# SLOW/Faulty 840 Pro 256GB on M5A97 EVO R2.0



## kooshini (Mar 3, 2013)

I just bought a 256GB 840 Pro from amazon, It arrived today and I connected it to my 2 week old M5A97 EVO R2.0 however AS SSD bench reports 430MB/write and 3MB/s read - HD Tune Pro reports that I am getting <2MB read speeds and also reports warning in the health status to say the UDMA CRC errors reporting numbers of 7000+ 

Is this a faulty drive? I think it must be as I have tried in different motherboard ports, tried different cables etc.

My old Intel SSDSA2M080G2GC works fine and gets approx 200MB/s without a problem. 

If anyone can suggest anything before I RMA the drive and go and buy an OCZ vector tomorrow I would be grateful. 

















This is my intel on AS SSD






Intel Anvil (AMD drivers)






Intel Anvil (Windows drivers - storageahci)






This is a spare drive - on the same cables on the same board.


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## Am* (Mar 3, 2013)

Have you done a firmware update on the SSD? Make sure you do that, then run the OS Optimization, THEN run the Performance Optimization. My 830 showed read speeds well below specs until I updated the firmware and did the above.


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## Aquinus (Mar 3, 2013)

kooshini said:


> UDMA CRC errors reporting numbers of 7000



This is what is concerning. I would do what AM* recommended and try updating the firmware. If the CRC error count continues to increase I would try to RMA it. SMART warnings and test failures are usually grounds for RMA for any drive manufacturer. A drive could be working perfectly fine and if it fails an extended SMART test, I will send it back and WD will replace it. It doesn't sound good though.


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## Deleted member 74752 (Mar 3, 2013)

Mine if it helps at all...






After Optimization...


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## itsakjt (Mar 3, 2013)

Try changing the SATA cable and see results. An Ultra DMA CRC error is likely to be caused by a faulty SATA cable assuming the drive is ok.


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## andrewsmc (Mar 3, 2013)

kooshini said:


> tried different cables etc.



^^^^ This


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## alan1476 (Mar 3, 2013)

An X58 motherboard does not have a Native Intel 6.0 port,  what more do you want from SATA 11?


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## kooshini (Mar 3, 2013)

OK, this is strange. 

I bit the bullet because I was going to RMA my drive and went and bought another 840 Pro from a local retailer.

This performed great I was getting approx 500Mb/s read/write out of the box. 

Thinking that it was just a bad first drive it prompted me to get a a firmware upgrade, after the reboot I was back to slow speeds again. So I decided to try Linux. 

I ran Ubuntu 12.10 off the CD and ran speed tests - both the drives are fine running at 560MB read and about 530MB write. I have even put them into raid and Ubuntu reports 1.1GB/s read speed and around 1GB/s write. 

The raid set-up doesn't seem to like windows 8 even though I have loaded the driver from a CD at install.

I have secure wiped and set-up AHCI mode again as (separate drives) and I have just tried with Windows 7, same issue with slow speeds even with the chipset drivers from ASUS website. It seems like anything Windows on my motherboard on this firmware doesn't work but Linux is fine....

Any ideas?


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## Aquinus (Mar 4, 2013)

kooshini said:


> This performed great I was getting approx 500Mb/s read/write out of the box.



I thought you said you didn't have any SATA 6Gb ports. These numbers are impossible unless you have SATA 3 (6Gb).

What motherboard do you have? (Filling out yoor PC specs could be useful.)


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## kooshini (Mar 4, 2013)

Sorry here are specs:

Name AMD FX-8350
Codename Vishera
Specification AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor
Package Socket AM3+ (942)

model M5A97 EVO R2.0
Northbridge AMD RD9x0 rev. 02
Southbridge AMD SB910/950 rev. 40
vendor American Megatrends Inc.
version 1503


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## kooshini (Mar 4, 2013)

Just put the SSD into another PC, only about a month old.

AMD Athlon(tm) X4 750K Quad Core Processor
Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4
Northbridge	AMD A55/A60M FCH rev. 00
Southbridge	AMD A55/A60M rev. 11
BIOS version F2 08/31/2012
Windows 8 x64

Works out of the box no problems on Windows.


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## Aquinus (Mar 4, 2013)

kooshini said:


> Just put the SSD into another PC, only about a month old.
> 
> AMD Athlon(tm) X4 750K Quad Core Processor
> Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4
> ...





kooshini said:


> Sorry here are specs:
> 
> Name AMD FX-8350
> Codename Vishera
> ...



Please do not double post. You can edit the previous post if no one has posted in the thread yet. I mention this because it's against the forum rules and it cuts down on excessive bumps to a thread. Plus, if you keep doing it *a moderator might notice and they have special powers that can polymorph you into a sheep*. 

So it works fine on the FM2 build but not the AM3+ build? Is it only with one particular drive on the AM3+ machine where one works fine and the other doesn't? Have you tried replacing the cable yet?


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## kooshini (Mar 4, 2013)

Sorry didn't mean to bump, I will edit in future. 

Yes exactly, the AM3 is 12MB seq read and the FM2 is working fine - there has to be something strange going on with drivers. 

As I say Ubuntu works fine, handles the drives also in raid mode however Windows 8 and also Windows 7 simply don't want to play ball. 

In my other machine the FM2 one also on Win8 x64 it works as per the screenshot above, samsung magician also reports 540MB/s read and 300MB/s write. 

*Cable*

Yes I have 3 different ASUS cables and I bought one yesterday too, makes no difference on the cable - fact that I haven't changed the cable and it works on Linux made me think it can't be the cable?

I am at a bit of a loss...


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