X220 SSD upgrade trouble with drivers

[grayb]

I've a trusty X220/i7/Win7/16G/Sandisk Plus 512GB used for an astro rig. Just upgraded to Samsung 870 EVO 1TB. Have tried multiple disk copying approaches across 3 HW configs and many differnt SWconfigs- Win7/10/Linux/X220/P50 and a beefy Xeon server.

Despite trying multiple clone tools and different SATA connectors it was highly problematic to get the partition structure on the SSD because of Lenovo's bitlockered SYSTEM_DRV. (This had not been an issue when moving to SanDisk - in the end I used O&O Disk Image - which doenst do the same job anymore. So right now I only have the bootable Windows partition on the Samsung. Seems OK.The behaviour noted below is the same on a disk clone with the lenovo SYSTEM-DRIV partition too (I didnt keep this setup as the Windows partition was hemmed in by 2 bitlockered partitions and couldnt be expanded to take advantage of the extra 500GB).

My problem is to get the best R/W performance and the correct win7 boot behaviour - 2 situations

a) using the last Intel Mobile Express SATA drivers 11.0.2.1006 I get zippy speed: Sequential R/W is 560/530 MB/s and random R/W is 71/60 kIOPS but Win7 soft restart drops into Intel Boot Agent (disk not ready ?) and needs a power off/on cycle to get past this

b) using Microsoft Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA drivers at 6.1.7601.18231 I get good Seq E/W at 560/527 but random is way down at 41/39 and its noticeably slower in use but soft restart is fine

Lenovo auto check says these drivers are up to date. I've tried some alternatives in BIOS but no difference.

Q1 : Anyone experienced this with the Samsung 870 EVO and managed to fix this ?

Q2: Anyone experience of Sandisk 3D Ultra 1TBs in the X220 ? Any other compatibility problems with X220 ?

Thanks for reading this and dont waste your time telling me to upgrade to W10. I have very good reasons for keeping this stand alone PC on W7.

[dr_st]

Welcome to the forum.

I suggest trying a fresh Win7 install on the new Samsung SSD - from an official installation media - just to see if the issues are somehow related to the clone / Lenovo's build.