Improve SSD performance on Windows 7 laptop

Question

I got Asus k40in and I've just replaced it's HDD with new 120gb SSD (Kingston v300) to give it a new life as office machine; winsat disk shows ~225 MB/s sequential read and ~195 MB/s sequential write.

This SSD seems to provide up to 450 mb/s read/write, and laptop seems to have sata 2. The question is can I get faster disk performance, maybe sata 2 like 275-300 MB/s ?

Does BIOS setting of SATA enhanced / compatible impact that? Currently I have compatible, and windows boot BSODs on enhanced.

Thanks

Answer 1

Eventually, setting SATA mode to enhanced in BIOS did the trick. I was able to get slightly faster performance - 216 MB/s write and 266 MB/s read (tested by winsat disk). I'm not sure why, but the system feels actually snappier now, like windows explorer (winkey + e) opens instantly, while on compatible sata it took some moments to show the contents. So native SATA is definitely the way to go (I assume enhanced actually means native).

I followed this advice from some forum to fix BSOD and make Windows 7 boot in native SATA mode:

• In regedit navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci,
• click "Start", in the right pane
• modify value to 0

While I feel read speed is close the limits of SATA 2 interface, I'd appreciate any advises to make write speed higher!

Answer 2

3Gbps (Gigabits) is the theoretical maximum of SATA II, which translates to about 375MBps (Megabytes).

In real life you're never going to get that speed (at least not for any sustained amount of time), and getting 225MBps sustained is about as good as you should expect.

• Image source and more info
• More info on the subject of real vs. theoretical speeds