How come my Intel 520 180GB SSD performs extremely poorly?
- by Willem
I recently installed a new Intel 520 series 180GB SSD in my brand new MacBook Pro.
The system is as follows:
Model: MacBook Pro 15-inch, Late 2011 (MacBookPro8,2)
Processor: 2.4 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory: 16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 6770M 1024 MB
Software: Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3
Main Drive Bay: Intel 520-series 180GB SATA-3 (6GB/s negotiated link) SSD (Firmware: 400i) [80GB free]
Optical Bay: Toshiba 5400 RPM 750GB SATA-2 HDD
Trim: Enabled (according to Trim Enabler App)
And here are the speeds I'm getting:
Read: 412 MB/s
Write: 186 MB/s
What have I done wrong?
Results expected:
Read/write both 500MB/s
I have seen benchmarks with lesser SSD:s (SATA-2 even) outperform my write-speeds by far.
Also, Intel 520 SSD:s are supposed to be the top class of SSD:s.
Trim Enabler report:
This looks a bit odd compared to screenshots from their site:
These is the defined S.M.A.R.T attributes (taken from Intel):
And here are my S.M.A.R.T attributes read using smartctl tool from smartmontools:
They don't seem very compatible. I'm going to try and look for a S.M.A.R.T attributes reader tool for OS X which might support Intel 520 series.
