[ursine]

Hi, I have a three weeks old Samsung EVO 840 500GB that has the notorious bug. Read speed has dropped to 58MB/s for the three weeks old files using HD Tune Pro (see the attached three benchmark comparisons). I want to replace the Samsung EVO by Scandisk Extreme Pro.Then I had the following chain of misfortunate:

1. I cloned EVO 840 to a new Scandisk Extreme Pro using Macruim Reflect. Everything seems fine except the read speed of Scandisk Extreme Pro was about 375Mb/s much slower than the advertised 500Mb/s mark. So I tried to secure erase it and do a clean install. Acronis indicated that over 3 hours was needed to complete secure erase and I didn't want to wait and cancelled it in the middle of process. Then I did a quick format instead and the Scandisk Extreme Pro was "bricked" suddenly. The PC cannot see it with my USB-SATA adaptor.

2. Next I bought a new Crucial M500 240GB. This time I used Acronis to clone the EVO. Again the HD Tune benchmark of the cloned M500 is very poor, at 150MB/s , slower than my Seagate mechanical hard drive.

3. I did a quick format of the M500 and installed window 8 from fresh. The HD Tune benchmark of clean installed SSD is as bad as the cloned SSD. So the poor performance is nothing to do with cloning.

My system is Asus Hero VII 4790K GTX 970 16GB RAM. There are 8 x 6GB/s SATA ports. I tried manual trim but it makes no difference.

I do not understand why both Scandisk Extreme Pro and Crucial M500 are so both slow on my system. I am completely puzzled. Any advice would be appreciated. My last option is not to replace the EvO and wait for the Firmware update on the 15th .

 

[Ultisym]

Have you tried diskfresh to refresh/update the file dates on the EVO? There are several programs out there that do the same thing. Should get you through the firmware update anyway.

 

[ursine]

Hi, I haven't tried it. It looks like I will be stuck with the crappy EVO and wait for the firmware update. I do not understand how the poor performance of the Samsung EVO can pass to two other different SSDs or I must have very bad luck Everything I touch it turns into crap.

 

[Ultisym]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ursine

Hi, I haven't tried it. It looks like I will be stuck with the crappy EVO and wait for the firmware update. I do not understand how the poor performance of the Samsung EVO can pass to two other different SSDs or I must have very bad luck Everything I touch it turns into crap.

I am not sure whats going on either. Its hard to diagnose things like that over the internet, the temp fix for the evo is easy enough, I am interested if your speed is in fact restored after you do this. Let us know and we will go from there and see what we can come with.

 

[ursine]

I am not confident enough to try the Diskfresh fix, in case it will do more harm than good. If Samsung firmware is not a reliable fix, I will send my EVO back and get another Sandisk Extreme Pro. My dealer has accepted the return of the EVO but offered to replace it by another new EVO. But I said no and thank you. No wonder they have dropped the prices of EVO by a massive amount yesterday.

 

[MaXimus666]

secure erasing a new SSD using Acronis......perfect way to kill it! There is a better way of Secure Erasing an SSD to not harm it:

http://www.overclock.net/t/1227597/how-to-secure-erase-your-solid-state-drive-ssd-with-parted-magic

That should only be done after owning the SSD for a long time and having serious performance issues NOT on a new drive.

 

[ursine]

yeah I will never secure erase new or old drive in the future. Painful lesson learnt. I thought it would be safe after reading about people secure erase their SSDs in forums. There should be a warning message in Acronis that secure erase can instantly turn your $160 drive into a door stop.

 

[MaXimus666]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ursine

yeah I will never secure erase new or old drive in the future. Painful lesson learnt. I thought it would be safe after reading about people secure erase their SSDs in forums. There should be a warning message in Acronis that secure erase can instantly turn your $160 drive into a door stop.

Secure erase on a normal HDD is fine, the problem is, it writes all 0s or 1s to the entire SSD. Now the problem is, since all the blocks are now marked as WRITTEN, before any new data is written the SSD controller must change the state from WRITTEN to WRITEABLE again, that's what's gonna slow it down drastically and that's what I meant if you don't do the proper way of secure erasing an SSD, you kill it

(not literally, but kill its performance)

 

[ursine]

Then I have no clue how I physically killed a SSD by interrupting a secure erase and tried to quick format it. The SSD was completely dead but very warm while it was connected to a SATA USB adaptor.

The HD Tune benchmark of the Crucial M500 seems to inherit the performance degradation of the Samsung EVO after cloning. Quick format does not remove the crap in M500 inherited from the Samsung EVO bug. While the benchmark of the Sandisk Extreme Pro remains very flat and consistent, it also suffered from performance degradation in the cloning process. The more I think about, the less it makes sense. It remains a mystery until Samsung is open about the root of the problem.

 

[trparky]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ursine

The HD Tune benchmark of the Crucial M500 seems to inherit the performance degradation of the Samsung EVO after cloning. Quick format does not remove the crap in M500 inherited from the Samsung EVO bug. While the benchmark of the Sandisk Extreme Pro remains very flat and consistent, it also suffered from performance degradation in the cloning process. The more I think about, the less it makes sense. It remains a mystery until Samsung is open about the root of the problem.

