Question

Possible To Replace SATA 150 Controller On Laptop? If Not, Which HDD Config Is Fastest?

Asked by: BenKellermann

Hey All -

I've got an Alienware m9750 laptop that's about 2 years old.  At the time, it was one of the best rigs around.  A while back, I swapped around the hard drive configuration to meet my needs. Here's the before and after:

Before  -
x2 300Gb 7200 Hard Drives in RAID 0
     1 Partition for everything

After -
x1 Intel X25-M 80Gb SSD
     2 Partitions on SSD - One big one for OS, one small one for VM
x1 WD 500Gb 5400 plain jane drive for storage.
     1 Partition but does also hold page file

*Note 1*  There was trouble with the X25-M a few months ago, but I have upgraded it to the newest firmware

*Note 2*  Stas on the X25-M (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-x25-m-SSD,2012.html)

I'm currently running Windows 7 x64 Ultimate and have 4 Gb RAM

Here's the problem.  My SSD is or was a year ago) one of the best around and I payed a good amount for it, however, benchmarks didn't reflect what I was after until I realized that my laptop has a 150GbPS SATA controller (Intel ICH7-M - 27C4).  Is it possible to replace it with a 300?  Is it possible to overclock my existing 150?  

If not, instead of wasting the valuable resource in the X25-M SSD, which config below is the fastest?  If there's not too much difference because of my bottleneck of SATA150, would it be wise to just use my X25-M in a different computer?  

- Go Back to the x2 7200rpm HDDs on RAID 0
- Securely Erase my X25-M to set it back to factory and reinstall everything
- Keep current config
- If keep current config, change Page File
     - Keep it on the 2nd HDD which is a 5400 RPM
     - Move it to the SSD on either of it's paritions
     - Place a page file on each of the drives (5400 & SSD)

Any other recommendations would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

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Asked On
2009-10-31 at 10:33:47ID24860918
Tags

sata

,

controller

,

150

,

300

,

hard drive

Topics

Storage Technology

,

Hard Drives & Storage

,

Computer Hard Drives

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Comments
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Answers

 

by: dlethePosted on 2009-10-31 at 11:16:04ID: 25710842

Rule of thumb, you can overclock almost anything, but in a laptop???   The extra heat is a deal-killer.  Fuggetaboutit.
As for what HD is fastest?  Read full specs.  Don't get hung up on RPMs.   Look at access time/latency/best-worst case seek/transfer time/read/write max/mins.  
Use perfmon to trap and model your current I/O and see what your peak and average is for a typical day.  Then normalize the manufacturer's specs by assigning weights to the various parameters and seeing how your top candidates compare against how you use the machine.

Also since you are using NTFS, consider breaking up your system into multiple partitions if necessary where you use a larger chunk size for NTFS.  That will make the file system more efficient, and remove the need to perform some I/Os.

Remember it takes microseconds to read something from a an internal cache and milliseconds to go to disk, so, very roughly speaking, you get 1000X better performance for every I/O that does not have to go to the disk drive.   One can usually get a much better performance gain by just taking the time to tune your O/S then by throwing hardware at it.

 

by: garycasePosted on 2009-10-31 at 11:22:07ID: 25710874

First, to answer your question as stated -- No.    You can't replace the SATA controller chip.

A few thoughts on your config ...

=>  Why did you downgrade your 2nd drive to 5400rpm?   If you needed the extra storage, that's understandable;  but otherwise, I'd use one of the 7200rpm drives for your 2nd drive.

=>  Did the X-25M work better initially?  Degrading performance on an SSD can be due to a "trim" issue -- which Intel is well aware of  (They just released new firmware to resolve it a week or so ago -- and then pulled the release a day later when it caused issues).    If it's always had the same level of performance that's not it.

=>  What performance measures lead you to conclude the bottleneck is the controller?   The read performance will indeed be bottlenecked by a SATA-150 interface;  but the write speeds won't be;  and of course the 2nd drive's performance is far below even SATA-150 (even the 7200rpm drive).     In real life ... booting; program loading; etc.  the dramatic "seek" improvements of the SSD should have resulted in notable performance gains over your previous RAID-0 array -- did you indeed see these gains?

 

by: garycasePosted on 2009-10-31 at 11:25:38ID: 25710896

"... consider breaking up your system into multiple partitions if necessary ..."  ==> NOT a good idea with an SSD.    This can aggravate the trim issue;  and multiple partitions provide no performance benefits on a drive that has no mechanical seek time.

 

by: dlethePosted on 2009-10-31 at 11:37:55ID: 25710941

Yes and no, Gary .. first you are technically correct when you consider I/Os once they are issued.  However in the context of a NTFS file system, you can eliminate (or conversely increase) some I/Os because changing the NTFS parameters affects internal cache buffers.

So while I/Os will effectively be the same once the request is made from the controller, the service time will be different if you measure from the time the program requested the I/O.  

 

by: BenKellermannPosted on 2009-10-31 at 11:45:07ID: 25710971

Thanks guys -

I really appreciate your posts.

dlethe:  I really don't understand why the multiple partition will help if it's going to the same disk.  Should I have how many do you suggest and for what purposes should I assign? ie: downloads, OS, page file, VM, etc...)

garycase:  To answer a couple of questions, I downgraded one to a 5400 because I needed as much space as possible and the biggest 2.5 internal at the time was a 500Gb and didn't come in anything other than the 5400.

