Assistance - Calling all Samsung EVO owners
- Thread starter Aurhinius
- Start date
I've sent across some information to Abarrass which the Samsung Europe tech asked for same stuff I think they will probably want anyway including a sandisk short stroke shot and a Samsung short stroke shot. The performance difference is plain to see between the two drives. My partner has a same size drive and shows exactly the same issue. The only thing we both have in common is we both use the drives as an OS drive but the page file is moved.
I would be happy to provide my drive for testing but I'd secure erase it first and I am sure that will restore performance to as new. As new isn't the problem here. Used drive even for what seems a month or two is causing the problem and in some of your cases just copying over a large amount of data to the drive causes it.
I know that both my partner and I cloned our drives so that could be a causing factor - large data copy of tens of gigs.
The copy of data on and off the drive is giving TRIM/garbage collection a chance to work and it does help my drive has perked up a small amount after I purposely defragged it but the issues are still there. Yes I know you shouldn't defrag an SSD I did it on purpose to see if re-ordering things would help. It did a tiny amount.
As for Samsung I think they are taking it seriously all credit to them but I find it hard to believe they aren't able to take a drive and clone an OS from one drive to another on it and instantly see the sub 50mb read performance in places.
John's tests look interesting but for me the part of the drive that is most interesting is the first part the sub 50mb read section which seems to be static files that aren't changing like an OS installed on it.
I would be happy to provide my drive for testing but I'd secure erase it first and I am sure that will restore performance to as new. As new isn't the problem here. Used drive even for what seems a month or two is causing the problem and in some of your cases just copying over a large amount of data to the drive causes it.
I know that both my partner and I cloned our drives so that could be a causing factor - large data copy of tens of gigs.
The copy of data on and off the drive is giving TRIM/garbage collection a chance to work and it does help my drive has perked up a small amount after I purposely defragged it but the issues are still there. Yes I know you shouldn't defrag an SSD I did it on purpose to see if re-ordering things would help. It did a tiny amount.
As for Samsung I think they are taking it seriously all credit to them but I find it hard to believe they aren't able to take a drive and clone an OS from one drive to another on it and instantly see the sub 50mb read performance in places.
John's tests look interesting but for me the part of the drive that is most interesting is the first part the sub 50mb read section which seems to be static files that aren't changing like an OS installed on it.
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If you can get a samsung drive and give us a before and after HDTune run after you have even just installed windows 7 on it.
I'm using a windows 7 AHCI Z87 platform. Windows 7 home 64bit latest intel RST drivers.
I've moved my page file to another drive to save the TLC nand drive along with my internet temp files. I don't imagine this will make much impact though on your testing.
I use acronis true image to clone my drives.
no it doesn't look as bad but it's starting to show.
Just to keep everyone up to date I am passing information to abarrass and Samsung in the back ground to try and replicate the issues.
Yeah it's strange they can't replicate it but hopefully they can
Just to keep everyone up to date I am passing information to abarrass and Samsung in the back ground to try and replicate the issues.
Yeah it's strange they can't replicate it but hopefully they can
Had another look at your shots John and it is almost completely identical before and after deleting the 30GB of data but you can quite clearly see that adding the 30GB of data dropped the read performance to approx. 200MB.
The fact that taking it off put everything back almost identical is bizarre that it didn't change anything in terms of the drive layout.
Very interesting you would think taking the data off with a straight delete just deletes the allocation table entry thus not affecting the drive state.
The fact that taking it off put everything back almost identical is bizarre that it didn't change anything in terms of the drive layout.
Very interesting you would think taking the data off with a straight delete just deletes the allocation table entry thus not affecting the drive state.
No at this stage Overclockers and Samsung are doing their best to figure out what the issue is but as most of us have different system, os's drive sizes etc etc it makes life difficult for them.
They are gathering together the components they need to run the tests but I am quite surprised they can't replicate it by simply copying over about 50GB of data to a 250GB drive. At this stage though I am not sure they have tried that.
What I do know is they are taking it very seriously and Abarrass is working hard to help so lets take it easy and keep the information coming. We might stumble on a common theme or figure out where this bug is lurking.
As for not selling the drive - The drive works and it does give the appearance of great performance. I am still using mine and it works fine in most circumstances or at least I wouldn't notice there is this underlying problem until I go looking for it.
Right now though I would buy an MX100 over an EVO until this problem gets resolved but that's my personal opinion and you guys should all make your own choices.
There is a chance here this is something to do with TLC nand and not just the firmware. MX100 uses MLC so hence my choice.
That looks very fresh Jokester is that OS only and what OS is it?
I don't think it would be possible to downgrade firmware.
Tephnos you are seeing the issue most of us are with massive performance degradation on area's of your drive. That shouldn't happen for read performance and that is what we are trying to get to the bottom of. If you are not happy with it and you can do a secure erase and restore your drive then that might be worth a shot. Otherwise you'll need to wait and see what comes of Samsung's investigations. At the moment the drive will still function normally so don't panic and watch this space.
They are gathering together the components they need to run the tests but I am quite surprised they can't replicate it by simply copying over about 50GB of data to a 250GB drive. At this stage though I am not sure they have tried that.
