I found out what was freezing Watch Dogs: Legion (can see it in task manager)

I'm trying a tweak that preloads more system RAM into 'Standby' when loading into the game world, it now looks like this:

Standby-RAM.jpg
 
I think I've tracked down the problem now, the SSD (about a year old) has over 1,000,000 read errors according to the smart data:

smart-data.jpg


Not a lot I can do about this except try sanitising the drive (which apparently works in some cases). The read errors increase each time I run the AS SSD read tests. What's interesting is, this is apparently still considered well within the threshold for the drive.

Enabling Crucial's Momentum Cache only seems to increase the error rate.

The read access time of the SSD was reduced to a more typical ~0.145 microseconds, just by switching the SATA AHCI controller to the 'Standard SATA AHCI Controller' Driver that comes with Windows 10.

I recently brought an external 250GB SSD (for backups) with no read errors that I could copy the game onto later, hopefully that will be fine.
 
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g67575 said:
Not a lot I can do about this except try sanitising the drive (which apparently works in some cases).
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Waste of time trying to do anything else than replace drive.
It could die any moment and it certainly won't stop making those errors.

Also basing on its lousy write speed after running out of SLC cache it could be QLC drive and might be suffering from similar what Samsung's planar TLC drives 840/840 Evo had:
Because of minimal charge degradation tolerance, data in cells starts evaporating after enough time from writing.
And that causes bit/cell level errors causing error correction to work over time.
Those Samsungs also started slowing down from that.

Samsung "fixed" that by firmware update making controller refresh data periodically by rewriting it.
And while not actually doing anything usefull with SSDs, that defragging forced drive to rewrite data it "defragged".
That would lower number of cell read errors returning read speed back toward original.
But at the same time those writes wear down cells more making charge degradation faster.
 
EsaT said:
it could be QLC drive and might be suffering from similar what Samsung's planar TLC drives 840/840 Evo had:
Because of minimal charge degradation tolerance, data in cells starts evaporating after enough time from writing.
And that causes bit/cell level errors causing error correction to work over time.
Those Samsungs also started slowing down from that.

Samsung "fixed" that by firmware update making controller refresh data periodically by rewriting it.
And while not actually doing anything usefull with SSDs, that defragging forced drive to rewrite data it "defragged".
That would lower number of cell read errors returning read speed back toward original.
But at the same time those writes wear down cells more making charge degradation faster.
Click to expand...

Really interesting if caused by the same problem, thankyou. Might as well do an intensive defrag at this point, to see if that helps! Drive still has est. 99% wear levelling count, so worth a try. I think I will stick to MLC (2 bits per cell) drives in the future, if these can still be had for reasonable money, this is what my Crucial 240GB OS drive has and its been good for about 5 years.

Does anyone know of any software that will completely defrag a drive? most only do a partial defrag of files.

For the record, I switched to a fairly new + cheap 500gb Lexar SSD drive with no read errors and it handles the game perfectly, note that it has no DRAM (and is problem free), so this was totally crap advice from certain ppl!
 
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g67575 said:
Might stick to MLC (2 bits per cell) drives in the future, if these can still be had for reasonable money, this is what my Crucial 240GB OS drive has and its been good for about 5 years.


For the record, I switched to a fairly new + cheap 500gb Lexar SSD drive with no read errors and it handles the game perfectly, note that it has no DRAM (and is problem free), so this was totally crap advice from some certain ppl!
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There haven't been MLC drives available on consumer markets in years.
Or if there are, those are super expensive.
Anyway 3D NAND with vertically stacked layers of transistors makes TLC basically comparable to tiny transistor planar (single layer) MLC.
Just have to stick to known good TLC drives, like MX500 from Crucial.


DRAM has little effect to normal home use read focused work loads.
No drive has big enough DRAM to cache much of even smaller game and read performance depends lot more on performance of controller and NAND.
Heck, Windows can cache lot more stuff into unused RAM!
Where DRAM helps is high IOPS write and mixed work loads.
But anyway DRAMless drive is still lower level product than DRAM equipped drive and that should always show in price.
 
