Ok.. I've tried everything I can think of, but my write speeds have dropped off quite a bit with small files since the drive was new. I've left the rig overnight in BIOS to encourage GC, I've optimized the drive, I've even secure erased and re-installed windows. How can I get it back to how it was when new? New... As it is now.. Any ideas?
Very quickly (as i'm off to bed)... The most likely reason is that the msahci driver's changed since you first installed & tested the SSD - each new driver version (whether you're using MS', intel's, AMD's, etc) gives slightly different specs to every other one... ...& you've gained enough on the 1024-8192 writes for it to 'appear' to be more than a testing variance. Everything else i can think of would affect things across the board... [Edit] Oh, unless you've increased the allocation unit size - though this wouldn't be something you're likely to have done. [Edit 2] Whilst i don't think it'll help, i guess you could also look at the "Performance Optimization" thing in Samsung's Magician software thing... ...this basically does a forced trim & so if the results were significantly better then you'd likely have a issue with either trim or GC running... & as you're in there, it's always worth checking to see if you've got the latest f/w...
So far as I'm aware, the drivers haven't changed. I've run the optimization in SSD Magician I've not changed the allocation size It is the latest firmware. [edit] Nope... performance the same, or worse still no matter what driver I use. I've lost over 50% performance for small file size writes (the ones that matter and give the perceived performance increase) in 3 weeks. If I can't resolve this it goes on Ebay, as RMAing it will probably be impossible under the circumstances.. I'm starting to think SSDs are just ALL a pain in the ass. I've even secure erased, repartitioned, end re-installed Windows.... I still can't get the levels of performance I was getting when it was new. I may as well have bought a crap SSD to begin with. £580 to get great performance for a few weeks. Bargain! I've been looking at other people's bench results using the same software, and they are pretty much all identical to what I got when the disk was new. http://www.pureoverclock.com/printer.php?action=review&id=1455&page=5 http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1795/4/ All I know right now is that ever since I decided to go SSD I've spent almost every weekend messing with my PC instead of enjoying it, and I'm >this< close to going back to HDDs. I thought I'd cracked it with the Samsung drive, but I guess I've just swapped Sandforce flakyness for Samsung performance degradation (something every review says has been improved over old drives... apparently not). I'll try a Vertex4 maybe... and if I have any problems with it, I'm going back to HDD.
You're really not having much luck are you... ...&, unless you're doing something odd, i really can't think why. Well, other than there being a learning curve - almost entirely as there was a general misunderstanding of things back in the day & time has altered how people treat their SSDs (which is partially why i know some stuff) - other the basic setup 'rules', i've always found using SSDs to be dead simple... (i know this is probably grandmothers & eggs, but just making sure) Stick it in / set the controller bios to ahci or raid & make the sleep setting maintains power / (pull other HDDs/SSDs &) install windows (then reattach them) / change the power settings in Windows (never turn off) / disable hibernation & system protection (these are choice) / install all the updates / install the latest drivers for everything (intel &/or lsi in my case) / run wei / &, other than not doing anything foolish, enjoy for ~6 months/until the h/w changes & then reinstall from scratch. Oh, & checking that defrag's disabled is worthwhile at least the first few times in case Win7 doesn't disable it automatically on your system - though i use Diskeeper (w. HF) more generally which replaces the Windows one, & so just check that the partitions are recognised as SSDs in that... Now, with the drivers, 2 quick things to note are that - (a) the msahci ones you've said you're using 'can' get altered with MS' updates... ...so they 'could' have been changed without you knowing. (i am not 100% saying that this has happened, but...) (b) i really would recommend using the controller specific ones instead - eirst in your case - along with making sure you've got the latest chipset drivers, etc... (as an aside, the only exception to this i can think of being with nForce chipsets where nVidia didn't add in trim compatibility afaik) ...the latest ones for your mobo are here... ...well Asus don't update their downloads pages that often. (did you install April's bios update for the mobo btw? Simply that, if not, it may have fixed things or, if you did whilst having the SSD, it may have worsened them. i know that the latest bios update has been causing problems for people using my P67 board, but this doesn't necessarily translate to your board - & you've a dual bios if things went awry) it would also be worthwhile contacting Samsung's tech support (seemingly through the product page - though there's a couple of different versions of the 512GB 830 so i can't just link to it) to see if they have any ideas - well it 'could' be the case that this is an unpublicised fault that 'can' occur... ...either with a recommended fix or the need for a RMA. Oh, & if you've got access to another machine with a 6Gb/s controller & Win7 then you could re-run the b/m with the 830 as a secondary drive just to check that it's not something in your system/settings. &, if you really think selling it & getting a V4's your best option, remember that the latest f/w is a RC & Anand appear to have confirmed what i said about there being some bug fixes to come in the final version... (in the comments for the 64GB news one of the 'staff' wrote - "We'll most likely wait for the release version before publishing any data. I talked with Anand earlier today and he said he has done tests with the 1.4 RC but there are still a few things that should be fixed in the final version, if I interpreted his messages right.") Not that it's not working perfectly for people, but given your run of luck then perhaps it'd be better to err on the side of caution.