What I do know is they are taking it very seriously and Abarrass is working hard to help so lets take it easy and keep the information coming. We might stumble on a common theme or figure out where this bug is lurking.
As for not selling the drive - The drive works and it does give the appearance of great performance. I am still using mine and it works fine in most circumstances or at least I wouldn't notice there is this underlying problem until I go looking for it.
Right now though I would buy an MX100 over an EVO until this problem gets resolved but that's my personal opinion and you guys should all make your own choices.
There is a chance here this is something to do with TLC nand and not just the firmware. MX100 uses MLC so hence my choice.
That looks very fresh Jokester is that OS only and what OS is it?
I don't think it would be possible to downgrade firmware.
Tephnos you are seeing the issue most of us are with massive performance degradation on area's of your drive. That shouldn't happen for read performance and that is what we are trying to get to the bottom of. If you are not happy with it and you can do a secure erase and restore your drive then that might be worth a shot. Otherwise you'll need to wait and see what comes of Samsung's investigations. At the moment the drive will still function normally so don't panic and watch this space.
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Your alignment can be checked using AS SSD but I am sure it is okay as windows 7 was SSD aware so should align okay.
So not entirely sure if that is what is causing the seesaw effect. It's almost like a heartbeat effect but an SSD shouldn't do that and certainly not so regularly.
Love to know what causes it though.
So not entirely sure if that is what is causing the seesaw effect. It's almost like a heartbeat effect but an SSD shouldn't do that and certainly not so regularly.
Love to know what causes it though.
Just for interest I get exactly the same heatbeat effect on my SSD in clean disc space.
I've sent some more information to Abarrass for him to pass on to Samsung with some resource mon shots while running the benchmark and acronis true image comparing the EVO to the Sandisk in my system showing that not only do each program show issues windows shows the issue as well but only on the EVO drive.
I've sent some more information to Abarrass for him to pass on to Samsung with some resource mon shots while running the benchmark and acronis true image comparing the EVO to the Sandisk in my system showing that not only do each program show issues windows shows the issue as well but only on the EVO drive.
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An update for everyone -
Samsung are going to send me a new drive to test in my machine to see if I get exactly the same result. At this stage I am not sure if that drive is another EVO or a PRO.
I have advised that I don't expect the PRO to show the issue as we have seen from others in this thread but lets see.
To be honest I'd prefer to get the EVO to see if I can replicate the problem to help resolve this though I won't refuse a minor upgrade. Both path's will show something.
I have advised them that regardless we need to fix this for everyone as many others of you have the issue not least my partner who has the same model of drive.
If this drive fixes the problem they want my old drive back which I am happy to secure ERASE and it will go to Samsung HQ for testing.
It makes me think they can't yet replicate what we are seeing which just seems mad!
My plan -
Get new drive. Acronis old drive to new drive. Test drive with HDTune and acronis over a couple of days.
This is what happened to the last EVO so lets try it and see what comes.
If it does fix it I can see they will get a lot of RMA's coming their way.
Samsung are going to send me a new drive to test in my machine to see if I get exactly the same result. At this stage I am not sure if that drive is another EVO or a PRO.
I have advised that I don't expect the PRO to show the issue as we have seen from others in this thread but lets see.
To be honest I'd prefer to get the EVO to see if I can replicate the problem to help resolve this though I won't refuse a minor upgrade. Both path's will show something.
I have advised them that regardless we need to fix this for everyone as many others of you have the issue not least my partner who has the same model of drive.
If this drive fixes the problem they want my old drive back which I am happy to secure ERASE and it will go to Samsung HQ for testing.
It makes me think they can't yet replicate what we are seeing which just seems mad!
My plan -
Get new drive. Acronis old drive to new drive. Test drive with HDTune and acronis over a couple of days.
This is what happened to the last EVO so lets try it and see what comes.
If it does fix it I can see they will get a lot of RMA's coming their way.
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Okay so big update -
I received my new drives identical to the old ones.
I installed one new drive on my PC and benchmarked it with a blank MBR NTFS format default allocation size
So nice and tidy and performing as intended.
I then benchmarked the old EVO OS drive to show the issue.
As you can see very very unhealthy EVO.
So I cloned the OS drive directly to the new drive using Acronis True image home outside the OS. It took 30 mins approx. Which was slow and due to the poor source read performance of the unhealthy old EVO.
Then I benchmarked the newly cloned EVO os drive.
Seems the cloning process halved the drives performance and introduces quite large heartbeat spikes. Not so good as performance has dropped about 200MB from the clean drive.
I then Manually trimmed the drive to see if this would help after all I just wrote 60GB+ to the drive.
Nothing.. trim did absolutely nothing, fair enough.
Okay lets hammer the drive using the Samsung benchmark which writes a couple of gig every time you run it to encourage a drive TRIM and a bit more wear. To do this I benched it 5 times with rapid on. Disabled rapid and did it 5 more times. I then re-enabled rapid and ran a manual TRIM to try to clean up the drive.
After the 10 benchmarks runs without rapid mode
Not much changed...
