I have windows 10 system which has SSD on the OS for many years now. Last year I got another one (Silicon Power 1TB) to put some games and programs on since the OS one is getting full. I also have many HDDs on this system.
Strangely enough soon I noticed severe slowdowns and saw that the SSD where most of my software is installed runs on 100% usage with no transfer. 0kb/s and after a while gets back to normal - quickly delivers 100-200mb/s and goes idle until after a while goes back to 100%…
I started looking for problems, restarted the system, changed SATA cables etc. and after a while the SSD died and I thought nothing of it. RMA the drive and they gave me new one which is even newer model… now its the same. In the interwebs people suggest disabling page file, superfetch and so on and on nothing helps…
Anyone has nay idea what could be the problem? I changed cables, sata ports, software config only this one drive does this … very strange.
How was it formatted, does it show anything at a high percentage in task manager? Anything edited anywhere else or vanilla install? Is the driver from the website or Microsoft?
Yes in task manager shows 100% and all software are frozen during this time or extremely slow. It takes sometimes 5-10 minutes while doing this and does it 50% of the time when I am doing something on the PC.
No swap on this drive either. It was the drive for the swap but I removed it and nothing changed.
As I mentioned this is the second SP SSD, first one died soon after started doing this and I returned it and they gave me this one which now has the same problem.
TRIM is working as it should, so that the easiest explanation ruled out.
We still need to identify that drive and that tool does not show any identifying information.
Silicon power sells 30+ drives potentially matching your description. Knowing which is massively helpful.
For reference 8 year old sata samsung 850 scores like this:
Perform AS ssd test once again, this time with 10GB test set and compare the results. Save them and the run it once again without delay.
Are the result getting progressively worse?
Does task manager show drive use after you finished benchmark still?
From those access time and overall read performance values I have very bad feeling, that this is one of the extremely cheap drives that actually performs like this as designed.
Or counterfeit drive, but thats relatively rare event. Where did you get it?
That Silicon Power drive performance is so bad, that I would recommend getting your money back and getting anything else. Seriously.
EDIT: Removed 850 PRO and replaced with EVO version, not much difference but unfair comparison.
When I got the drive I performed a test on it and it looked like this: (the one on the right is the Silicon Power one the left is Samsung my old os drive)
Based on that historical screenshot, I think there is nothing wrong with your drive. If it performs like that brand new, then what you are seeing is likely normal.
When did you buy it and how cheap was it?
To summarize:
drive cannot be reasonably identified
performs order of magnitude worse than expected out of the box
performance tanks after light sustained write
and absolutely nosedives after longer sustained write
performance randomly drops during normal use matching typical housekeeping routines when controller moves data from pSLC cache to QLC nand area.
I am betting drive has dramless controller and its operating nand in QLC mode. That would explain observed behaviour perfectly.
If that holds, there is no fixing this, drive works as expected.
Return it and use the refund to get Samsung 870 EVO instead, its about 60 USD for 1TB varinant and 120 for 2TB drive.
Its both cheap and absolutely reliable given the price tag.
Yes seems like this cheap drive is indeed slow performer even though I was happy at first. The problem however is that it goes often to 100% active time with no data transfers 0kb/s which causes all programs reading or writing to it to hang for several tens of seconds and even crash sometimes… if this can be solved I would be happy with it performing like it is . Sometimes it has no issues for hours and then suddenly goes to 100% and cannot be used for minutes at a time.
This is normal for all drives. The longer you use SSDs, the more apparent the flaws get. Cheap NAND, QLC and with troublesome firmware is cheap for a reason. They are basically consumables, unlike most other stuff in a computer.
Makes customers buy new drives more often and is good for sales and for people working at landfills.
Use overprovisioning on new drives so they live another 3 years or so. Improves endurance quite a bit.
If its QLC, then there no fixing this. This is how they operate. There is reason why no large OEM ships these kind of drivea as part of their builds, RMA rate would be insane.
Part of drive free space is used as low capacity cache (pSLC cache) area and hold all incoming writes. But its small and needs to offloaded to long term storage area, that operates in slower QLC mode.
Size of this cache area is also dynamic, shrinking as the drive fills up. So it hold less data a must be emptied more often. Once drive is full enough, you see massive slowdown → and thats actual drive performance.
This all happens on the drive itself, completely invisible top the computer or user.
Drive is actually busy doing housekeeping operations, but its so slow that it interferes with normal operations.
TLDR:
QLC drives are not cheap enought to outweigh performance drop vs TLC drives
doubly so with budget OEM, who skimp both on flash provisioning and controller
TLC drives have gotten so cheap, there is really no reason to go QLC
All trustworhy OEM specify what kind of flash they use
if unsure, all samsung drives except QVO series are solid and TLC based.
There are some QLC drives that are engineered right, but they are not cheap nor are they SATA drives. Solidigm (used to Intel ssd division) and Sabrent nvme drives are good enough for consumer use.
Anadtech did solid benchmarking and analysis of first Sata qlc drives, so if have time read up how complex this is, and how much performance suffers even in top of line QLC drive models from know good manufacturer:
Just because it’s not QLC, doesn’t mean everything TLC is good. There are vast differences in quality. You can usually see the TBW values and make (very) rough estimates around that number.
I got 3 of these little shits (this is 100% crap tier). No listed TBW, TLC, 8-10 bucks, SLC cache, I don’t trust them surviving which is why I got them in RAID1 as boot drives. Writes break down after ~20GB, it’s horrible. But fine as boot I treat them as “premium USB drive” level of SATA
I treat them as “premium USB drive” level of SATA