Well.... I've just finished a window sinstall... Out the eirst drivers on, but this time, NOT from the asus site.... Direct from intel. Performance back as it should be. I'll keep checking it as I'm gradually installing stuff. Fingers crossed.
Fingers crossed also... ...well, i don't want anyone to have hassles naturally. Remember that over b/ming will help to (temporarily) lower the speeds... ...& Station Drivers is *the* place to get all of the latest drivers imho - forgetting beta ones, from experience they get the whql ones up way before intel does.
Fixed! I am such a fool! It was bloody PCTools! I've binned it, and cancelled my subscription and gone with Bitdefender. All is well. Thanks for the help as always PocketDemon.
That's great to hear... ...esp as it's an easy solution &, afaik, BitDefender's a much better a/v & firewall product. Yeah, i think i tried PCTools a few years back & found it shonky... ...though that pre-dated having SSDs so... After a few changes, moved on to a combo of Symantec Endpoint & SpyBot (plus some manually added addresses in the hosts file since i hate vast no's of foolish ads on my commonly used sites) that has just worked against everything, touch wood of course, since then...
Yeah... I've been sticking with PCTools out of habit really, and this isn't the first time it's caused me issues. I should have done it a while ago. So far, so good with Bitdefender... it even found a few things PCTools missed.. tucked away in my archive. My drive is every bit as fast as it was when new, so I'm now happy
Hi All, I have much the same problem as the OP. I have had my SSD 830 256 gb for about a week and my sequential write speed has decreased from ~444 MB/sec to just ~93 MB/sec. I have tried virtually everything that i can think of without luck. System: i7-3770k, Asus P8z77 - V Pro Bios 1015, 8GB ram, 2TB Hitachi HDD, Win 7 64 bit. SSD has the latest firmware, is connected to the Intel SATA 3 port. Windows was installed with no other drives attached. Over provisioning set to about 23 gb. Optimizations: 1. Ensure your computer is operating in AHCI mode. - Yes 3. Disable system restore. - Yes 4. Disable drive indexing. - Yes 5. Disable drive defragmentation schedule - Yes 6. Turn off pagefile. – No - Microsoft blog says it should not be turned off. 7. Turn off hibernation. - Yes + all other power recommendations as per Magician software. 8. Turn off windows write-cache buffer flushing - Write caching disabled 9. Disable prefetch and superfetch. – - Yes both set to 0 10. Disable windows search and superfetch. - Yes 11. Enable faster boot through msconfig. – Yes, some. 12. Disable recycle bin. – no rarely have anything to delete and empty manually. 13. Decrease shutdown time. – no 14. Verify TRIM. - Yes working 15. Power settings. - Yes 16. Disable ‘clearpagefileatshutdown’ - Yes And ‘largesystemcache‘. - Yes Intel 7 series C216 chipset family SATA AHCI controller: Driver 11.1.0.1006 I don't particularly fancy installing Windows again, so any suggestions would be much appreciated.
