Thinkpads Forum

Okay. To make a long story short, about a year and a half ago I bought a Samsung 256GB SSD with FDE(FRU: 45N7959, same as in this old Marketplace ad: http://www.thinkpads.com/forum/viewtopi ... 11&t=86398). I paid next to nothing for it and it's been used in both my X200 and T500(which it's currently in) ever since. I haven't experienced any data corruption, bad sectors, or anything rather goofy with this drive; SMART diagnostics still show that it's in good shape. I am running Win7 on the drive with all my typical programs/utilities/games loaded; this was a fresh installation(not cloned from another drive). There's about 80GB of free space.

However, ever since I purchased it I noticed the performance was pretty sluggish. I went ahead and ran the AS SSD benchmark on it:

Sequential: Read: 182.19 MB/s Write: 35.59MB/s

4K: Read: 17.10 MB/s Write: 4.15 MB/s

Compare this to the comparison run I did on the Hitachi 7K500(500GB, 7200RPM HDD) in the Ultrabay:

Sequential: Read: 82.35MB/s Write: 81.23 MB/s

4K: Read: 0.52MB/s Write: 0.77 MB/s


Obviously, the SSD definitely blows my platter drive out of the water with read speeds(though not quite matching the advertised 220MB/s). However, with the sequential write speed being less than half that of the SSD I'm convinced there's a problem happening somewhere. I have an Intel X25M G1 in my Asus G73 that feels much snappier than this Samsung, although in all honesty the overall user experience with this drive hasn't been that much better than a traditional HDD.

Now, I realize that this is an older SSD and definitely not up to the performance standards of new drives. However, my question is if there's a way to get the performance back up to par, or if this is simply how this drive's going to be and I should just keep living with it?

The write speed is definitely off. It's slower than some HDD. Most manufacturer use ATTO to benchmark their drives and that's the specs that they provide so you might want to give that a try. Regardless, a SSD should noticeable be faster.

I'd check a few things. SATA controller set to AHCI in BIOS? Alignment is correct? Did you clone the old driver over or did you do a fresh install? Make sure all the chipset, SATA drive controller and Intel drivers are all up to date. Latest firmware on the SSD? SSDs, especially earlier models, benefit greatly from a firmware update.

Have you installed the Samsung "Magician" software to check/update fw, and to optimize windows for the SSD? It will help you with a few of the things Cigarguy lists.

Sorry it took me so long to get back to this. Here's what I've found.

This drive seems to be some type of one-off of the Samsung PM800. Apparently there was a firmware update on a similar drive used in earlier Dell/Alienware machines, but I haven't been able to find out anything specific about this drive's firmware revision. I've made sure that all my drivers are up to date and the system itself is in good order.

Due to the risk of bricking the drive I'm very leery about testing unknown firmware. As I'm likely going to need a pretty decent hardware upgrade for school(strongly considering the W520), I might relegate this SSD to a secondary machine I can play around with.