SSD write speed is slower than a HDD?

[wickedking94]

So I got a Kingston SSD Now 200 V+ 60 GB SSD and installed OS 10.6.8 onto it. I enabled trim and ran black magic design's disk speed test and it gave the SSD 75 MB/s write 180 MB/s read. While I'm perfectly happy with the read speed (my MBP boots in under 10 seconds) I was hoping to get better write speeds especially considering my regular HDD got 85 MB/s write. Is there anything I might need to configure differently to get better write speeds? The drive is advertised as 280 MB/s read 230 MB/s write for SATA II, and I know you don't usually get advertised speeds but even 100 MB/s would be a good enough improvement.

My Macbook Pro:
13" mid 2010
2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo
8 GB ram
Nvidia Geforce 320M 256 MB
SATA II disk interface.

I know theres a firmware update for this drive, but I assume it would already be installed? I'll have to get access to a PC to run their firmware update tool and see. Will post an update when I do that, in the mean time any other suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[Intell]

The Black Magic Disk Speed Test app has been reporting incorrect results as of late. There are some other disk speed bench mark applications you could try. One of them is XBench. While old, it can often provide good results for disk speeds.

 

[derbothaus]

Test is all about incompressible data. Sandforce based drives do poorly on these tests. You are really getting twice this in compressible performance. Use AJA or something else.

 

[throAU]

Test is all about incompressible data. Sandforce based drives do poorly on these tests. You are really getting twice this in compressible performance. Use AJA or something else.

Not necessarily. Encrypted data (filevault) compresses poorly. As do most (already compressed) file formats used online. eg, mp4 audio/video, .png, jpeg, etc - and these types are probably what the big files on a user's system are made up of.

 

[dusk007]

So I got a Kingston SSD Now 200 V+ 60 GB SSD and installed OS 10.6.8 onto it. I enabled trim and ran black magic design's disk speed test and it gave the SSD 75 MB/s write 180 MB/s read.

Write speed isn't all that important but anyway. Your problem is the 60GB size. You should have bought a bigger drive if you wanted more speed. The 120GB would manage double the write speed 140MB/s according to storagereview. So it sounds about right. That is all you can expect with incompressible data and such a small drive.

If is the controlle with its 8 channels. The 60GB drive has only four chips which only utilise half of the channels. And only the 16 chips of a 256GB drive use all 8 channels with interleaving to best effect.

This data is definitely correct and there is nothing to do about it. Generally I would always buy at least 120GB sized SSDs also because of the wear leveling life expectancy though that is not really a problem with Sandforce controllers.

 

[JoeG4]

SSDs are made so that the data is broken up into pieces and written in parallel to multiple blocks at the same time, much like a RAID 0 of hard drives. The problem is that when you change data, the SSD just takes the current block, rewrites it somewhere else, and deallocates the current one.

The problem is, when you're running low on space, the drive has to do that deallocating much more often, especially if a write is waiting on that space (and controllers usually have extra space to spare for this exact reason - a 128gb drive reserves 8gb, a 256 16gb, and so on).

So I could see it being kinda slow in that respect - slow for an SSD? Not so much, if you're within return policy you might wanna go bounce that thing back!

 

[wickedking94]

Yeah I might return it. They have the same drive as mine except in 120 GB would that be faster?

 

[wickedking94]

Actually I'm probably just going to get my money back and not bother putting an SSD into my MBP. Its pretty much a waste on this piece of junk.

 

[derbothaus]

Not necessarily. Encrypted data (filevault) compresses poorly. As do most (already compressed) file formats used online. eg, mp4 audio/video, .png, jpeg, etc - and these types are probably what the big files on a user's system are made up of.

Thats what I was saying, my friend.

 

[richnyc]

Piece of junk, really???

I put a 256GB Samsung 830 SSD into my Dell laptop with approx. same specs as your MBP (Intel C2D 2.4, 6GB, HD3000, SATAII only) and it was screaming fast... Still a viable machine for 95% of tasks... I was getting 241/172 MB/s r/w speeds.

There is just no comparison in speeds between a 'decent' current generation SSD and HDD. If I was you and didn't want to spend too much money, I'll look at non-Sandforce based 128 or 256GB SSD, look for a deal at Frys.com, Newegg or Amazon.

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Here you have a good roundup of different SSD drives to see what they are capable of:

All SSD Charts 2012

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This right here is a great SSD for your comp (for $98.05):

Samsung 840 Series 2.5 inch 120GB SATA III internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-7TD120BW

 

[WillFisher]

I put my first SSD into my machine the other day, exact same machine as yours.
The speeds are ridiculous, I would never choose another HDD over a SSD ever again. As well as it running cooler, quieter and battery life seems to have improved very sightly.
My write speed is actually at 198/200mb/s, so yours should be quicker?

Mine was a Samsung 830 256GB btw.

 

[wickedking94]

Yeah but I think its a waste because mainly what my computer is getting stuck on are CPU intensive tasks to spending 100$ on an SSD that basically all it does is make it boot fast and open programs faster isn't going to help. An SSD can't make Maya render faster or make the Source physics engine work smoother can it?

I might as well get my 80$ back for this drive and go buy a ton of wine gums or something. I'll get more enjoyment out of that.

 

[dusk007]

A 120G SSD usually has about twice the speed of a 60GB.

I think SSD mostly reduce some very annoying waiting times. It is more a psychological thing rather than an actual speed boost. Most of the stuff it speeds up makes up so little of a usual work day it doesn't really matter. Once you are used to it the HDD annoys you twice as much as it would have before.

The write times though really don't matter. It is the random access and low latency that is great about them. Swapping is really fast. Sequential write speeds you need almost never because you generally don't have any source medium that will transfer you any more than what 60-80MB/s anyway. Only extracting archives or copy on the same drive is a bit faster.
Even install times only change little as unpacking still requires the CPU and most writes aren't all that sequential. From RAM to disk happen very few sequential writes and on average they rarely reach more than 40MB/s.

 

[wickedking94]

So, like I said I might as well return it and get some wine gums. All my problems are CPU related and since thats soldered to the board I might as well use my money on something more useful.

 

[throAU]

Piece of junk, really???

I put a 256GB Samsung 830 SSD into my Dell laptop with approx. same specs as your MBP (Intel C2D 2.4, 6GB, HD3000, SATAII only) and it was screaming fast... Still a viable machine for 95% of tasks... I was getting 241/172 MB/s r/w speeds.

See that's the thing.

Unless your workload involves bulk sequential IO, the sequential read/write throughput numbers don't really tell the whole story.

You can go from a spinning disk to SSD that is the same read/write speed and still see a massive improvement because the random IO is so much better.

At RANDOM IO (which although not fully representative of a desktop workload is probably slightly more realistic - in reality there will be a mix), a spinning disk drops massively. Worst case, with fully random 4k IOs, you may see a spinning disk that can run up at 90MB/sec sequential drop down to 1MB/sec due to the head movement required to service the random IO.

An SSD will drop a little bit at random IO but nowhere near to that extent as there are no moving parts.

To the OP:
Have you actually tried using the machine (pushing it a bit) back to back vs the SSD, or are you just looking at the benchmark? If the real world performance is no better for what you do, fair enough - but in my experience you don't really need to be doing a heap to get a massive general system speed increase in day to day use, not just system startup.

But if you're happy with HD performance fine....

 

[paul-n]

I installed a SSD in my wifes macbook, and I think she will kill me if I put the HDD back in her system
Even she feels the performance, but everybody is allowed to do his own choices, and if someone is fine with HDD performance he is a lucky man, without the need spending money on SSDs