Assistance - Calling all Samsung EVO owners

[Aurhinius]

Rotor -

I agree the winsxs is full of small file data -

However if you carry out that test using SSD A
Do the same test using SSD B

One turns out faster than the other you cannot deny regardless that performance of drive A is worse than B.

Forget the winsxs test for now as AIDA is serving the purpose of giving us another test to prove HDTune's results.

What do you consider real world performance? It's only real world if you notice it? or have a feeling of slow performance?

Acronis can do a sector copy but I did a file level copy which I think is it's default as cloning a drive is much faster at file level.

Just because the files are small is no excuse for poor performance. Though I know and am aware of what you describe about small files. If you look at people's drives though you are seeing GB's in some cases 10's of GB's of drive space that is showing the 50MB/S performance

Regardless you are forgetting a key fact. If the small files were the cause of the issue. Explain to me why after a secure erase with a cloned copy of the EXACT disk (i.e all the small files are still there and put back) is the drive performing at over 400MB/S across the board where it was previously doing 50MB/S in sections. Acronis image creation has gone from 30mins+ to 10 mins to do exactly the same image?

Sorry mate it doesn't fly. I appreciate that this is a difficult issue to accept when you don't really notice the issue until you look for it but that doesn't mean it's not there.

The issue is real world I think we have proven that but I agree even I didn't "feel" there was a problem when I first encountered it for general drive usage. I did however feel there was a problem when a backup that should take 10 mins suddenly start's taking 30 mins.

Most people who tested and did a secure erase put their data back and are not seeing the poor performance they had before. In my case it was an exact clone. So all the data that was there is back yet performance is fixed so your small file thoery just doesn't stand up, sorry but keep the idea's coming.

 

[Deleted member 138126]

Most people who tested and did a secure erase put their data back and are not seeing the poor performance they had before. In my case it was an exact clone. So all the data that was there is back yet performance is fixed so your small file thoery just doesn't stand up, sorry but keep the idea's coming.

It's been fascinating to follow this thread, and I will continue watching as am very curious to see what turns up. My main reason for being skeptical is there must be hundreds of thousands of these drives globally, yet somehow nobody has mentioned any problems. There's also a lot of mixing/matching throughout the thread, which is why I've piped up here and there.

I agree that there is something funny going on with the benchmarks, and why secure erase appears to make a difference, is just bizarre. So I continue to watch...

And by the way, cheers for being a good sport with my devil's advocacy.

 

[GoogalyMoogaly]

Out of interest did everyone find the drive was 'frozen' when trying to secure erase?
Could that have had anythign to do with this and the secure erase bit was actually unneeded?

 

[Aurhinius]

sadly not the frozen drives are quite common that is just because your BIOS locks the drive as soon as it boots.

Most bios's will release the drive if you pull out the power connector and plug it back in during the bios detection.

This is th established way of releasing the freeze. Some bioses like my HERO will do it for you.

 

[Aurhinius]

It's been fascinating to follow this thread, and I will continue watching as am very curious to see what turns up. My main reason for being skeptical is there must be hundreds of thousands of these drives globally, yet somehow nobody has mentioned any problems. There's also a lot of mixing/matching throughout the thread, which is why I've piped up here and there.

I agree that there is something funny going on with the benchmarks, and why secure erase appears to make a difference, is just bizarre. So I continue to watch...

And by the way, cheers for being a good sport with my devil's advocacy.

No problem I appreciate any idea's at this stage because someone will probably come up with a possible answer eventually there is a lot of knowledge out there.

I am not an SSD or storage expert by any stretch of the imagination either.

I just don't want to underplay this so that it becomes a minor issue that can be ignored if I can help it.

If something mostly works that I paid for that isn't really good enough unless you are honest and tell me that upfront.

I want it fixed otherwise

 

[davetrace1]

I was considering buying a Samsung 840 1TB version as well......

 

[Aurhinius]

Get an mx100 if it was me. I think this can be fixed though but the mx100 is a superb deal and mlc nand is better.

 

[wazza300]

lets hope they can fix it

if you want a Samsung drive go for the pro version,more expensive but worth it,no issues at all with mine and ive had it longer than my evo

 

[Toytown]

Or worth considering that none of us who have experienced these bad benchmark results have experienced any ovious drop in real world performance.

I already posted it once, but i'll post a better image this time. Here is a MySQL database being read sequentially, if i move the data/index file to the D drive (3TB WD) it gets approx 76MB/Sec

However from the EVO i get approx 30MB/Sec, disk activity is at 100% so windows slows down and is unusable and CPU usage is still less than 10% of a dual core cpu.



I have a small bat file that opens up a website and gets a value from the HTML, and writes that number to the C drive in a new text file. It runs once per hour and takes approx 3-5seconds to complete, if i'm doing a test like above, then it can take anywhere from 15-20mins to complete.

