Crucial C300 vs M4

T

the_cheeky_badger

Weaksauce
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Dec 15, 2006
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Hi,

I have a Crucial C300 and M4 (both 128Mb) and I'm benchmarking them, the strange thing is that the M4 is always coming out a lot slower, which makes no sense at all!

I've double and triple checked the following before you ask!

1) Both drives are plugged into a 6Gb/s SATA socket
2) Both drives are on the latest firmware from Crucial

I've run both HD Tune Pro and CrystalDiskMark to benchmark them and I get the results below which is baffling me as the M4 is supposed to be slightly better than the C300? Does anyone have any ideas or things that I could check?

Thanks for your help

M4
M4-Crystal.jpg

M4-HD.png


C300
C300-Crystal.jpg

C300-HD.png
 
Neither one of those looks to be doing anywhere near what it should.

Do you have an active antivirus/malware program running? The M4 128 should be hitting near 500MB/s reads and like 190ish MB/s writes on 0009+FW. You've got to be doing something wrong on the M4 to get it that slow.


Can you please run and post screenshots from AS-SSD? On both drives? And make sure the M4 really is in the right port(it probably is, but it doesn't hurt to check again)?
 
Both drives should be performing better. Do you have AHCI enabled in bios? Could also check for updated or alternative storage controller drivers, i.e. try the generic microsoft ahci drivers.

edit to agree with Crykan: those numbers are awfully close to what I would expect if I plugged into sata I or sata II ports.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for your replies, I have put together some answers:

Again I've double checked the connectivity to ensure both drives are connected to 6Gb/s ports, here you can see my motherboard with the connection to the M4 (the M4 is currently outside my system in an external SATA caddy, its the blue cable in the picture

6gb.jpg


And here, you can see the motherboard layout and block diagram for my motherboard rev 2.1:

Motherboard.jpg

BlockDiagram.jpg


Which does indeed confirm that not only is the M4 and C300 plugged into SATA 6Gb/s ports, all my drives are.

Now for the screenshot of AS SSD benchmarking my M4:

ASSSD.png


Which also confirms the poor performance. (note I left all settings at default for the test)

I then took a look in the BIOS and found that all my SATA ports are configured for IDE setting NOT AHCI, not sure if this has any effect on performance?

I have also updated my chipset drivers to the latest version from AMD which made no difference to the speeds.

Any ideas from here would be welcome!

Thanks
 
Thansk DJ Big T, I've now set AHCI on in the BIOS, let Win 7 reinstall the drivers and run the benchmark again, although it shows an improvement, still not the blazing speeds I would expect!

ASSSDAHCI.png


Also, sorry ckryan I didnt answer your question about the anti-virus app, I do have MS security essentials running on default settings

Thanks
 
Turn off hard disk sleep in the power settings so it can run trim when Idle. If you have system wide sleep enabled set it to 1 or 2 hours vs. the normal 30 minutes so it has time to run trim/garbage collection.
 
Yes, something is amiss.

The first thing you should do is try AMD's AHCI drivers. The purpose behind running AS-SSD was to gather some information. AS-SSD will tell you if your drive is aligned, what FW the drive is running, and which drivers you are using.

Sometimes using MSAHCI (Windows' built in drivers) can result in better performance, but I'd start trying to figure this out by downloading the appropriate AMD AHCI drivers.
 
Ok, I've updated the driver, it now appears like this in device manager:

DeviceManager.jpg

AMDDriver.jpg


And these are the results:

AMDtesting.png


Again, a small improvement but nothing like what it is capable of! Any other suggestions would be welcome

Thanks!
 
Is there any chance of being able to pop your drive into another working system and bench it, just to see?
 
OK, I decided to try Tiporaro suggestion and try the drive in my Shuttle SH67H3 and it yielded it same results:

128gbbench.png


Despite the fact that the 64Gb M4 I already had in the Shuttle SH67H3 was much faster:

64GBbench.png


So I thought what was the only thing that had followed the drive accross to the other system and I suddenly realised the caddy, so I plugged it direct into the system without the caddy and boom!

128insidesystem.png


Much faster, looks like it was the damn caddy. So I'm just about to ghost my C300 and swap it to the M4 and then see how the benchmark looks in my main PC, I'm expecting much better speeds!

I'll post once I've done the swap
 
After some messing about cloning the C300 to the M4 I've finally got it inside my system and benchmarked with HD Tune & AS SSD, results are much better so it does indeed seem my external caddy was the cause of the problem all along.

M4Final.png

M4128Gb0309.png


Thanks for all your help and troubleshooting
 
OK, not to rail on you but what do you mean by caddy? All this time you were using some external drive bay or extender? Sorry but that is a noob error!
 
You mean almost as noob as no one reading that I specified I was using an external caddy in my second post? ;)

As my school teacher said "Perhaps we should read the question, before we provide the answer"

And to answer your question fps4ever, yes I do mean an external drive bay, more specifically the Sharkoon Quickport XT (link)

I was not aware that external drive bays / caddy's caused such an impact on performance, obviously it is not a mistake I will be making again!

Thanks for your help
 
the_cheeky_badger said:
You mean almost as noob as no one reading that I specified I was using an external caddy in my second post? ;)

As my school teacher said "Perhaps we should read the question, before we provide the answer"

And to answer your question fps4ever, yes I do mean an external drive bay, more specifically the Sharkoon Quickport XT (link)

I was not aware that external drive bays / caddy's caused such an impact on performance, obviously it is not a mistake I will be making again!

Thanks for your help
Click to expand...

Missed it and I actually looked to see if u wrote that! Ha...

Yeah, if I saw that I would have mentioned direct connect. At least it wasn't something major....
 
I would have never thought they reduced performance so much, but I guess you learn something everyday!

Anyway, thanks to all for your help and suggestions, at least I got my system running on AHCI which is much better than IDE!

Cheers
 
Yeah, but I was thinking you were "currently" using the M4 in the "caddy" as in a hot swap bay or something. When you have a problem you can't solve after a little effort, the best thing to do is strip away anything unneccessary. If you had put that drive in some kind of esata or USB enclosure, that would obviously be something you would want to get rid of. If you're using a hot-swap bay or some kind of pass through device it's not really a big deal (most of the time).
 
Whats the point of the C3? Why get one when you can get a M4?
 
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