SSD Benchmarks show disk slow unless in use

Pretty much what it says on the tin. I've had a Samsung HD in my system for a while, and I recently switched it out for a SSD with capabilities far beyond what my laptop's controller can do. The controller is UDMA5, so that should be a maximum of about 90MB/s.

The problem is I don't know if that's happening:



What happened is I was getting a measured 34MB/s, which is pretty bad. Then I started a large program (Spybot) and the speed suddenly jumped on the graph to 85MB/s. I don't get it. Why doesn't the performance show in benchmarks (it's not just HD tune, AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark all show 34MB/s read seq. 17MB/s write)?

And why on earth would speed "increase" only on a load? Is that happening or...am I actually getting that performance?

I don't even know why I'm asking...I guess if someone knows why this happens and how to turn it off.

 

Are you dealing with the comp in your System Details? I would think that W8.1 64bit would deliver all the speed you want with an SSD.
I'm happy about the performance and speed with my SSD. Neil.

 

Hmmm, according to the HD Tune website the free version was last updated in 2008 and does not support W8.

IMO, people put WAY TOO MUCH value in benchmark programs. They are all synthetic scenarios. Did you notice a "real-world" drop in performance when you installed this SSD? Where you expecting to "see" some huge gains when you installed it compared to the Samsung SSD?

Did you install the latest firmware update from Mushkin?

 

I understand; no one knows.

Yeah, that is old, but it seems to work.

The prior drive tops out around 60MB/s, but the various benchmarks showed it stuck at 34MB/s, so my observation was no change there. As for real world performance, well, I'm not sure. The reason we use benchmarks is to quantify small differences or differences which may be difficult to observe with other hardware being a factor.

So you can't predict a specific non benchmark task's performance using benchmarks, but benchmarks can tell you which hardware will perform best generally. I think graphics benchmarks are pretty useless for reasons I guess you understand, but CPU and hard disk performance are generic measurement.

I checked; Mushkin has no new firmware. I aligned.

Presario 900 motherboard. Athlon XP-M, the controller is an Ali M5229 which tops out at DMA5, 100MB/s theoretical. Mushkin Atlas, MSATA SSD, 550MB/s rating. This is Windows XP. Yes, I am aware of TRIM and garbage collection.

I think there's just something about this hardware that does this; other people with old laptops seem to get normal results.