Assistance - Calling all Samsung EVO owners

You may find that it's not your write performance but the speed in which it has to read from the EVO mate.

That was my problem.

I tried copying to a sandisk ultra that should manage 400MB + write and it can but not when it has to read from the Samsung EVO.

The write speed in a file copy is also limited by how fast it can read the source file.
 
Okay not a huge surprise here.

I secure erased the OLD faulty drive to go back to Samsung and benchmarked it without even a partition installed or a format.

OLD_EVO_SERASE.png



Not surprised at all. I will be annoyed if Samsung come back and say "we can't find a fault"

They are still saying they need this old drive to replicate the problem! I don't get how they can't recreate this given all the evidence for a problem here on the forum but maybe they aren't waiting long enough. I don't know.

Tested new drive again today - same as 2 days ago but I haven't copied any more data to the drive.
 
Even with 8TB of writes read performance shouldn't be affected. Wear on an SSD we have been lead to believe should affect write performance but not read performance.
 
I dropped a quick e-mail to Tomshardware to see if they were interested in getting involved to see if they can replicate the issues and investigate. It's such a popular consumer drive and with more folks coming forward showing problems I think we need to go wider. It'll likely come to nothing but worth a shot.
 
Surprised you are not seeing the heartbeat effect on the clean drive.

Are you using an AMD/marvell controller?

Others with the intel controller like me seem to get the heartbeat effect.
 
strange I don't see the heartbeat effect on the clean drive of yours that I have on mine.

I'm using an intel sata 3 port in AHCI with the latest intel RST drivers

I see that on two totally different pc's as well but you don't.

So colour me slightly interested in that.

Others have shown the same heartbeat effect with a new drive earlier in the thread too so wondering why I don't see it on your drive.

That is a distraction from the real issues here though.
 
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I suspect it might be that I have write buffer flushing on. I'll disable that and see if it clears the heartbeat effect. Well it didn't but then it shouldn't effect read performance anyway. Disabled rapid mode and still get that heartbeat effect in none data areas but not overly worried about it. Still your drive is looking healthy there.
 
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Some interesting results folks. It seems like using this cloning software is working much better than using Acronis True Image 2011 that I used.

I am going to Try Acronis again on my partners drive to the new drive to see if it clones straight to rubbish performance.

Not that the type of cloning software used should make a difference and they give acronis away with certain drives so shouldn't be an issue.

I get the same results as Fizzy as you have seen and after a while in time the drives seem to just get progressively worse.

Definitely a drive issue it seems.

For reference I am using Acronis True Image 2011 - straight disk to disk clone from old EVO to new EVO. This causes the PC to reboot and do the copy before the OS loads.
 
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Yeah that is showing what we are all seeing profressive degradation over time to almost shocking performance levels.

So proving once again not an OS level issue.
 
Results for the second EVO I got from Samsung -

Old drive on my partners PC - totally different to mine.
Intel Z77 SATA 3 AHCI port.

Old drive before clone -

Partner_old_EVO.png


Yeah not surprised and not good!


New drive after Acronis 2011 clone - Aligned perfectly

partner_new_evo.png



Striking similarity to mine after a clone!

Here's mine again - remember these are totally different source and destination drives with totally different data patterns from totally different PC's. Though both windows 7 64bit.

NEW_EVO_AFTER_CLONED_OS_zps22e560f6.jpg


Only conclusion I can come to is this is the EVO's way of dealing with a large data copy and how it spreads out the data.
 
Okay folks stop using HDtune 2.55 - it isn't showing correct results and I have no idea why.

Any results in HDTune pro have shown to be fairly accurate so those are still very much accurate.


There is still a drive performance issue as shown by my original tests and John's, selektor's etc that hasn't changed but lets remove HDtune 2.55 results as they are muddying the water.

I have run AIDA 64 disk benchs and they produce similar results to HDTune pro so that's good and proves these were accurate.

We'll have to assume anything tested in HDtune 2.55 as invalid. Sorry.

Lets move forward with HDTune Pro trial.

Unfortunately I cannot re-run my tests on my two drives that were bad because they are now erased. However the original tests on the first page without graphs were done in the pro version so as John and others who used this have shown, we still have an issue with the drive.

From my initial tests with the trial again on the cloned drives after a secure erase it does appear they are working perfectly now.


So the question that is outstanding the the original cause of this thread is - How are these EVO drives getting themselves in to such a state with sub 50mb's read performance.
 
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Just to show that the original issue was there these were shots using HDTune pro 5.5 which we seem to think is the working bench -

Here is my bad drive short stroke tested -

Samsung20GBshortstroketest.png



Against my sandisk drive -

Sandisk20GBshortstroketest.png


So while we have had to invalidate some data -

The problem is there and yes from my testing now of the two new drives Samsung sent - They are both performing beautifully after an acronis clone. So yes secure erasing the drive does fix it.

The question remains - how did it get in such a bad state to begin with which was the original problem we were investigating anyway!
 
It must be the SSD the question is how did we all manage to get our SSD's in to the state they were in and have to secure erase the drive to restore the performance.

I'll be keeping an eye on mine over the next few days/weeks.

For note my old drive that showed the bad HDtune performance also showed bad performance in acronis true image and res mon native to windows. As I know John's did and a fair few others so it's the drive all right but why... and how long does it take to get to that state.
 