That makes no sense at all. The data is written as new data when cloning to the new SSD, that would clear up any access speed issues since the data is newly written to the NAND Flash.

 

[ursine]

I did make sure no program was running on the background when I ran HD Tune Pro benchmark tests. Asus bios always set the SATA mode to AHCI by default. The motherboard has only 6GB/s SATA ports. Trim is always enabled by default so I cannot think of any external factor that may cause HD Tune Pro to show such bizarre results.

 

[Techie007]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MaXimus666

secure erasing a new SSD using Acronis......perfect way to kill it!

Sounds like a SSD to avoid. As far as the SSD is concerned, there's no difference between a partial secure erase versus writing an equally large file with zeros in it.

 

[voyagerek]

Same here.

My Crucial m500 240 MB HD Tune 5.50:



The same symptoms like in 840 EVO

Any solutions??????

 

[alientech]

I noticed this as well. HD tune shows such a graph. The speeds are high in the blank erased areas while reading back written data is slow. This was with a new drive. So I think it is a part of how the drive works. I think many of the drives use caching inside the drive so reading back recently written data is fast but once the data gets old, reading it back is much slower.. Although using some command line utils shows read speeds much faster speeds than HDtune shows but still not as high as those in the reviews. The strange graph was surprising since I never saw such a thing on any review. I assumed they did not really write any data but just speed checked it after erasing the drive. Or read a file back they wrote it for a speed check. I also assumed I got a bad drive until I saw this message which showed my results to be similar as well.

Also dont use compression. The computer is fast enough to decompress that data on the fly but when you have a lot of cache files, you notice the speed loss. Something else that I found out the hard way when I noticed it taking 10 seconds to show a web page that I refreshed. It slows down the entire system. Although with a hard drive the slowdown is not as noticeable and with compression the HD was faster than the SSD but without compression the SSD is much faster.

Over all, my SSD is not much faster than my 7200RPM hard drive. It saves a few seconds here and there. Not really worth 10 times the cost.. SSD's are great for battery operation. Not so great for desktops. Save the money and install more ram would show more speed improvements.

 

[ursine]

I am glad that I am not alone. My problematic Samsung EVO HD Tune benchmark looks very good now and it is snappy like a new drive after restoration. I still cannot explain why the Crucial M500 does not perform consistently across the graph. I think the Scandisk Extreme Pro SSD benchmark looks disappointing becuase I ran the HD Tune when the CPU was at idle frequency. I agree with you. My 2TB 7200 rpm hard drive has rather consistent and clean HD benchmark with maximum read 200MB/s at the outer rims of the platter. I don't get so much grief from HHD with unpredictable and inconsistent performance issues lke the SSD.

 

[nhc511]

Same problem , MX100, after clone from 840 , use Macrium Reflect.
First time, after clone disk: HDtune-bad;
I backup data to a HDD, then delete SDD's partition, HDTune still bad;
Quick format SDD : HDtune line is perfect like origin
Clone disk from HDD to SDD using Acronis True Image, HDTune line is "bad" again
I dont think its related to 840, cause the different of "good" and "bad" HDTune's line is not much as in 840:
- Speed never drop under 200MB/s ( 840 is under 60MB/s)
- CrystalDiskmark and ASSSD score lower by 1% (which is normaly between "new" and "contain data" SSD)
just wonder any one else got this happen? Is there any different result between Clone disk and Install fresh Windows?

 

[flopper]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nhc511

Same problem , MX100, after clone from 840 , use Macrium Reflect.
First time, after clone disk: HDtune-bad;
I backup data to a HDD, then delete SDD's partition, HDTune still bad;
Quick format SDD : HDtune line is perfect like origin
Clone disk from HDD to SDD using Acronis True Image, HDTune line is "bad" again
I dont think its related to 840, cause the different of "good" and "bad" HDTune's line is not much as in 840:
- Speed never drop under 200MB/s ( 840 is under 60MB/s)
- CrystalDiskmark and ASSSD score lower by 1% (which is normaly between "new" and "contain data" SSD)
just wonder any one else got this happen? Is there any different result between Clone disk and Install fresh Windows?

shouldnt be much difference between cloning and a fresh install.
ssd runs so fast even when used a long time.
I suspect the controller on the ssd or the sata port controller on the motherboard.
The slow down on the 840 evo has been due to the firmware wasnt updating the change of flash voltage drift.
the samsung restoration tool restore the drive and update its firmware at the same time.
It also might be highly possible other manufactures ssd has similiar issues.

Normally I never run benchmarks with my drive.
This is mine today, 128gb Crucial M4 its 4 years old in daily use and has 16gb free of space.

 

[jlopz]

Hello
I have the same problem after clone a 840 EVO (128MB) to a M500 (240MB). First I clone the drive (using Reflect), after that I increased the partition from 128 to 240 (using W7).

Tested with HD TUNE and HDTACH, performance is low just in the original data (about the half of the new disk) and normal in the other half. My system is a P55 3 GB SATA. The M500 is brand new, only 8 hours of use. 840 EVO is 1 year old (with the performance restoration passed 2 month ago as fas as I remember).

 

[bogdankr]

In HD Tune options set 'Benchmark > Block size > 8 MB' and test again.

 

[jlopz]

Same test with 8 MB: