XW6400 terrible SSD speeds

[Fellanah]

okay, I may have exaggerated on the "terrible" but it's not that great. I've been getting ~180 MBps read and write speed which isn't THAT bad but others are getting 330MBps - ~half as fast. However, keep in mind, I'm not using the SATA 2 ports, I'm using a pcie to SATA 3 card and plugged my SSD in the first slot. When I first boot the computer, I can see that the computer is initializing my pcie adapter as it's saying "PCIE Gen 1 (my SSD number) SATA 3" so I thought I was all good. could it be because it's not directly on the motherboard internally? is it because it's an external card? maybe not enough lanes for sata 3 (though I'd be surprised, there's no way an SSD could saturate that much bandwidth, I'm using the SANDISK SSD Plus) or could it be a faulty SSD? can anyone guide me? I would highly appreciate it. thanks everyone!

[SDH · Accepted solution]

1.  Make sure you have the latest BIOS installed.

2.  Make sure you have BIOS SATA emulation set to "RAID + AHCI"

3.  A clean install of your OS without that setting will result in your OS install not having the proper drivers included.

4.  All PCIe slots in a xw6400 are PCIe Generation I slots.  The xw6600 has 2 slots that are PCIe Gen II.... twice as fast.... so you may be suffereing from having your fast card plugged into a slow slot, without the alternative of the PCIe2 x16 slots the xw6600 has.

5.  These workstations and on up into the Z600 have only SATA II speeds, but that is more than fast enough.  HP recommended using drives that were from them if you were to use a SATA III drive in one of these workstations.  So, my favorite SSD is the Intel 320 series..... buy a 160GB or 300GB one off eBay used and test with that.  The Intel "toolbox" software allows you to easily update their firmware if needed, and does some autodetection of configuration and offers to fix a few settings for the OS if needed.  There are some SATA III drives that work just fine without being from HP for these but I stick with what I know works.

[Fellanah]

I completely forgot about pcie gen 1 speeds, thanks for reminding me, its definitely that.