Well you don't appear to have done anything that's foolish... Okay, personally i limit the list down a bit - 1. i use raid as non-raid drives will be in ahci mode. (as an aside, the new(ish) beta drivers apparently do provide trim to SSDs in at least R0 & R1 arrays, but *only* with Win8 atm - if you use them with Win7 then you lose trim for non-raid SSDs) 3. Fine. 5. Though i use Diskeeper w. Hyperfast so just ensure that it recognises the relevant partitions as being on a SSD(s). 6. Set a range from 400MB to whatever it recommends. 7. Yes to disabling hibernation... ...& i assume the power recommendations are to have HDDs never turn off & the machine to never sleep (or at least be many hours)??? 8-10. it's much simpler to run the windows experience index as this alters both these & other things properly. 14. Just to note, this only tells you that the OS is trying to pass the trim command on - not that the SSD is actually receiving it (for example, with the beta drivers in Win7 then it would tell you it's enabled, but do nothing / as would SSDs in a raid array with Win7 atm / as would having a SSD in ide / as would...). 15. covered in 7. - but that's just me. Anyway, what Pookyhead obviously found was that that his antivirus/firewall software was causing a problem - so this 'could' be a place to start. Before he located the issue though i had never heard of any software having such a detrimental effect, so there's no ther specific software which springs to mind. [Edit] i should have said that an easy way to tell if something is writing large amounts would be to open Resource Monitor (in Start Menu -> All Programs (--> possibly Accessories) ---> Systems Tools)... ...though this won't tell you if something's delaying writes. [End Edit] The other 2 main options are - 1. Have you left a reasonable amount of free space? Too little & the available blocks can become over fragmented with dirty pages & it can slow down writes dramatically. With this, ideally you want at least 14% of the formatted space (not total capacity) to be free - though i personally choose to work with upwards of 20% 2. &, how much have you been testing it - simply that hammering a quite full SSD with b/ms (esp AS-SSD or CDM) can cause a major temporary slowdown... ...esp if there's not been much idle time. With this, the quickest way to tell would be to use Samsung's magician software to optimise the SSD - it should be doing both some block combining & 'force trimming' (writing 11's to the nand - 11 being the blank state for a MLC nand cell) to make most of the unused partitioned area clean again. [Edit 2] Another thought - you haven't by any chance disabled write caching have you?
Hi PocketDemon, Thanks for the quick reply, it was actually one of your posts about samsung vat bace etc from dabs that finally made me go and buy one of these. I kinda wish it just worked... I think adoption rates will be much higher when you can plug in and go. I think we are getting there but are not there yet. Anyways, some more info for you. 1. I'm a little confused here as to which driver i should be using. I think I am using the right one, and my Bios is set to AHCI as per the instructions provided by Samsung. I have no RAID arrays... at least nothing intentional. And the fact i had a write speed of 400 would suggest that things were functioning ok. I have the feeling that trim is not working. Magician software performance optimisation does nothing at all. We could be into something here. I performed an AS SSD test today and the results are: Read / Write Seq: 492.33 MB/s / 92.31 4K: 19.10 / 2.26 !! 4k-64 thread: 223.78 / 15.06 Acc. Time 0.086 / 1.750 ms!!! 4. Will adjust page file. When i turned it off i had some issues with stability, so i just went back to keeping it on. 7. Yes, sleep and hibernate both off. Regarding the AV issue, i am using Kaspersky IS 2012 at the moment, disabled the background scan activity. I had turned it off and did a Performance optimisation via Magician software and that did not help. Free space: Drive is 87% free! Has maybe 30gb max out of the 256gb originally. Hammering: Avoided benchmarks. I have performed one on the 29th after i built the system, then maybe three more the last 2 or so days as I've been trying to find a solution to the write speed issue. All those tests have been limited to 100 meg... As mentioned before, the Magician softtware seems not to help at all and i get the same speed afterwards as i did before the test (ie 90MB/s seq write.)
Forgot to mention that I had updated my BIOS at some point over the last few days... doubt that is hugely relevant though.