After the 10 benchmarks runs with rapid mode enabled and a manual TRIM
Yeah that made not much difference at all.
Thoughts so far - clearly cloning the drive across kills the performance off the bat and I just can't explain the heartbeat/stairs effect at all. I'm not seeing the sub 50MB/s of the bad drive yet though but this is day 0.
I'll keep you posted.
Worth a mention is the acronis drive copy time for the new EVO to my sandisk is back to where it should be at around 14mins from the 30+ it was reporting on the bad drive.
One final shot to prove it's not the PC that causes the heartbeat effect or the performance issues here is my sandisk ultra plus which is about the same full and 9 months old.
I received my new drives identical to the old ones.
I installed one new drive on my PC and benchmarked it with a blank MBR NTFS format default allocation size
So nice and tidy and performing as intended.
I then benchmarked the old EVO OS drive to show the issue.
As you can see very very unhealthy EVO.
So I cloned the OS drive directly to the new drive using Acronis True image home outside the OS. It took 30 mins approx. Which was slow and due to the poor source read performance of the unhealthy old EVO.
Then I benchmarked the newly cloned EVO os drive.
Seems the cloning process halved the drives performance and introduces quite large heartbeat spikes. Not so good as performance has dropped about 200MB from the clean drive.
I then Manually trimmed the drive to see if this would help after all I just wrote 60GB+ to the drive.
Nothing.. trim did absolutely nothing, fair enough.
Okay lets hammer the drive using the Samsung benchmark which writes a couple of gig every time you run it to encourage a drive TRIM and a bit more wear. To do this I benched it 5 times with rapid on. Disabled rapid and did it 5 more times. I then re-enabled rapid and ran a manual TRIM to try to clean up the drive.
After the 10 benchmarks runs without rapid mode
Not much changed...
After the 10 benchmarks runs with rapid mode enabled and a manual TRIM
Yeah that made not much difference at all.
Thoughts so far - clearly cloning the drive across kills the performance off the bat and I just can't explain the heartbeat/stairs effect at all. I'm not seeing the sub 50MB/s of the bad drive yet though but this is day 0.
I'll keep you posted.
Worth a mention is the acronis drive copy time for the new EVO to my sandisk is back to where it should be at around 14mins from the 30+ it was reporting on the bad drive.
One final shot to prove it's not the PC that causes the heartbeat effect or the performance issues here is my sandisk ultra plus which is about the same full and 9 months old.
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Abarrass is away at the moment but I am in contact with samsung and I have fed back all this information and directed them to this thread right from the beginning.
That way I don't have to compile information twice and do this in a transparent way.
Next step for me will be to leave it a few days and get the 2nd drive installed and do similar comparrisons in my partner's PC which is a totally different machine.
I expect to see exactly the same results and I am sure you guys do too.
I think we already have beyond reasonable doubt can show performance is not good with data on the drive but I'm not sure what samsung will have to say about it. Though I did ask the question.
I will send the old drives back but I want to leave it a few days/ a week and see what samsung want to do anyway because the new drives haven't really fixed the issue as such so I am happy to send the new drives back if they want.
Samsung did suggest my drive would go back to samsung HQ for analysis but as we can see all EVO drives seem to show issues so my specific drive doesn't matter but that just makes the mystery of them being able to recreate it a problem. Either that or they feel the performance degradation shown on the new drive above isn't an issue and normal operation but when it gets down to severe levels sub 50MB's then it is. So the issues for them might be why it gets that severe? Not sure at this stage.
I'll get that 2nd drive in my partners PC as soon as I can and will do exactly the same thing bench before fresh, bench after a clone. I won't bother with trying to trim it because that made no difference.
That way I don't have to compile information twice and do this in a transparent way.
Next step for me will be to leave it a few days and get the 2nd drive installed and do similar comparrisons in my partner's PC which is a totally different machine.
I expect to see exactly the same results and I am sure you guys do too.
I think we already have beyond reasonable doubt can show performance is not good with data on the drive but I'm not sure what samsung will have to say about it. Though I did ask the question.
I will send the old drives back but I want to leave it a few days/ a week and see what samsung want to do anyway because the new drives haven't really fixed the issue as such so I am happy to send the new drives back if they want.
Samsung did suggest my drive would go back to samsung HQ for analysis but as we can see all EVO drives seem to show issues so my specific drive doesn't matter but that just makes the mystery of them being able to recreate it a problem. Either that or they feel the performance degradation shown on the new drive above isn't an issue and normal operation but when it gets down to severe levels sub 50MB's then it is. So the issues for them might be why it gets that severe? Not sure at this stage.
I'll get that 2nd drive in my partners PC as soon as I can and will do exactly the same thing bench before fresh, bench after a clone. I won't bother with trying to trim it because that made no difference.
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Samsung have come back to me via their 2nd party CS and are asking for my old drives saying Samsung can't replicate the issue and they want the old drives. They did say they would come back to me about the new drive once they have spoken to Samsung but nothing on that yet.
So I'll need to get that 2nd drive installed and get them sent back bit busy until the weekend though.
So I'll need to get that 2nd drive installed and get them sent back bit busy until the weekend though.