you really had that unlikely observation?
 
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