Pyro SE 120 Slow 4K Writes

[Mark963]

I have older 785G AMD system with an Athlon II X4. The device manager shows Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller with a Pyro SE 120.0 GB SSD. Windows 7 x64. I had tried other drivers when I first set this drive up a few months ago, but the Microsoft default one seemed best. The drive now has 855GB read and 277GB written. I keep all the user data off the boot drive.

I've noticed pauses lately and that lead to running benchmarks. Then I backed it up and tried updating the 5.0.2 firmware update which went in OK, but the speeds seemed no different. I am limited by the SATA2 controller, but I thought I used to get much better 4K writes and IOPS than these.

Any suggestions or even tell me what I should look at?

Patriot Pyro SE ATA Device_120GB_1GB-20120803-1604.jpgUntitled.jpg

[Patriot_Ben]

Hello,

Can you try running a benchmark with ATTO? Try flashing the board to the latest bios as well.

Try letting the system idle overnight and letting Garbage Collection run it's course to see if performance increases.

[Mark963]

The bios for my motherboard hasn't been updated for over a year. It's an MSI 785GM-E65, so it isn't really new.

I ran ATTO 4 times. The first time I used it with AMD's AHCI driver, which has always given me lower benchmarks, like topping out at 160MB/s reads and 124MB/s writes under CrystalDiskMark. Then I switched back to the normal Windows 7 default driver which gives around 250MB/s reads and 148MB/s writes in CrystalDiskMark. Then I rebooted again, reran the Windows 7 driver, re-installed in the AMD driver and ran a last time. I didn't even let the MS benchmarks finish because they were running so incredibly slow. What should I do?


1 ATTO_AMD AHCI.jpg2 ATTO_MS AHCI.jpg3 ATTO_MS AHCI after reboot.jpg4 ATTO AMD AHCI Again.jpg

[Patriot_Ben]

Are you still getting random freezes?

The scores in your first benchmark looks about right with the native Windows 7 drivers.

Can you try letting it idle overnight or for a few hours?

Double-check that the drive is set to AHCI in the bios. Can you also make sure that the drive is running on ports 0 or 1?

[Mark963]

I did verify that the bios is set for AHCI - without it, the Windows ACHI drivers don't load and the serial transfer rates fall to 150MBps. I'm not sure how to check which port number the drive is on. The Pyro shows up at Disk 0 in the Storage view in Computer Management. This PC often sits for hours with little hard drive activity and I haven't noted much difference.

It used to be that the Microsoft AHCI drivers were better all the way around than the AMD's. I'm sure the maximum transfer rates (large reads/writes) always measured 10 or 20% better and there were a lot of complaints about pauses with the AMD's. When I recently measured the Pyro SE with the MS drivers installed, things were definitely worse especially on 4K read/writes - those are the .jpg files above with MS in the name. While trying various things, I had installed the newest (v12.6) AMD drivers. I think the AMD results above (the ones with AMD in the .jpg name) are the ones you thought looked about right - given the SATA limitation of 300MBps.

I went back and ran CrystalDiskMark on the AMD drivers and was surprised that that the sequential transfer rates were a match for the MicroSoft ones.

I'm confused what changed, but the AMD drivers seem like a reasonable fix for now. I'll have to run it for a while to see if it's still hanging up or pausing. I know the AMD drivers used to be blamed for those behaviors.