Tbh, once you get used to SSDs, they are kind of plug'n'play... Well, ahci or raid mode's useful for HDD speeds / i've always disabled sleep (important for idle time), hibernate & system restore (both only as they're useful for freeing up space - & their functions are useless for my usage) anyway / with HDDs you'd set a fixed pagefile size so having a ranged one from 400MB to whatever's recommended is as much work / for me then i play with Diskeeper's settings anyway as i don't want all of the numerous HDDs being constantly rearranged / & otherwise running WEi does everything else that's important. Everything else is either double checking that your system doesn't do anything odd (ie that Windows sees it as a SSD & so enables trim) & once you've installed a couple of times & seen that everything's fine then you stop bothering... ...or, imho, 'arsing about' with tweaks of very minor import. Anyway, back to the plot. - So it's very unlikely that you've been running enough b/ms to make any odds - & naturally it's perfectly reasonable to use them (within reason) to troubleshoot... (though, with the default settings, one of AS-SSD or CDM writes ~8-10GB & the other ~15GB from memory) ...separately, you've got bunches of free space so that's not an issue... ...the driver version is the right one to have for the moment (the 'unholy beta version' is 11.5.0.1171)... ...& all i was meaning was that it was immaterial if you set the intel controller it to ahci or raid. - i'm then not saying that it is your AV/Firewall that's causing a problem - simply that there 'could' be some program that's either writing foolish amounts or delaying writes. Now, the only way (i believe) that Pookyhead managed to discover what was up was by Secure Erasing & testing after each new thing was installed... ...but, again, you could start with the Process Monitor to see if any program is writing stupid amounts of data whilst you do a few functional tasks (a bit of browsing or some such). Yeah, there's just no way that i can guess what you've got installed or assess how it might be affecting anything. - Did you check that you've not inadvertently disabled the write cache? (it was added in late on the last post) Clicking on any partition in Windows Explorer, choose Properties... in the new box you want the Hardware tab... Choose the SSD & then click the Properties button... & go to the Policies tab & make sure that "Enable write caching..." is ticked (& the other one is unticked)... - & did you ever run wei? (though this isn't going to make enough difference) - Otherwise... ...mmmmm... Well, there's always the chance that there's something up with the new bios for your board - have you tried rolling it back to an earlier version & re-testing? [NB if it will not let you install a earlier version, you 'could' try the technique described here - though i have not tried it & so only have the word of other people on the forum that it works.] Or, alternatively, conglomerating 2 testing procedures for issues with OCZ SSDs &, separately, with some Asus boards, you 'could' try - downloading the latest bios update onto a usb stick... pulling the SSD... resetting the bios... reflashing the bios using the copy on usb stick in the bios itself... & then plugging in the SSD & typing your bios settings back in. (obviously turning the power off in between where sensible)
I think it was the write caching that was the problem. Will test now. I think you were spot on. Fill force trim now. Se the images in this forum for the speeds of the 830 with and without caching. http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?278816-SSD-s-cache-and-power-loss-protection [SOLVED] It was the write caching. Performed the magician software optimisazion and benchmark. Sequential write 514 MB/s Sequential write 388 MB/s (vs 444MB/s on the 29th) and random read and random write IOPS have increased (63426/18750 on the 29th vs 75807/26208 now). I assume faster random operations helps Not too fussed about the sequential write. It is still very fast.
Cool... Yeah, i was racking my brain to cover as many potential options as possible - have a head full of random stuff about SSDs - but it's always good when it's something simple. it does illustrate how inadvertently altering an odd setting (the default is to have it ticked) can cause issues - which is why it's generally better, imho, to limit down the no of tweaks to the ones that make a material difference. if you've not done so, i would run WEi as altering reg settings for SSDs is the one thing it's of any use for. & what you should hopefully find is that, with a bit of idle time, the write speeds will regain that last bit again... if you want to accelerate the process, the easiest way is to make sure you have a sleep state set in the bios that gives power to the SSD, & then boot to the bios overnight.
I'm sure i read somewhere that caching should be disabled, but actually the more i think about it the less sense it seems to make. I think the 830 has a large 256mb cache... so yeah. No point really. I will rerun the WEi. I had run it once before i made all the additional changes. Now at some point this week i will have to go see a friend and set up his SSD (i built his system), so have to go through it again. At least I have learned a lesson
That's handy - well having another setup to do so quickly, & by trimming down the list of things to do to the essentials, it should start sticking in your memory... & once you've setup a SSD a couple of times, it becomes really quick & simple... ...honest. Yeah, back in the day (2009 was my starting point), there was so much more that people were paranoid about with SSDs that you'd end up with a list of tweaks & reg hacks & whatnot which was pages long to effectively remove almost every write from them - but it's largely old hat thinking... ...though, conversely (as it's adding knowledge - albeit i've been saying this for half of ever on here, so maybe confirming instead), with Samsung having really clearly recommended upping the OP with the 830's software then at least they've joined OCZ (albeit via their forum, though the orig V2s had far more OP) &, to some extent, intel (via white papers, tech notes for their enterprise drives & occasional forced extra OP) in making it a bit clearer to people that there's value in doing so.
One of the reasons i went for a large SSD was the fact i'd have to OP a proprtion and i didn't really want to worry too much about how much space i have left. I think it's quite amusing how we seem not to get away from filling up storage and it slowing down in some circumstances. Still better than HDDs. Regardless, I think for the majority of us, they will last for years. Anand wrote an article about 2x nm nand and it would last for many many years.
