Unacceptable Performance Degradation in Firecuda 530?

[philo-sofa]

Dear chaps and chapettes. I bought a Firecuda 530 4TB a while back and its write performance in has gone to hell in synthetic benchmarks, along with IRL read performance. First noticed something was wrong when imaging 1TB from the drive took 12 hours.

Firecuda 530 in DiskMark:

Firecuda 530 in HDTach (average read 571 MB/s?):

Compared with the SN850X I bought to back it up (which is about where the 530 should be according to reviews):

My thoughts:

1. It's weird that CrystalDiskMark says read is fine (although HD Tach says read is abnormally low) when in practice reading 1TB from the drive to the WD took half a day
2. The random access being 0.4ms seems very high for an SSD (would expect 0.1 ms)
3. My system is noticeably snappier with the SN850X as its main drive.
4. Seagate's TRIM is on and I've manually trimmed it too, but nothing changes
5. The Seagate is apparently healthy according to SMART and Seagate's tools
6. Something seems to be wrong with the Seagate

I don't think the WD drive can be to blame. Am intending to wipe the Firecuda 530 as a last test and if nothing changes will RMA'ing it. Any thoughts; anything I'm missing?

 

[philo-sofa]

How full is the drive? Is Bitlocker enabled on it? How hot is it running? (You didn't forget to remove the peel on it before you fitted it under the heatsink did you?)

Originally 2TB of usage. I pared it down to 1TB to get the imaging to half a day, but it had no effect on the speeds you see above. Max temp under testing for the Seagate is 60 degrees. The SN 850X actually runs hotter; topping out at 72 under CrystalDiskMark.

No peels on barring the sticker with the brand, model & serial number etc AFAIK those are mini heat transfer pads and are designed to be left on.

 

[philo-sofa]

Doesn’t seagate have their own tool like Samsung magician you can run on it? If it does I would run a diagnostic on that drive. Generally when I have had significantly low write speeds in the past it was down to the controller chip getting very hot.

I ran Seatools, no issues and it said the health of the drive was good. No specific section on the controller temp tho, but it was well cooled.

p.s. Laaaaaaaaaaanmaaaaaaaaaaaa!.. Danger Zone!

 

[philo-sofa]

If you click on settings in CrystalDiskMark and select NVME SSD.

Have you tried reseating the drive?


Think Meddling-Monk meant the thermal pad on the heatsink (if you are using one) may have a sticker that needs peeling off.

Thanks for the info. I've tried NVME and default, I've reseated the drive, even tried the second slot, no change. No stickers on the thermal pads sadly, no.

 

[philo-sofa]

Merry Xmas.

Is there a firmware update for the drive.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Seagate/comments/1gcaieq/help_understandingfixing_very_low_write_speeds_on/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Seagate/comments/1feu3ik/any_suggestions_on_how_to_get_seagate_to_offer_an/

Merry Christmas @freddie64 @Meddling-Monk, @ZXSpectrum and all!

Very interesting mate, thank you! It's shocking Seagate has had this known problem for so long and not fixed it; the latest firmware from Feb 2023 still has the problem. Stories of people's drives just dying after slowing down has me quite spooked; I'll wipe the Firecuda and RMA it.

I've just completed a back up to a platter drive (3x faster to run than Firecuda ==> WD!) and now have the SN850X as my main drive plus a recent backup. Sorted.

Cheers again and have a very Merry Christmas!