 

[wazza300]

I think it has something to do with cpu idle/load clocks,look at the difference in spikes when I enable intel burn test on standard stress

I stopped the test at 45gb's in and it levelled out again,then re stressed at 205gb's in and again it spiked up

 

[Aurhinius]

There is something there wazza but the performance is going up there slightly with CPU speed agreed however we are seeing massive drops in performance which I don't think could be attributed to CPU speed you are seeing a fluctuation of maybe 50MB/s there.

The performance drop we see is nearer 350-400MB/s so yeah you are right CPU activity is having some effect but not nearly enough.

Toytown what happens to your queue depth on that SQL run?

I saw this on my acronis backup where my queue depth got to 4 and my CPU was at 100% when the drive was in bad performance.

Now the same run after a secure erase gives me queue depth of 0.2-0.4 which is normal and 25% cpu load at most.

 

[wazza300]

can you test your drive while stressing? I wish id have tried mine before I secure erased it just to see

I was thinking idle cpu clocks for the 50mb read,till the cpu switched to full speed clocks?

the spiking in my graph is cpu at full clocks,the level line is cpu at idle clocks

 

[Dervious]

I ran Prime95 three times during this test, and each time Prome95 was running, the transfer rate increased,

My CPU was running at 4.6Ghz throughout the test.

 

[Jokester]

Your CPU usage is rediculously high for some reason.

 

[Aurhinius]

Well that would stand to reason I think so it's a good find but not explaining the drops in performance. We are seeing we can get more performance out of the drive by fixing the clock rate at turbo speeds. Okay that makes sense the CPU will respond faster.

A CPU idling though is giving 425MB/s on the graph above that is no where near the performance degradation we have seen on "bad" drives before the secure erase and a CPU can't get any slower than it's idle speed.

Good find though wazza.

In other news my drive looks like it might be starting to go. I am seeing a drop about 60% in to the drive now that drops to sub 200MB/s that wasn't there 2 days ago. In that time I haven't done anything to drive other than general use.

I'm going to keep monitoring it and if it persists tomorrow I will post a screenshot I don't want to chalk today up as the start of things to come until I am sure it isn't going away. I did run the benchmark several times though and AIDA as well and they both show it.

So the drive has lasted about 1 week roughly after a secure erase if this proves to be true.

Also seeing having rapid enabled is showing an odd spike upwards where the drive has clearly cached some data to RAM as it peaks up to about 600MB/s which is faster than the interface could handle so must be coming from RAM and again AIDA shows it.

 

[Dervious]

Your CPU usage is rediculously high for some reason.

"I ran Prime95 three times during this test, and each time Prome95 was running, the transfer rate increased"

Just ran the test without Prime95 running, CPU usage 4.6%.

Ran the test again with Prime95 running all of the time, CPU usage 100%.

 

[wazza300]

Well that would stand to reason I think so it's a good find but not explaining the drops in performance. We are seeing we can get more performance out of the drive by fixing the clock rate at turbo speeds. Okay that makes sense the CPU will respond faster.

A CPU idling though is giving 425MB/s on the graph above that is no where near the performance degradation we have seen on "bad" drives before the secure erase and a CPU can't get any slower than it's idle speed.

Good find though wazza.

In other news my drive looks like it might be starting to go. I am seeing a drop about 60% in to the drive now that drops to sub 200MB/s that wasn't there 2 days ago. In that time I haven't done anything to drive other than general use.

I'm going to keep monitoring it and if it persists tomorrow I will post a screenshot I don't want to chalk today up as the start of things to come until I am sure it isn't going away. I did run the benchmark several times though and AIDA as well and they both show it.

So the drive has lasted about 1 week roughly after a secure erase if this proves to be true.

Also seeing having rapid enabled is showing an odd spike upwards where the drive has clearly cached some data to RAM as it peaks up to about 600MB/s which is faster than the interface could handle so must be coming from RAM and again AIDA shows it.

did you test with full cpu clocks now that your evo is dropping in performance again? above screenshots are on recently secure erased drives

if its still doing it then fair enough

 

[Dervious]

Well that would stand to reason I think so it's a good find but not explaining the drops in performance. We are seeing we can get more performance out of the drive by fixing the clock rate at turbo speeds. Okay that makes sense the CPU will respond faster.

The clock rate of my CPU is 4.6Ghz all of the time (according to CPU-Z). If I run Prime95, the transfer speed increases. That seems a bit strange.

I`ve tried the same tesat when I benchmark a mechanical drive in my systen. There seems to be no change in performance if Prime95 is running or not.

 

[Jokester]

"I ran Prime95 three times during this test, and each time Prome95 was running, the transfer rate increased"

Just ran the test without Prime95 running, CPU usage 4.6%.

Ran the test again with Prime95 running all of the time, CPU usage 100%.

Hah, I always assumed it reported the CPU usage associated with the test, not the complete system.

 

[Dervious]

Hah, I always assumed it reported the CPU usage associated with the test, not the complete system.

TBH, I wasn't sure exactly what it was reporting, until a few minutes ago !