Read test suite error

[Neuromancer]

I use AIDA64 in my SSD reviews, and with my 3rd review of SATA 6G drives, notice that read test suite performance is once again 500 MBps start to end, on this new drive.

Interestingly enough the maximum speed of the drive tested is only 450MBps.

I have used AIDA64 on multiple SSD reviews previous to this one, and have not encountered any issue before moving to 6G

Board is an ASUS p8p67 Deluxe, stock 2600, 8GB 1600 MHz RAM, latest intel RST drivers, using HOT swap enabled in BIOS, and write back caching and buffer flushing both checked.

[Fiery]

Please note that certain SSD controllers may skip actually reading SSD sectors _if_ those sectors are still in their factory default state. In other words, if you don't fill (write) the drive completely with *some* data first (to initialize every flash chip blocks), the drive will know that those sectors are empty (not-yet-initalized, never written before), and it will simply give back zero values for all data in virtually no time at all. And that will effectively mean the drive will be able to "read" data at the throughput speed of the controller itself, which in the case of SATA 6.0Gbps (SATA3) controllers would be around 500 to 540 MegaBytes/sec.

With SATA2 SSD drives that issue usually wasn't revealed, since the sequential read performance for many controllers almost matched the throughput of the SATA2 channel anyway

Solution: before testing any SSD drives, make sure to create a maximum-size partition, and copy large files on it until it's completely full. Once the drive is filled, you can remove the partition, and start benchmarking the drive.