EsaT said:
There haven't been MLC drives available on consumer markets in years.
Or if there are, those are super expensive.
Anyway 3D NAND with vertically stacked layers of transistors makes TLC basically comparable to tiny transistor planar (single layer) MLC.
Just have to stick to known good TLC drives, like MX500 from Crucial.


DRAM has little effect to normal home use read focused work loads.
No drive has big enough DRAM to cache much of even smaller game and read performance depends lot more on performance of controller and NAND.
Heck, Windows can cache lot more stuff into unused RAM!
Where DRAM helps is high IOPS write and mixed work loads.
But anyway DRAMless drive is still lower level product than DRAM equipped drive and that should always show in price.
Click to expand...

So, 3D NAND + TLC = generally fine? But avoid single layer TLC?
 
g67575 said:
So, 3D NAND + TLC = generally fine? But avoid single layer TLC?
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Yep.
But you won't find planar TLC or likely any kind planar NAND from any drive in sale...
For a cost reason:
Every square millimeter of silicon wafer costs and planar NAND simply has lot less storage capacity per area compared to 3D NAND with 100, or even more layers stacked on that silicon.
 
TheVoice said:
You don't need to defragment SSDs, and doing so puts significant strain on the drive and can leads to the kinds of errors and performance issues you're seeing.
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@james.miller already explained this on the second page, there's so much misinformation in this thread now it's probably best to just let them get on with it. :)
 
I'm gonna try to swap the drive anyway, probably go for a Samsung 860 Pro 2TB (it has 64-layer 2bit MLC V-NAND memory). Another option is the Crucial MX500, I'm sure either would be good.

Any thoughts about the Crucial MX500 2TB? Is this the most reliable TLC 3D NAND drive?
 
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g67575 said:
I'm gonna try to swap the drive at a certain shop anyway, probably go for a Samsung 860 Pro 2TB (it has 64-layer 2bit MLC V-NAND memory). Another option is the Crucial MX500, I'm sure either would be good.

EDIT - S*** I've just noticed that it's out of stock.

Any thoughts about the Crucial MX500 2TB? Is this the most reliable TLC 3D NAND drive?
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MX500 is a quality drive, I replaced my cacheless drive with it and all the problems disappeared.
 
How about for sustained read / write speed? Any problem there?

I think I'm leaning towards the Samsung 850 Pro, which is another MLC drive.
 
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g67575 said:
How about for sustained read / write speed? Any problem there?
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I just copied 126 1GB files to and from my two thirds full 1TB MX500, both ways the speeds were about 450-500MB/s for the whole test. I am actually a little surprised that it managed the write test without running out of SLC cache but I reckon it just managed it as the free space was just a little over 3x larger than the test size. It also has a DRAM cache so no need to wait for a first read to find where data is stored before doing a second read to get the data.

5 year warranty too.
 
I still use a pair of Samsung 830 drives from 2012, one has been an OS drive, the other has been used for games/a scratch disk/recording etc and neither have hit 50TBW.

I've no doubt the pure MLC Samsungs are still very good but no longer think they are worth the extra cost. Even the fastest consumer ssd samsung make, the 980 pro, is TLC.
 
One thing I noticed about the BX500, is that after I formatted the drive, the read access time shown in AS SSD reduced from 150-300 microseconds to just 40 microseconds (but the read errors appeared to be occurring at a similar rate). I wonder if this is common for all SSDs?

I assume the longer read access times are due to the drive having a lot more files to search through, when it's full / near full.
 
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Disco_P said:
I just copied 126 1GB files to and from my two thirds full 1TB MX500, both ways the speeds were about 450-500MB/s for the whole test. I am actually a little surprised that it managed the write test without running out of SLC cache but I reckon it just managed it as the free space was just a little over 3x larger than the test size.
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It run out of SLC cache.
But proper quality TLC doesn't suffer any notable write speed collapse and is always faster than HDD:
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/crucial-mx500-1-tb/6.html
 
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