I found a great deal on NCIX less than a week ago on a Sandisk Extreme 240GB and I decided to jump on it as fast as I could since the quantities were limited on the deal they had for it. I had only read a few reviews that put it up there as one of the highest performing SSDs. Since I’ve gotten it, I’ve cloned my old partition from a previous drive and connected it in SATA 2 at first. The results were impressive; it pretty much maxed out my SATA 2 for seq. reads/writes and everything else was at least higher than it was with my previous Intel x25-M G2 SSD.
A couple days later, though, I built my new computer, consisting of an i5 3570k and an ASRock Extreme4 Z77 motherboard. I’ve updated the drivers and everything but the write performance has been degrading ever since the first benchmarks. I’ve tried both the native Intel SATA 3 ports and the ASMedia 1061 (which gave very poor performance).
As you can see, we’re very far from advertised speeds. The disk is only half full, and I didn’t write much onto it other than standard Windows 7 usage and some benchmarking (no overkill on these). I also used a program called SSD Tweaker to force a TRIM command and idle’d for a good 30 to 40 minutes. The result is what you see on that screenshot. Previous to it, my reads were lower, but it didn’t improve the writes. I’m pretty disappointed and I hope this isn’t permanent.
Advertised numbers on Sandforce drives are kind of BS because the drive uses compression internally to achieve them. Your AS-SSD numbers do still look pretty low compared to what I’ve seen benchmarked (I’d expect more along the lines of 250MB/s sequential write). Are you using the MS or Intel AHCI drivers?
Most of it is probably just the broken TRIM though. Sandforce drives do some garbage collection that will keep things from getting too bad over time, but it needs TRIM to get all the way back or get back quickly.
I sent an email to Sandisk Support asking when the next firmware was going to be available. Of course they would not give me a time frame. But the tech support specifically said the speed will ONLY degrade if you run numerous benchmark tests and/or fill up the disk significantly. I think your problem is that you keep running benchmark tests. He said that is what degrades them the quickest. Stop running benchmark tests until the new FW comes out. I haven’t run one, and my Sandisk Extreme 240GB is still lightning fast (but I have 160GB free, so that probably helps too)
Just installing and removing a few games and large applications would likely utilize the drive more than running a few benchmarks. This is something that normal people do and may cause the drive to become near full.
I haven’t benched my drive at all, however I have used it as a backup drive, copied my whole Steam folder to it, removed the Steam folder, copied just specific games to it, and used it for holding a some large vector data files that take a lot of time to process. I did all of that in a weekend, and my drive already feels slower.
So yeah that might not have been the best stuff to do, but I was excited to have a blazing fast SSD. Then I tried to Secure Erase it to “fix” the peformance, so we are right back to how SSDs were performing a couple years ago when people would wipe the drives every three or four months because they became so slow. Unfortunately I can’t get the Freeze Lock off the drive without hot swapping it, so I can’'t Secure Erase it. My PC isn’t situated in a manner when I can easily get to it and hot swap a drive…
Geez, you’re right. HD Sentinel is telling me I wrote over 900 GB on it already. That’s… almost a 4x fill! No wonder. Yeah, I hope being able to do a Secure Erase on it if the firmware doesn’t improve it enough.
I don’t know if I should try it now. I previously only tried it with my Intel SSD and sleeping didn’t work.
Just wondering, what are you backing up your drive with before a Secure Erase? I’d like to keep everything intact. I have Acronis True Image, not sure if that’s ideal.
I sent an email to Sandisk Support asking when the next firmware was going to be available. Of course they would not give me a time frame. But the tech support specifically said the speed will ONLY degrade if you run numerous benchmark tests and/or fill up the disk significantly. I think your problem is that you keep running benchmark tests. He said that is what degrades them the quickest. Stop running benchmark tests until the new FW comes out. I haven’t run one, and my Sandisk Extreme 240GB is still lightning fast (but I have 160GB free, so that probably helps too)
This is the reason for the write performance degradation voidwards is observing. Atto benchmark numbers posted above support this - they are using compressible data and the numbers are good.
AS-SSD and CDM use incompressible data by default. The default tests use fairy large dataset. Anvil is also capable to use incompressible data (like you did in your screenshot). A few runs with the current firmware that has TRIM broken are enough to kill your write performance.
The only way to recover currently from this is secure eraze. Disk image your partition, perform a secure eraze, then restore the disk image. After you’ve done this do one run of AS-SSD and CDM if you like to verify that write performance is back to the expected, no more.
I did a secure erase and got about the same results as you on CDM now, but your 4ks (both read and write) are so much better than mine. I guess my Intel controller must be to blame. Will put my image back and see how much effect it has.
Oh and I went ahead and secure erased my Intel X25-M 160gb G2 too, and guess what? The write speeds dropped DRAMATICALLY. And I mean by over half all across the board. That’s with 0% of the space used before the first benchmark. Any idea as to how that happened?
Edit: I ran AS-SSD after restoring image and got 704 for the SanDisk. Same issue, almost the same stats as you but the 4ks are lower. As for the Intel, I get an I/O error and can’t bench it, but I think this is caused by Intel Rapid Start.
Uhm, killabee is using an Intel controller. He is also using an Intel SATA/AHCI/RAID driver. Intel 6 and 7 series chipsets with SATA 6Gb/s SATA chipsets are the highest performing PC chipsets availiable, and somewhat faster than AMDs.
You are using the generic Microsoft AHCI driver, msahci. While not bad at all, you probably will get better performance with an Intel driver.
Notice in his screenshot file names, the text “nocstates”, which means no C states, a CPU power saving feature, that puts a dent in benchmark performance. That is likely what is happening in your case.
If you want to see what your SSD performs like with c-states turned off … but don’t want to actually turn c-states off, you can force the CPU into full power mode by running linx in the background during your benchmark run.
Set linx to the following options:
a) At least 4gig problem size if you can
b) Set it to 1 thread and idle (or lowest) priority in the settings.
Then start it up, confirm the CPU is under some load, the run your disk benchmark. You should see better scores for high queue depth operations.
Okay, hold on here… I have downloaded all the drivers from the ASRock site. How come I am not using the Intel controller? It even says it on the mouse over: http://i.imgur.com/UzDLo.png … Intel controller.
C states are disabled in my bios… I’m not sure what else I could disable that is called ‘C state’. C3/C6 and that other one are disabled.
Just found out that I had removed Intel RST. So yeah I had the Intel Z77 Express chipset drivers installed but not the Intel RST. Everything looks pretty good now, still lower 4ks than the SS above though. 34 read 68 write on CDM. Got 715 on AS-SSD. Not too bad I guess.
Just setup a refund for my Extreme 120GB and ordered an Intel 330 SSD. I would have to open my case to remove the Sandisk Extreme and Secure Erase it to restore perfomance. So at that point I would rather just replace the drive with something I don’t have to babysit.
I can’t Secure Erase the drive without opening the case to Hot Swap it. Parted Magic won’t wake from Sleep on my computer to get the Freeze Lock off the drive. Ah well…
Sandisk could have thrown people a bit of information or put up a new firmware and clearly labeled it as a BETA. They didn’t, and I don’t want to fall outside of my refund period with a drive that “might” get updated. Once bitten, twice shy. I don’t want another piece of hardware with problems that the manufacturer isn’t supporting. Now I suspect Sandisk will release the new firmware about 5 minutes after I put the Extreme in a box to ship it back to Amazon
