C300 performance down one third

[[LYL]Homer]

I built 2 identical systems as workstations last October:

Crucial 64gb C300, SATA 3gb/s (best the mobo has), AHCI, aligned, on Intel H55 ports, write caching enabled
i7-870
4gb RAM
Gigabyte H55M-USB3, F10 BIOS
SATA DVD
8800GT in one system and Radeon 5750 in other
WinXP Pro 32-bit

It scored 452 on the 9.6.x.x drivers in October right after it was built, here it is in November with 10.0.0.1046 drivers.

Both computers have been stuttering (0.5-1.0 seconds several times per minute) and hangs of 20-30 seconds around 8-10 times per hour. They originally had the 0002 firmware and I updated one with the 0006 firware about 6 weeks ago. It has had a few BSOD's since and no improvement on the stutters and hangs. I tried updating and rolling back the RST drivers.

I've been holding out for the 0007 firmware which I have just updated the 0006 machine with.

Here's where they both benchmark now, still the same for both pc's for around the last 2 months (one with 9.6.x.x drivers/0002 and the other with 10.5.0.1022/0007 respectively):

Grabbing for anything I just tried the 0007 system with the C300 booting from one of the onboard 'Gigabyte SATA2' (some sort of JMC controller) and got this:

I've done some searches and found something relating to EFI or hot-swap but there seems to be nothing in the BIOS as this is an H55 chipset. I've tried to go to MSAHCI drivers but I don't seem to be able, is this a WinXP limitation?

Any ideas on where to go from here? Do these drives just suck after they are filled? Is my garbage collection borked somehow?

 

[Yonzie]

WinXP => No TRIM => Performance goes down the drain after 4 fills.
Sandforce-based drives might be a better choice, but I have no experience with them.
Get Windows 7, OS X or something. AFAIK there is nothing else you can do.

 

[[LYL]Homer]

I know about TRIM, but is there also no garbage collection?

But yeah, Win7 will eventually happen here and this may scoot it along.

 

[Old Hippie]

The speeds on the Intel ports with the latest drivers look just fine to me.

The first AS-SSD shot you have is an iops test not a MB/s test. Do you always compare apples to oranges?

If your GC wasn't working the drive would barely work.

The Gigabyte/whatever 3rd party chipsets are no good.

If I were you I'd be trying the latest 0007 firmware that's supposed to fix the stutters.

 

[[LYL]Homer]

The speeds on the Intel ports with the latest drivers look just fine to me.

The first AS-SSD shot you have is an iops test not a MB/s test. Do you always compare apples to oranges?

If your GC wasn't working the drive would barely work.

The Gigabyte/whatever 3rd party chipsets are no good.

If I were you I'd be trying the latest 0007 firmware that's supposed to fix the stutters.

bah! Thanks, I grabbed the wrong pic regarding iops - fixed.

The one with 336 as score is on 0007, which is 120 points lower than when built and the drives are still stuttering/freezing. I had high hopes that 0007 would fix my issues.