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

james.miller · 8 Jul 2021 at 22:25

g67575 said:
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.

Are you still reading AS SSD incorrectly or were those numbers really hundreds of times larger than they should have been?

Also, shouldn't that drive still have warranty left?

EsaT · 8 Jul 2021 at 22:29

g67575 said:
Regarding the Samsung 850 Pro I found this:

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/e...o-comes-to-an-end-after-9100tb-of-writes.html

Rated for just 150 TB, but managed 9100TB before dying.

Not too shabby.

Don't take those numbers of SSD endurance tests as any ultimate truth:
None of those tests have actually tested reliability of holding data, which is the purpose of non-volatile memory.
They should have disconnected drive occasionally from power for say at least week to test actual data retention.

Pretty sure drive would have been done lot earlier, with data evaporating like water without controller able to monitor situation and do its maintenance work.
Drive manufacturers again have to think about drive staying functional for say over holiday in how long warranty and TBW they give.

g67575 · 8 Jul 2021 at 22:57

james.miller said:
Are you still reading AS SSD incorrectly or were those numbers really hundreds of times larger than they should have been?

Also, shouldn't that drive still have warranty left?

1. Those figures were correct. It read as between 0.300ms to 0.040ms on AS SSD.

You do realise that just repeatedly questioning every little thing is quite rude? I'd guess not.

2. Not in my case, didn't buy from Crucial direct, warranty might be covered by some retailers though. probably easier just to sell and switch in this case, anyway.

Disco_P · 9 Jul 2021 at 01:20

james.miller said:
Are you still reading AS SSD incorrectly or were those numbers really hundreds of times larger than they should have been?

Also, shouldn't that drive still have warranty left?

It doesn't suprise me, cacheless drives can be incredibly slow at times. This was the AS-SSD benchmark result I got after the stuttery GTA V video I posted earlier in the thread.

g67575 · 9 Jul 2021 at 08:07

I'm thinking that the read errors my BX500 was getting were caused by ineffective error correction code/ a low performance memory controller, rather than the TLC NAND cells themselves.

james.miller · 9 Jul 2021 at 16:56

Disco_P said:
It doesn't suprise me, cacheless drives can be incredibly slow at times. This was the AS-SSD benchmark result I got after the stuttery GTA V video I posted earlier in the thread.

That's 3.7ms. G67575 was saying >200ms. But regardless we know why your drive was doing that. Well, we're pretty sure we know why his drive was as well but we won't get to the bottom of it now the drive has been offloaded to some other poor sap. Hopefully it was just a faulty cable or something, because it seems weird an SSD would have a load of read errors but no reallocations? Meh, doesn't matter now.

You do realise that just repeatedly questioning every little thing is quite rude? I'd guess not.

I wouldn't have to keep asking if you just answered the first time. we would have that issue nailed days ago if you just answered me instead of taking offense and you are trying, really hard, to take offense. There's a word for that, you know, frozen things that falls from the sky?

2. Not in my case, didn't buy from Crucial direct, warranty might be covered by some retailers though.

Well, that's vague. Where did you buy it? or was it second hand? how old is it etc? I'm surprised it doesnt have some MFG warranty left on it, which would apply regardless of which retailer you bought it from. Assuming it wasn't a grey market purchase.

probably easier just to sell and switch in this case, anyway.

Well, selling a (potentially) known faulty drive is one way of dealing with a problem i guess.

g67575 · 9 Jul 2021 at 17:36

I take offense because of your manner, it's pretty simple mate. However, I apologise if I've said something thats annoyed you.

Actually, what lead me to solve the issue was looking carefully at the raw SMART data (in decimal) of the SSD, previously I had only compared the current and threshold values.

Disco_P · 9 Jul 2021 at 18:02

james.miller said:
That's 3.7ms. G67575 was saying >200ms.

Actually he quoted μs. In this situation I had read times of 3700μs and a truely awful 64 thread read time as various bits of the drive just got overwhelmed.

I honestly believe that all cacheless drives are a false economy in the face of high quality, lost cost, cached drives for not much more.

g67575 · 10 Jul 2021 at 01:22

Out of interest, does anyone have a Samsung 870 EVO SSD? These are TLC based 128 layer V-NAND devices.

I think this is what I would buy as an alternative to a 2tb 850 Pro.

g67575 · 10 Jul 2021 at 13:44

The 850 PRO 2TB arrived today (used), which is an MLC based SSD. as far as I can tell, the drive appears to be fine, apparently ~~13.15TB~~ has been written to the drive (based on Total LBAs Written - 25688670450, and a sector size of 512), which doesn't seem too high. The drive is officially rated for 450TBW.

Wear leveling is 98 out of 100. Used Reserved Block Count is 99 out of 100.

Please let me know what you think of the SMART statistics (the drive is connected via an external enclosure), as follows:

I will run some tests to see if the error count increases when reading / writing to the drive.

EDIT - Samsung's software reports 12TB written to the drive.

g67575 · 11 Jul 2021 at 00:20

I ran AS SSD and enabled Samsung's Rapid mode (uses system RAM as a cache for the drive) and the sequential write speed was 7GBPS!

I tested copying a Windows 10 ISO file (from folder A to folder B on the drive), and the transfer speed was 400-500 hundred MBs per second. So, maybe these kind of speeds are only possible in benchmarks?

If so, is Rapid Mode something that most leave enabled, or not?

EsaT · 11 Jul 2021 at 12:39

With 16GB of RAM wouldn't waste it for some write caching.
Normal use including gaming is heavily read focused and some write caching only means Windows having less cache for the most recently read stuff.

TheVoice · 11 Jul 2021 at 13:35

Not sure I'd have replaced a faulty drive with another fairly well-used one, but it looks like it should solve your problem.

As above, let your RAM be RAM.

g67575 · 11 Jul 2021 at 14:07

TheVoice said:
Not sure I'd have replaced a faulty drive with another fairly well-used one, but it looks like it should solve your problem.

As above, let your RAM be RAM.

Ok, will do.

The drive seems good so far, no additional errors after writing 600GB of data (nearly all games, drive is compressed) to it, no freezes during gameplay, good performance.

I wish I had a faster internet connection (only got 50mbps FTTC) to install /download faster, but we can't have everything

. Should get FTTP (Openreach) by 2026 at this rate... Still no idea how the 5G rollout is going in most towns.

Disco_P · 11 Jul 2021 at 17:10

g67575 said:
Ok, will do.

The drive seems good so far, no additional errors after writing 600GB of data (nearly all games, drive is compressed) to it, no freezes during gameplay, good performance.

I wish I had a faster internet connection (only got 50mbps FTTC) to install /download faster, but we can't have everything . Should get FTTP (Openreach) by 2026 at this rate... Still no idea how the 5G rollout is going in most towns.

I've gotta ask the reason behind using compression? Surely you're just gonna get worse performance?

g67575 · 11 Jul 2021 at 17:54

Improved capacity, with only a very small effect on CPU utilization when the drive is in use. Unless I've been misinformed.