So how come sites like Storage Review are getting different results then? So many people here can't all have OS/fragmenting issues that would cause this issue.

My testing was on a fresh install of XP.

I think all my drives are setup at IDE too, and not AHCI (you tend to get mired in the old crap when you only update parts of your system at a time and don't build a complete new one)

Well I started having problems with my system hanging and locking up .. turns out my WD Blue drive that is only a few weeks old crapped out on me. That's 3 WD drives I've had fail in the last 2 months.

Got my replacement Blue .. AAKX instead of an AAKS but the benchmarks are the same. So I decided to clone my OS install from the WD black to the blue and give it a test. I didn't do any benchmarks but I can say the Black drive system seemed faster starting up and in general use and loading apps it was noticeably faster also.

Well that new Seagate drive lasted awhile .. a few months and it crapped out on me. Not sure if I'll even bother to RMA it .. might just called it a right off of 60 bucks. Seagate has retarded shipping requirements for hard drives. By the time I pay to send it back and get the packaging I'll have spent more than half of what the drive is worth. Geeze I'm having shitty luck with hard drives the last few months.

Well thats what I did and turns out my ALL my sata drives have just as fast or faster write speeds than my new Corsair SSD. WTF? Read speeds are good but writes are terrible.

which drive did you get?

CORSAIR FORCE 120GB

mine works awesome.

Could you run some benchmarks like Atto or HDTach and post the results as compared to your other drive?

This is between my SSD and a Seagate 500gb Sata ... ATTO shows a different bench .. right where the SSD should be

That's nowhere near the 285/275 claimed by Corsair for that drive. All I can think of is that there may be something buggered by whatever chipset you are using.

Well I see others using the same chipset and drive without problems so I'm not sure whats going on. Going to try and wipe the drive and reinstall windows again this weekend and see what that does.