Testing new (refurbished) SSD

Question

I got a Corsair Force GS 128GB, and popped it into the "dock" integral to the case. It's a SATA connector going to one of the motherboard headers, like any other internal drive.

After initial trying, I rebooted Windows 7 x64 with the disk still plugged in, so it's running like any internal drive for sure, not in a special swap media mode or anything caused by plugging in later.

The thing is that benchmark/test programs run extremely slow! I tried H2testw which I use to test flash USB sticks and cards: started writing at 800kB/s. A "quick/speed" test on HDDScan showed 1.1MB/s.

Oddly, a simple test of copying an 11GB file to it ran at the expected speed: limited by the read speed of the source drive, approximately.

Any idea what could be happening here? I acquired this SDD to replace my existing (full) C: drive, which is an SDD from several years ago.

Answer 1

I had the same problem with CrystalDiskMark and had to force-terminate it. Then plain copying again showed problems this time: started out fast and then stalled. So, at least it's consistently broken now.

I switched out the cable (and skipped the dock) and all was well.

So, docks and hot-swap bays are handy enough when they work, but when a drive acts funny the first thing to try is to open the case anyway. I wonder if a backplane, essentially another connector stacked on the end of a cable, is often troublesome?