Going back to conventional hard drives...

cogrady84

cogrady84

cogrady84

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I've been running 2x 64Gb Samsung SSD's (MMCRE64G5MPP-0VA) in RAID-0 since July and have recently started to notice performance degradation (stuttering, slowdowns). I believe these drives neither support firmware upgrades or TRIM, so probably a bad decision on my part.

I've opted to go back to conventional HDD's as I cannot afford the latest/greatest SSD's, I chose 2x Samsung F3 1Tb drives in RAID-0, (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-082-SA&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1279).

Am I going to see a massive drop performance wise? Any suggestions on maybe getting (and keeping) the performance in my SSD's?
 
Just wait, there's rumours that the PB22-Js may get a firmware update. Later drives have GC firmware, which you might be able to find and flash your drive.

As Atom says, image your install, break the RAID and run HDDErase in DOS, restore the RAID and reinstate your OS from the image. Shouldn't take more than an hour.
 
Sorry scrub that about firmware, yours is a first gen Samsung not second gen (PB22) - so I doubt you'll see a firmware for that one.

If you were happy with the drive when you first got it, I'd still keep it and do the HDDerase clean up process. Mechanical HDs haven't got faster in the last few months, so you'll have a fair idea yourself on performance from going HD->SSD when you first got them.
 
Atom said:
I think if you undo your raid and run hdderase that sorts your ssd out.

There is a few posts knocking about mentioning it.
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Personally I think this is a very bad idea.

RAID 0 will store data on both disks in a format that is just garbage without the necessary RAID configuration to tell the system the stripe & cluster sizes, etc. Neither drive in isolation will have any readable data on them.

If you break apart the RAID and run utilities on the individual drives that assume that the data stored on them is "logical" then by moving all this stuff around it would - in all likelihood - trash whatever was on there.

(I'll admit I've never tried doing the above so willing to be proven wrong)
 
Durzel said:
Personally I think this is a very bad idea.

RAID 0 will store data on both disks in a format that is just garbage without the necessary RAID configuration to tell the system the stripe & cluster sizes, etc. Neither drive in isolation will have any readable data on them.

If you break apart the RAID and run utilities on the individual drives that assume that the data stored on them is "logical" then by moving all this stuff around it would - in all likelihood - trash whatever was on there.

(I'll admit I've never tried doing the above so willing to be proven wrong)
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You're perfectly correct. It totally erases the data.

You need to first take an image of your OS, then run HDDerase, before restoring the image. Otherwise if you run HDDerase in isolation, then you would have to reinstall everything from scratch which would take far longer.
 
I am feeling a little similar.

6 months ago I got a 64GB Kingston Value SSD. It's made a massage difference in load times, however at the time I noticed when writing large files my computer would stutter. To counter this I moved everything thats written (Firebox cache, Outlook) to HDD.

Recently i'm getting slow down problems - it's horrible there can be a 20 seconds wait where I can't even move a mouse pointer, I can only figure there is still some files being witten to the SSD and as drive is filling up it's getting worse.

I have 8GB ram in the machine so once applications are loaded there is no swap useage. I'm starting to wonder if HDD is not better, as lock up's are doing my head in. One of my HDD's is a Samsung 1.5 TB (cost < £80), it's used for data only, but to be honest i'd be happy booting of this, at least performance would be consistant.

I think SSD is great, but they need to sort the write delay issue before it can become mainstream.

The other issue I have is i'm on Xp64 - at some point i'm going to install Win7 64. Because my SSD drive is now 'used' will putting a new OS on degrade read performance also. I don't see any trim utilities on Kingston website.
 
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JasonM said:
I am feeling a little similar.

6 months ago I got a 64GB Kingston Value SSD. It's made a massage difference in load times, however at the time I noticed when writing large files my computer would stutter. To counter this I moved everything thats written (Firebox cache, Outlook) to HDD.

Recently i'm getting slow down problems - it's horrible there can be a 20 seconds wait where I can't even move a mouse pointer, I can only figure there is still some files being witten to the SSD and as drive is filling up it's getting worse.

I have 8GB ram in the machine so once applications are loaded there is no swap useage. I'm starting to wonder if HDD is not better, as lock up's are doing my head in. One of my HDD's is a Samsung 1.5 TB (cost < £80), it's used for data only, but to be honest i'd be happy booting of this, at least performance would be consistant.

I think SSD is great, but they need to sort the write delay issue before it can become mainstream.

The other issue I have is i'm on Xp64 - at some point i'm going to install Win7 64. Because my SSD drive is now 'used' will putting a new OS on degrade read performance also. I don't see any trim utilities on Kingston website.
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I have very similar issues, not quite as long as 20 sec, but i have random lockups when watching movies every 15-20 minutes, playing games will just freeze for a few seconds... my machine isnt crammed full of crap I have no scheduled tasks running etc etc... annoys the hell outta me tbh, and i really CAN NOT be arsed erasing my HDD every few months to get the performance back... not to mention the limitations of my drives as they stand without firmware upgrades/TRIM... I see no other realistic solution.

I am fully aware i bought a "cheap" ssd, but does that mean to say I should have performance *problems* ?? yes its slower, yes its not the best on the market, but theres a difference between slow and stuttering.
 
I take it buying a SSD drive at this point in time isn`t such a good idea then, especially if the drives performance degrades after some months of usage and the performance was the main reason why you went SSD??? The reason why im asking is because im planning on finally going SSD when building my new system early next year, planning on buying a quality 250GB SSD drive but this thread has got me thinking now if I would be better off staying with conventional hard drives like Samsung SpinPoint F3 instead.