So what we know so far -

1. HDtune Pro Trial seems to work properly. 2.55 useless.

2. Drives are some how getting in to a really bad performing state which seems from our testing to date happens over time.

3. Even fairly new drives that did not need a firmware update show this issue.

4. Secure erasing the drive and restoring the image restores performance. So it's not the file data pattern causing it.
 
agreed and to be honest I think Samsung needs to fix this. A drive should not get in this read performance state that we are all seeing.

Write performance may be but read performance no.
 
Mei said:
this is now the samsung bad press thread :o
i still think its a hdtune problem with this particular samsung drive and the reading it is getting is "buggy"
tho i have nothing to prove this and its just a guess :)

i would like to see any real world tests that back up hdtune's findings
if i transfer a 4gb movie i am getting 450mbps, it does not spike up and down at all, hdtune tells me i should be getting 50-100mbps!?
that to me doesnt make sense
Click to expand...


Plenty of real world tests at the start of the thread - As I stated I first noticed the issue because an acronis true image backup of the drive was going to take 3 times longer than it used to. 30 mins + instead of 14 mins.

So real world performance issues are there Mei. You only need to initiate a file copy in windows and use res mon to watch the HDD copy speed. Mine was capping around 100mb from disk to disk.

The drive now secure erased has doubled that.

So while there was a problem with HDTune 2.55 we have shown elsewhere that not all the tests we have done are invalid and HDTune pro seems to work as does HD_Speed.

It's not about trashing samsung who have been superb. A special thanks to Memory Hanaro from the Netherlands who shipped two drives in record time (24hrs) to me and paid for collection of the old drives. Their RMA support has been superb.
Samsung the last I heard have not been able to replicate this but as we now know it seems to take some amount of time for performance to get this bad. It's obviously more than a week because I have had data on the drive for that length and others and we are not seeing the issue arise just yet.

You cannot deny an issue exists given all the people who have posted showing the issue.

We cannot deny that doing a secure erase fixes the performance problems but we all know that's exactly what a secure erase should do which is why we all did it!.

What remain's is will all our drives recreate the original performance issues over time and how long that takes.

None of us should have to secure erase a drive every 6 months. Some of the guys earlier in the thread had really new drives showing this bad 50mb/s performance already.

What we know of SSD performance is that write speed is mean't to degrade over time but read speed shouldn't degrade because reading a data block doesn't wear the nand. So the question remains why do these EVO drives get in to such a read state over time. That's something samsung need to test but it's not just one or two of us it's many people who have tested and I can bet if others did bother to test they would seem the same. I agree you wouldn't notice the issue unless you looked for it because I didn't feel any performance issues until I tried to copy files and do an acronis backup. Then I noticed and I only noticed because I remembered what it was before. If you don't watch your computer closely many issues would go unoticed.

For note I have a sandisk drive that is just as old as the samsung EVO it has had none of these issues at all and even has a pagefile on it and gets written way more. Samsung none EVO drives don't have the problems either.

So if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck. it's a duck. If we can show a performance issue then a performance issue must exist. You might not like it and it might not bother you and that's fine but it bothers me because it's not normal and should be fixed. If my product is defective which as far as I am concerned it is because this is not normal SSD behaviour. If it happens again in 3-6months then again I'd consider my SSD defective again even though I just had two drives RMA'ed. It is not normal to have to secure erase an SSD every 3-6 months to correct dramatic read performance issues. Write performance I would accept but read performance I wouldn't. Samsung are treating this really seriously so that should tell you what we are describing isn't normal either.

Sorry if it seems like a rant but if people ignore issues they never get fixed and this should be fixed and probably can be. It's probably a bug in the garbage collection or TRIM that makes the drive read performance worse over time. That can be fixed with a firmware update probably and then none of us need to secure erase our disks. Worth the effort I think.
 
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Take a look at the first page. John and a few others posted HD_Speed tests that show the same.

I have shown a sandisk HDTune shot and a EVO HDtune shot.

Are you suggesting that HDTune just doesn't like EVO drives and has problems benching those properly?
It's a fair suggestion but I think unlikely.

I wish I still had my old drive to show you the other tests I did but I unfortunately don't.

Download acronis free trial and set it to backup your entire EVO to another drive and check the estimated time to completion then if you have a second drive that has roughly the same amount of data try to do it back the way.

On my drives I saw a 3 fold in copy time from the EVO to the sandisk than the sandisk to the EVO.
 
Okay found some -

Sandisk to EVO acronis image with res mon running

Acronissandisk.jpg


And here is the same with EVO to sandisk showing the performance halved almost.

Acronis.jpg


Can't do much better than that.

One for good luck - this is the EVO doing the acronis today after being secure erased and re-imaged disk to disk so the file layout is identical

evotoday.png



Oh and you should be looking at the true image home service that is the backup running - the top shot shows 270mb/s total where I copy from sandisk to EVO. The middle 65mb/s total shows EVO to sandisk. Bottom is the EVO today after a secure erase

Of note is the queue depth on the EVO when I copy to the sandisk middle picture jumping to 4. That's not normal. Bottom shot of the EVO today shows queue depth where it should be at 0.4 or so.

The sandisk shows less than 1 when I copy from it top shot.

Need any more convincing?
 
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