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I used Acronis Disk Director to do a direct clone of my C:\ windows 7 x64 drive from my Vertex 2 to my new Vertex 3 SSD (Just to show the drive software winstall everything is identical.)

I ran a performance test on Windows using the Windows Experience Index. The rating I am receiving when booting on the Vertex 2 is 7.5 While I am getting only a rating for the Vertex 3 of 6.9 My understanding is that the read/write speeds of the Vertex 2 is only up to 250MB/sec while the Vertex 3 is up to 500MB/sec.

Copying a single file (3GB in size) from the Vertex 3 to itself was getting speed of approx 70-80MB/sec This speed is no better (maybe worse) than what I got from the Vertex 2 I am connected via the SATA 3 port on the motherboard, using an SATA 3 cable

Is this issue caused by the drive cloning? Do I have a bad SSD?

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You should run some benchmarks with utilities that will give you more detailed information then windows and report those results to help us figure out what is wrong. –  Eric Fode Apr 12 '12 at 4:40
What are the sizes of the two drives? How much data did you clone? –  David Schwartz Apr 12 '12 at 4:44
Both drives are 120GB and both have ~8 GB free - what benchmark prog are free and available for testing SSD drives? –  Kairan Apr 12 '12 at 5:47
Full drives are slow. Probably the old drive was a bit better optimized as Windows optimizes drives as they are used and the clone process was likely file by file in essentially random order. –  David Schwartz Apr 12 '12 at 7:31
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up vote 2 down vote accepted

SandForce based SSDs have a optional feature called Lifetime Throttling. It will monitor the rate (PE cycles/Power on Time) at which the SSD is wearing out and if it seems they will run out before a specified warranty period it will throttle the write speed.

This is something OCZ has implemented in its SandForce based drives.

This means that if you take a brand new drive, and write a lot of data to it immediately, like you would do if you clone a big partition to it, the Lifetime Throttling will engage. As far as I know there is no way to disable this. But if you leave the drive powered on for a long stretch of time without writing to it, that will even out the wear rate and Lifetime Throttling will disengage.

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