SSD Is Slow

For about 2 months I have been noticing that my ssd has been slower than usual, I have an ocz agility 3 drive thats been running for about 8 months now as my boot drive. I did a crystal disk mark benchmark and only got about 200mb on the read speeds and about 100 on the write speeds. And thats a lot slower than the advertised speeds. I'm connected to a SATA 6gbs port and running AHCI mode (I checked in the BIOS to be sure). 

Is there anything I can do, I thought about updating the firmware but I'm worried about losing files and I can't back them up because windows wont let me create an image of windows on my secondary storage drive (a 1tb hdd).

 

It would be great to hear some suggestions, thanks.

Whats the capacity and how much free space does it have?

Mine is slow too, but I have it just about filled to the brim, so slowdown is very much expected. Updating the firmware can help, but it really depends on the update. If it's a destructive update (meaning the drive has to be wiped), you WILL need to back up your date. If not, it's still recommended, but not required, as the update shouldn't delete any data. Also, have you tried using a 3rd party disk cloning tool?

It's a 120gb drive and I have about 45gb free. The update says it is not destructive but I'm probably still going to clone the drive to be safe. 

I just want to know if its worth all the hassle because it doesn't say anyhting in the update about it increasing performance or anything like that.

there should be some minor slowdown, but nothing too noticeable at that point. About the only thing I have is make sure chipset drivers are up to date. The Firmware update might work, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

I have a 60GB version, split into 3 partitions. 40GB for Windows (~5GB of which is free), ~10GB for Linux Mint, and 8GB for SWAP. Linux Mint still boots up incrediably fast, really responsive, and shuts down just about instantly, so I'm wondering if it's either a Windows or filesystem issue... it feels like it's on a mechanical drive.

I do have this strange issue where i cant create a system image on my storage drive because windows thinks the hdd is also required for windows so I don't know if that has anything to do with it