The X-25-M was faster at first and after about a month of me noticing this, I saw an article on Tom's Hardware so I did a secure erase (using HDDERASE - an older version that was compatable to) then about a month after that flashed to the 1st released firmware.

Now its worse than ever.  I haven't done an OS reinstall yet, but PCmark05 gave it the results attached which are WAY below others I've seen for the same drive.

I really want my laptop to be as fast as possilbe, but may just be wasting my good hardware in it with the SSD and should go back to the x2 raid0 7200 hard drives if there's not going to be a big difference anyways and move the SSD to another machine.

What do you think?

 

by: BenKellermannPosted on 2009-10-31 at 11:50:27ID: 25710989

Ohh, for comparison purposes to the image I posted previously, here is the article that Tom's Hardware posted when the drive first came out.  This was even before any firmwares were released.  Since my scores have averaged about 1/2 or less, that's why I thought it was the difference in 150 to 300 SATA.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-x25-m-SSD,2012.html

Thanks again all...

 

by: dlethePosted on 2009-10-31 at 11:52:39ID: 25711002

Ben:   Just run this simple test.  Get one of the many USB pen drives you probably have sitting around, format it into 2 partitions, set the chunk size larger on one of them.  then copy some large files on both partitions and see for yourself and report back.

 

by: BenKellermannPosted on 2009-10-31 at 11:55:02ID: 25711016

Okay, I will do that - however - Isn't it true that Windows will not let you partition a flash drive?  I read that you can trick the OS to think it's a HDD or use a special tool, but I haven't found anything that works good enough yet.

Thanks

 

by: garycasePosted on 2009-10-31 at 12:57:59ID: 25711282

The results you're seeing are well below the SATA-150 interface speeds, so that's not the main bottleneck here.    It undoubtedly contributes (since burst transfers are limited to the interface rate),  but there's too much of a difference for that to be the primary cause.    I'd expect speeds in the 125MB range even with a SATA-150 controller  (you'll never hit the theoretical 150MB).

Using a larger allocation unit when you format a partition will indeed reduce the number of I/O's ... the tradeoff is added slack space.   This is true for any file system -- FAT32, NTFS, etc.      I always use a large allocation unit for drives where I store a lot of photo and video content;  but more most sizes for general use drives.   But the benefits of this are dramatically reduced with an SSD, where the overhead is dramatically lower than with a rotating platter drive ("seek" and "latency" are both nearly zero ... just a few microseconds).     [Of the 9 drives on my system, 3 are using 32K allocation units;  the rest 4K.]      You're more likely to see some benefit from this on your data drive, since it's a relatively slow drive and you're more likely to be doing large transfers on that drive than on the SSD.    But it's very unlikely to make enough difference to appreciably change the numbers you've posted above.   Certainly won't hurt to try, however ... the only real "cost" is the added slack space (~ 14k/file if you change from 4k to 32k).

A more likely issue with a rotating-platter drive would be an NTFS partition that was not properly aligned ... which ensure a block doesn't cross a cylinder boundary ... but even that is not as important with SSDs.

All of which begs the question as to why you're seeing such relatively slow speeds for an SSD.    One key question -- are you sure the benchmark is just testing the SSD?   If it's testing the SYSTEM it very well may be factoring in the performance of your 2nd drive.    I'd remove the 2nd drive and re-run the benchmark.    If that's not a factor, then you likely need to run a trim utility on the SSD to clear up the deleted-but-not-yet-reused sectors.   Unfortunately, the Intel SSD Toolbox is only for the 2nd generation 34nm drives (not yours) ... and it was pulled the day after it was released anyway, so Intel doesn't quite have it right yet.     I'm not aware of any way to add TRIM support to your drive -- the 2nd gen drive has the support; and Windows 7 supports the TRIM functions ... so with a 2nd generation X-25M you should get much better results (with OS support for TRIM, the drive will never encounter the blocked cell issue that causes the performance degradation).    But short of replacing your SSD with a 2nd gen unit, the best solution is probably to wipe the drive and reload it -- the ATA Secure Erase command is probably the best way to do this.    It's outlined here:  http://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase

Note that with an X-25M first generation drive you'll simply have to do this every few months to restore performance, as Intel has no plans to further update the firmware for those drives to add TRIM support.     Assuming you don't want to simply upgrade to a Gen 2 drive, I'd image your OS,  do an ATA Secure Erase, and then restore the image.    That should significantly improve your performance.     You could make this a bit less of a hassle by eliminating the 2nd partition and simply keeping everything in one partition (so you just have one partition to image/restore).

 

by: dlethePosted on 2009-10-31 at 13:26:48ID: 25711410

windows will let you partition a flash drive.  The drive appears as a standard SCSI disk drive to the storage stack of the O/S.  You need to delete the partition by zeroing out the first few blocks by doing a low-level format, blowing it away courtesy of a unix/linux machine's dd command, use a hex editor that lets you open the raw disk, etc..  

anyway it is moot point, if you insist on verifying for yourself, just run test twice on the same USB after running the windows format with different chunk (allocation) sizes using same test criteria.

 

by: BenKellermannPosted on 2009-11-04 at 10:57:58ID: 31648407

Even though I had tried the DOS method before, after this method I realized how dramatic of a difference there is now.  Thank you for your advice - Ben

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