My SSD has extremely slow write speed. Any ideas what could be the issue?

Last year I put together a new PC with a PNY XLR8 SSD (http://www.pny.com/XLR8_SSD?sku=SSD9SC240GMDA-RB)

Things have been great up until recently when I started noticing that network copies of large files would start fast but then become really slow.

Sample of copying a large file across the network

At first I thought this was due to network issues but tested my network extensively and found it fast between other machines. Also, copying FROM this machine to another machine was fast.

This led me to look at the machine itself. I noticed in Resource Manager that during the copy, Disk Queue Length and Response Time would go up, especially when the copy started to drop.

So, I did what any sensible person would do. I searched online and found a few benchmarking tools to test out my SSD. Here is what I found from ATTO...

ATTO results

I did a similar test with AS SSD Benchmark to similar results... AS SSD Results

So, with that information in mind, I checked online for possible errors and verified I have it in AHCI mode. You can see this in the AS SSD screenshot (iaStoreA OK ==> when I mouse over this it says "Intel(R) 8 Series/C220 Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller - OK).

Final thing I tried is running CrystalDiskInfo, which has these results. CrystalDiskInfo results

This also confirms transfer mode and says the health is good. I'm a little concerned about some of the numbers like "Raw Read Error Rate" seems a lot higher than the threshold, but it comes up green so not sure how to interpret it.

I've reinstalled drivers, played with cache settings, turned on and off virus checkers. Nothing seems to help.

I'm at a loss now. Any ideas would be helpful. Is this drive on its last legs?

brianestey

Posted 2015-02-13T16:09:04.913

Reputation: 171

1You should remove the [tag:hard-drive] from your question, as it is not about a hard drive but rather SSD, which it is correctly tagged with. That would make your, otherwise excellent, question even better :) – Kristian – 2015-02-13T16:14:41.873

1the SandForce 2281 controller only has good write speed when data can be compressed. looks like your data are not. – magicandre1981 – 2015-02-13T16:52:10.787

thresholds are lower threshold, its bad if the value drops below. source: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

– user236012 – 2015-02-13T17:10:48.067

@magicandre1981 - I read that ATTO does its benchmarking with compressible data whereas AS SSD does not. The fact both apps show poor numbers make me think it's not the controller. What do you think? – brianestey – 2015-02-13T19:30:05.127

@user236012 - thanks for clearing that up! I'm less concerned now. Should've realized it when SSD life left threshold is 10. – brianestey – 2015-02-13T19:30:54.720

Answers

It seems your sequential write times are substantially lower (9.21) than your read times (502.88) Write times for SSD drives often dramatically drop after the drive is half full, and especially nearing filling the capacity of the drive.

Since this review from Tom's Hardware on the PNY 240GB XLR8 shows this drive usually gets around 128KB sequential write times of 375MB/s to 475MB/s, I'd say you have a serious issue here and should try wiping the drive to get performance back. Look on PNY's website for tools to restore the drive and clear TRIM (if needed) and get the drive back to the original performance it had.

Rick Kraft

Posted 2015-02-13T16:09:04.913

Reputation: 93

Interesting idea. The drive still has 80GB free, so about 1/3 empty. I'll see if I can clean up some data to get to below half to see if there's any impact. I checked PNY's website and can't find any tools, which was surprising. – brianestey – 2015-02-13T19:27:53.453

Just to update, I have cleaned up my drive to more than 50% free and benchmarks were not affected at all. – brianestey – 2015-02-17T02:50:36.450

1Did you try the drive tools/factory restore options from PNY if there are any? If so...it may be a controller or hardware issue then. I'd check your motherboard bios for the latest version, ensure Device manager has no "unknown devices", try a different sata wire from your SSD to motherboard... You may also try hooking up via a sata-to-usb3 adaptor, or hooking up to a different PC and testing to determine the issue. Good luck! – Rick Kraft – 2015-02-19T06:24:27.697

Thanks for the advice... I haven't found any PNY tools so I haven't tried any =) Mobo BIOS is up to date and Device Manager doesn't show anything unknown... I'll give the SATA cable a look and check via another PC as well - that's a good idea. Thanks! – brianestey – 2015-02-19T23:37:22.403

One more factor is the device transferring data, if it's a slow HDD or USB 1.1 stick, you'll get write times that are slow. But with AS SSD Benchmark giving that low a result... that's really crazy low. When SSDs slow down when getting full you may see up to a 40~50% drop in speed (especially with first gen controllers), but yours is about 97%!!! Maybe the drive's had it? – Rick Kraft – 2015-02-23T09:18:17.453

I ended up replacing the drive and the new one is working marvelously. Thanks for the help. – brianestey – 2015-08-31T14:54:23.813

Had the same exact problem with a brand new ultrabook (spectre 13). The write speed was originally ~10MBps! After disabling "sleep" in APM, it went to ~500MBps!

Before adjusting APM After adjusting APM

maevius

Posted 2015-02-13T16:09:04.913

Reputation: 11

Thanks for the comment. I've replaced the drive but would be curious to see if this changed anything. I doubt it would in my case since the drive worked well for a long time before starting to work slow. – brianestey – 2016-12-06T00:08:40.333

I struggled with an issue of performance. It had to do with the power management of the SSD. It was the Advanced Power Management setting (which I accessed via Hard Disk Sentinel).

The APM level was at 0, which is default. When I set it to 254, which was maximum performance and power management, my read and write rates went from 32MB/s max, to around 120MB/s max (and theoretically, could go up to 224MB/s. So that was it. How weird! And no other guides mention this - so googling always got me an endless loop of "did you turn on AHCI and update your drivers??"

I believe a tool called HDPARM can do it. Such as here: https://sites.google.com/site/disablehddapm/

Taylor M

Posted 2015-02-13T16:09:04.913

Reputation: 11