Why is my Precision M6400 so fast with HDD's but not so fast with SSD's

Hi all and any - I've been puzzling over this for a while and finally got round to joining a forum to pop the question...

I recently bought a Precision M6400 laptop (eBay) to replace the M4400 I've had for the last year. I have been very pleased with the M4400 - it was fast as it came with its 160GB 7200rpm drive and only 2GB RAM (800MHz) but i got a 100GB STEC MACH16 SSD off eBay (unused) plus a caddy to make the DVD drive removable so i could turn the original mechanical drive into storage for my docs etc and the SSD as the main drive with windows 8.1 pro on it. The SSD made it lightening fast. Very snappy, no pauses between applications loading etc. My only complaint was the lack of M4400 driver support in Windows 8 - the display driver kept crashing until i settled for one from 2009.

I did some benchmarks with HD tune pro which seemed to get read results of around 160MB/s (not great i know but maybe STEC where decent in 2010?) Later tests with atto benchmark put read results at more like 260MB/s

I got the Precision M6400 off ebay a few weeks ago mainly to convert it in to a mobile imaging server for operating system deployment. I mostly repair PC's and Laptops for a living and have standard images with all updates, servicepacks and software for all the versions of Windows vista, 7 and 8. With another drive bay caddy, I now have 3 drives in my M6400. Only thing is, with the SSD as the primary drive with Windows 8.1, it wasn't nearly as fast as the M4400 which I found odd. This laptop has 6GB 1066GHz RAM, a T9550 CPU and the Quadro FX 2700M graphics - I was expecting it to be the same at least!

In the end, Ive ended up using one of the two 320GB 7200RPM drives it came with as the primary in a dual boot mode, the second 320MB as data storage and the 100GB SSD as the location for my operating system images - I figured fast read speeds through a 1GB/s network port would mean I could deploy to more machines at once?

Strangely, with a manual hard drive, my snappy windows 8.1 has returned! With this drive (a seagate momentus something or other) i got around 100MB/s read times (not burst) but you would think even if the SSD is only getting 160MB/s reads, it would still be an improvement? I'm happy with this setup - fast is fast enough and having OS images flying off the SSD is more important to me. Its puzzling about the SSD though.

Does anyone have any clues as to why an SSD in an M4400 would be faster than the same SSD in an M6400? I used the same operating system image on both machines so they where identical software wise.

Thanks for any responses and sorry I wrote so much!

 

The only time I have had any SSD performance issues was when it wasn't correctly aligned since I had copied the image from a normal drive to the SSD - after running a utility to fix the alignment the performance more than doubled. Silly thing really.

 

I wouldn't say silly rather than simple and yes, there are many cloning utilities that will mess up alignment, especially older versions that came out when SSDs weren't around in the consumer space.

 

You are not the only one!

I bought a M6400 a few days ago. Great machine and I'll be upgrading many parts on it. However, I too only get a maximum of 168MBps with HDTune using a Crucial M500 SSD. Average is 157MBps. ATTO says around the mid 200's.

I have found that HDTune gives low results compared to most other benchmarks. I would expect around the 200MBps mark though.

Puzzling but not the end of the world. I think HDTune is slighty out of whack to be honest for SSD testing.

Oh...and the SSD is properly aligned.

 

One other point...what PSU have you got connected to the laptop?

Mine only has a temporary 130W which allows the laptop to stay charged but due to it not being the full 210W it throttles the laptop down. I wonder if that also has a knock on effect with SATA speeds.

 

Okay I finally got the 210W PSU and HDTune benches have jumped up to 200MBps averaging around 185MBps and ATTO is now up to 280MBps.

 

Glad you got it sorted out. I came into this thread because of the title and was about to post about SSD partition alignment when I read that someone else had already mentioned that. I hope you keep the M4400 as they are great machines and someday I will own one.