I take it higher priced SSD drives have this problem also???
 
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Durzel said:
Personally I think this is a very bad idea.

RAID 0 will store data on both disks in a format that is just garbage without the necessary RAID configuration to tell the system the stripe & cluster sizes, etc. Neither drive in isolation will have any readable data on them.

If you break apart the RAID and run utilities on the individual drives that assume that the data stored on them is "logical" then by moving all this stuff around it would - in all likelihood - trash whatever was on there.

(I'll admit I've never tried doing the above so willing to be proven wrong)
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It's fine if you take an image, when you take an image it works at the file system level, so it doesn't matter how the physical hardware is configured just as long as it has enough capacity. You can take an image from a raid array and restore it to a single drive or vice versus if you wish.

I take it buying a SSD drive at this point in time isn`t such a good idea then, especially if the drives performance degrades after some months of usage and the performance was the main reason why you went SSD??? The reason why im asking is because im planning on finally going SSD when building my new system early next year, planning on buying a quality 250GB SSD drive but this thread has got me thinking now if I would be better off staying with conventional hard drives like Samsung SpinPoint F3 instead.

I take it higher priced SSD drives have this problem also???
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Current drives - the Intels, Indilinx Barefoot, and newer Samsung PB22-J's not only suffer less in the first place, but they are all capable of restoring their performance without a reimage. Intels and Indilinx have manual TRIM utilities that are very quick to run and can be scheduled, whilst the PB22-J's will sort themselves during idle moments.


When you think about it, taking an hour or two to reimage your drives every few months isn't that bad, its similar to having to defrag your PC with mechanical drives, if a little more technically complex.
 
I`ll be spending upto no more than £600 at the most for one quality 250GB SSD drive, so do you think i should be ok as long as i ask here in this forum for suggestions before purchasing a drive???
 
Sylver123 said:
I`ll be spending upto no more than £600 at the most for one quality 250GB SSD drive, so do you think i should be ok as long as i ask here in this forum for suggestions before purchasing a drive???
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You'll be fine, though with an investment that size, i'd say wait until the next gen arrives next year - like the Micron(Crucial) c300 with SATA 6Gb/s support. Should be new Intels as well with 320GB capacity.
 
If you need 250gb, then get a Crucial M225. No real competition at that capacity for it's price.

The stuttering and degradation are issues more commonly associated with the earlier drives, particularly the JMicron controller based ones. If you choose from the drives Zarf has listed they do not suffer in the same way.
 
Hi-
Just popped into the forums to have a look and seen this one.
I have 2 x Falcon 64gb in RAID0 and use them purely for booting from.
There is nothing, not even downloads or documents on them.
This boots in 25 seconds and apps open in seconds.
I have a 1TB for my Video & 1TB for music, photos downloads etc.
I have a few video editing programs as well as photoshop & PSP that run from the Boot drives
I have 70% free at the moment and have been running these for 5 months now.
Running bench 32 HDD tester I still get 450mb/s and 300mb/s from read / write and of course, NEVER defrag them ( Although analysing them shows them to be 27% defragmented in Defraggler )
Shame I cant run TRIM as I've read that it doesn't work in RAID0.
The theory of "if it aint broke, dont fix it" applies to me at the moment.

Just thought I'd throw in my 2cents worth !
Merry Xmas all !
Foz
:)
 
That's because the Falcon is an Indilinx based drive :)

The guys with the problems are running older, slower, less well supported drives - and in the case of the JasonM a JMicron which are well known for stuttering issues - especially on the older models :( It's not to say they didn't spend a lot of money so I do empathise with them.
 
ChileanLlama said:
That's because the Falcon is an Indilinx based drive :)

The guys with the problems are running older, slower, less well supported drives - and in the case of the JasonM a JMicron which are well known for stuttering issues - especially on the older models :( It's not to say they didn't spend a lot of money so I do empathise with them.
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Is there anything that can be done to speed up the Kingston, I have looked on Kingston website and there is not firmware release or trim software.

As someone posted above, i'm happy to live with it, however in a few months i'm going to fully re-install to Windows 7. Will formatting the drive and filling everything back up again cripple the performance even more?
 
I don't know much about the JMicron drives, I've tended to avoid them.

My advice, unless you can find some better support elsewhere, would be to make sure you run HDDerase from DOS before you re-install Windows 7.

The degradation comes from when a NAND cell is written and then the content deleted, before it can be re-used it needs to be erased, in the absence of TRIM or a cleaning tool it remains in that state, so when you come along to write something, it first has to do the erase - which takes longer.

Formatting the drive won't clean used cells, so simply reinstalling is just going to make a dirty drive potentially dirtier as more cells are used (if it's not already used them all).

Edit: Just thinking, this will not cure your stuttering issues. This is inherrent within the device and I suspect needs both a new firmware (if you could find one) and extra cache memory which you won't be able to fix :(
 
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Unrar'ing 4.7GB (50mb rar's) on my seageate 7200.11 is much faster than my M225 64GB even after wiped with wiper software.

All benchmark software I tried always stated my SSD write and read twice the speed than the seagate.

I think its all down to I/O speed, SSD sucks at reading and writing at same time, like unrar'ing, install big games (read installation files then write)

But SSD is the king for loading big applications due ultra high reading speed. (No need to write anything)

Reason I got the M225 was for a laugh and love to try out the new technology, also it was cheap at MM (£85 for a week old lol)

Fairly soon I will make image of OS from SSD the dump onto seagate then sell SSD in MM

I personally think SSD is nice but not for me as I am big time usenet user, I download lot stuff from usenet daily and unrar'ing on SSD is biggest let down for me
 
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