SSD's Dying a slow death :(

Buchanan0204

Buchanan0204

Buchanan0204

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Went from this a couple of months ago.

benchresults.jpg



To This!

ssd.jpg



Can anyone explain why this has happened. I read of this happening a while ago, but thought Windows 7 and trim etc sorted all this out.

The drives in Question are the Vertex 2E from OCZ. Raid0 array

Any one any ideas?
 
Well for a start if they're in RAID 0 they won't be getting TRIM commands. Have you been leaving the drives idle for a few hours a week to let them recover? If not, you need to start doing this. I'd leave it on for at least a day completely idle (login screen is a good idea) and see what happens. Also remember that benchmarks degrade performance so don't do too many.

The "quick fix" of course is to image your drives, do a secure erase, then restore the image. If you do this though, make sure you take a "disk image" not a "partition image" because you want the partition offset to remain in-tact.
 
I've had a similar issue which I've just noticed with my Crucial C300, looks like the write speed went from a modest 75.9mb/s to something like 29.5mb/s, really concerning me. Myb read speeds have dropped slightly which isn't concerning however but the write speeds are terrible now.

Think I may drop crucial an email on the issue, really worried me when I seen that :(
 
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Problem solved. After hours of reading and a little thinking, I got it resolved. Broke the raid0 array, updated the firmware on both drives to the latest. Then used HDD erase 3.3 to secure erase the drives. Re created the raid0 and installed.

Now back to original performance.

Cheers for the advice. If anyone else is struggling or got the same issue's ask me and I will help if I can. The methods were by no means straight forward.
 
Buchanan0204 said:
Problem solved. After hours of reading and a little thinking, I got it resolved. Broke the raid0 array, updated the firmware on both drives to the latest. Then used HDD erase 3.3 to secure erase the drives. Re created the raid0 and installed.

Now back to original performance.

Cheers for the advice. If anyone else is struggling or got the same issue's ask me and I will help if I can. The methods were by no means straight forward.
Click to expand...

Sorted my issues out too mate.

Lets just say I wasn't fully aware of how SSD performance degraded when writing data onto them :eek:

Anyways I used HDDErase 4.0 and now back to superb performance.

Main thing I noticed was when the other hard drive was accessed i.e for steam etc when I went to lock my computer it would take an age to show up.

At least I know how this works now :)
 
Are they all running the latest firmware?
You must have been really hammering them and filled them up to the brim to put them in that state - Vertex Garbage Collection is usually pretty good. The rough guide is that they need to be allowed to idle an equal amount of time to that spent in heavy use.

If you've been using them normally and they are on the latest firmware, id say you have a dodgy drive on your hands. Take a backup image, break the array, secure erase and rebuild/reimage.
 
Andrew Moore said:
Had similar issues with 4 drives in raid0 becoming slower than a single drive.. as such I now use all 4 drives on their own with TRIM doing its wonders. not ideal but id rather have reliable performance than performance that degrades as bad as that.
Click to expand...
Exactly.

I don't think people realise that TRIM/garbage collection is a process that is essential to maintain performance on SSDs, and sticking them in RAID0 will mean they can't work with TRIM unless the RAID controller/driver supports it.

As I understand it only Intel have implemented this - for their own motherboards, and their own brand SSDs.
 
having had an intel X25 80GB drive i realised how important trim is, but that went with my last pc, now have adel XPS17 laptop

and have been looking at the OCZ ssd's thought id post incase anyonwe else is reading this looking at buying an ssd,

i have not thoroughly looked into it but looks like the new ocz vertex 3 sandforce drives have there own onbaord garbage collection thingy, and hence trim not required as such, so using in riad 0 may work etc

im certainly gonna wait, a month or two as i suspect must ssd manufacturers will follow this route:D
 
Durzel said:
Exactly.

I don't think people realise that TRIM/garbage collection is a process that is essential to maintain performance on SSDs, and sticking them in RAID0 will mean they can't work with TRIM unless the RAID controller/driver supports it.

As I understand it only Intel have implemented this - for their own motherboards, and their own brand SSDs.
Click to expand...

The latest Intel Drivers still don't pass through TRIM. The performance increase came from them increasing the System RAM cache.

I'm yet to see significant performance degradation with my array. In a used state after a few months, and around 80% full, performance of the array (as measured by AS-SSD score) is only around 10% less than when freshly secure-erased and only around 15% full.
It still benches much better than a single disk, and any performance change certainly isn't noticeable in real life.
 
DragonQ said:
Well for a start if they're in RAID 0 they won't be getting TRIM commands. Have you been leaving the drives idle for a few hours a week to let them recover? If not, you need to start doing this. I'd leave it on for at least a day completely idle (login screen is a good idea) and see what happens. Also remember that benchmarks degrade performance so don't do too many.

The "quick fix" of course is to image your drives, do a secure erase, then restore the image. If you do this though, make sure you take a "disk image" not a "partition image" because you want the partition offset to remain in-tact.
Click to expand...

What software is best to image my drive?
 
Is Trim support almost a definite need with a SSD? SSD's seem to still be fairly enthusiast grade hardware that need a little more maintenance then the average joe is willing to give it.
 
Zarf said:
The latest Intel Drivers still don't pass through TRIM. The performance increase came from them increasing the System RAM cache.

I'm yet to see significant performance degradation with my array. In a used state after a few months, and around 80% full, performance of the array (as measured by AS-SSD score) is only around 10% less than when freshly secure-erased and only around 15% full.
It still benches much better than a single disk, and any performance change certainly isn't noticeable in real life.
Click to expand...

You sure? I was under the impression that the new Intel Raid drivers support Trim?
 
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