60GB Agility 3 SSD is running at SATA I Speeds on SATA II Motherboard

I bought a new 60GB Agility 3 SSD and connected it to my machine but it seems to be not working well into it. I have loaded and formatted the drive in the disk management but then I found that it is recogonized in windows XP. Also once I tried to perform the benchmark test on the disk and the result which I got somehow reached to the peak of 135mb/s read speed and around 100mb/s write speed. The most interesting thing was that in the Disk manager after I selected my SATA port it showed me that the drive was running at SATA I. none of the other hard drives are facing such problem, all of them are shown perfectly and are detected as SATA II on device manager and also they are running properly. There is no doubt that the SSD is also running fine but it seems to be running at a very slow speed. Already tried formatting the drive multiple times but that didn’t make any difference. Also tried out different block sizes and aligning partitions using GPARTED and using Linux distro to benchmark but everything landed at the same place with no such positive difference. Some external information, my mother board has a Nforce 630a chipset with two SATA II ports but on the Agility 3 system requirements it was stated that the SSD is backward compatibility with SATA II. Anyone facing the same issue and found any proper solution for the same?

Yeah I am the one with the exact same issue. I am sure that the SSD is faulty as I can see only this SSD common in both of our case. I have already tried out swapping the ports and replacing the cables but didn’t work on my machine, I would recommend you to try out the same and see whether it works in your system or not. If I would have another PC, definitely I would have tried each and every solution in both the system so that I could have made myself sure with the problem but unfortunately I couldn’t. so therefore I am requesting you to try out what I have tried so that at least we can make out whether we share the same cause of our problem.

There is one thing that I have noticed in my motherboard is that it does not support AHCI mode. Not sure but I guess this could be the main reason for the issue. can you check out for the same in your computer. My BIOS is completely updated with the latest updates.

There is a fix called a MAC fix but this fix is to really for just seeing 1.5Gb/s instead of 3Gb/s. if possible get the special version of the Linux based updated tool from web and then burn it to a disc like some other version and then boot to it. After this you could probably see a new icon called as "MAC 1.5/3G" with an OCZ technology icon. After this doubt click on it and then verify that you need to perform the update just by pressing Enter and then wait. I think it would take few minutes to complete, don’t shut off until and unless you see that it has completed. Once you are done you will be receiving a confirmation message on your screen saying that all the drives have been updated with the fix. If done shut down the machine, now restart the Mac/Nvidia based PC, remove the CD and then boot to OSX or Windows 7 and see whether the issue resolved. Definitely the issue will be vanished from the machine.

I did have a decent speed increase of up to 30% on a smaller read and write only when I reverted to the regular windows SATA/IDE drivers and also uninstall the Nforce ones. This will surely help you my friend, after reading out your thread I came to know that your problem was very much similar to mine so therefore I decided to help you out by letting you know the possible solution I tried in my computer to get a proper speed out of my SSD. Also see to it that your arbage collection is on and running. It’s the sandforce controller that uses the idle time garbage collection which works in the background without any user control over it. Until now there is no one who has revealed what sandforce considers an idle enough state or you can say how much idle time is required to maintain the performance for it. If you are aware you must be knowing that everyone’s usage timings are different; there are some people who do not require actual idle time whereas some need small amount of logged off idle time. Also there are heavy users who need lots of write/erase cycles that may need few overnight log offs each and every weeks. The only way to get sure and know is to get the baseline using a simple benchmark i.e. atto and then after few weeks run it again by adjusting the idle time as per your requirement.

There is a vast difference between smaller SSDs and huge SSDs, there are small drives which get dirty as soon as possible. I personally prefer to log off overnight a twice a week on all of my system but on the other hand I am always gaming or downloading applications or surfing or else testing firmware. When I asked my friend about dirty SSD he told me that the drives getting dirty depends upon the write load to the drives. Also if we are not using it for the boot drive with no OS installed then surely it is bound to stay much clean and also have much more time to let the Garbage collection be quite as there would be less disk activity noticed with the drive. There are people who have a wrong assumption that only surfing on internet and not downloading is not at all a write intensive, in fact actually the highest level of incompressible data streaming from other source that is being used now days can do temporary work out.

The best thing you could do is using the SSD and also has a look at the decrease at the speed on your daily and normal work. If you find that it decrease at a lesser amount then surely there is no need to take much care for the extra idle time but if the speed is completely broken down then better you think of taking some extra step in order to give the SSD some extra time to idle and then do the garbage collection. Obviously the companies are not going to discuss about their garbage collection as all of them tries to get the best and the fastest speed of the NAND with the lowest usage of the program and then erase the cycle of the NAND. It looks very much important for the controller companies to be very much sensitive with the next TLC NAND and also to think about each and every P/E cycle. Till the moment you write less as compared to the excess writing to the disk and also not hurting it with lot 4 thousand writes the SSD should definitely do the work without caring about the "idle Garbage Collection sessions".