I recently got a 160GB Intel X25-M ssd and I am not getting very good speeds with Slackware64 13 and -current. I have tried several tactics I have found through research to improve the results, but nothing has really helped. I partitioned the drive aligned on erase block boundaries with the ext4 filesystem. I used the noop i/o scheduler. I added 'noatime' to the fstab mount points. I install the latest kernels. After trying all these things I get around 140MB/sec with 'hdparm -t /dev/sda'. When I have booted into a gparted live cd the same drive gives 267MB/sec which exceeds the manufacturer's claimed read speed. I put the drive into a win7 box with the ntfs filesystem and the benchmarks there show right around 250MB/sec, just as the drive is rated.

I can't figure out what is holding the drive back in Slackware. Does anyone else have a ssd drive that they are able to get advertised speeds out of with Slackware? I am tempted to try another distro (although I have not used anything but Slackware for many years) to see if they are using any kind of optimizations to improve ssd performance.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

That is pretty bad; I'm getting 190 on a hard drive.

Are you willing to compile your own kernel? I don't have any particular optimisations but that will let you use 2.6.33, which might have something new and shiny.

If that works, then it's time to dig through the Slackware-provided kernel .config files and figure out what the issue is.

I am definitely willing and able to compile my own kernel, I see 2.6.33 is out now so I will give it a whirl.

Hm... I'm having the same issue, in Windows 7 I get maybe 200MB/sec but in Slackware I'm getting like 143.81MB/sec, idk, I'm not that worried, it's still fast. My hard drive is rated at 230MB/sec though.

I was able to successfully boot 2.6.33 and I get the same results so I will attempt to dig through the stock Slackware .config from -current to see if I can find anything that might help. Thanks for your help.

I'm very interested in hearing how this goes, as I'm in the market for a few of those Intel SSD's myself.