Eratic performance from C300 64GB SSD

[Unknown-One]

Any ideas what might be causing this horrendous performance graph? The drive in question is a Crucial C300 (64gb version) with firmware revision 006

The blue line should be completely flat, hovering around the 355 MB/s mark. As you can see, it's pretty far from that...

Drive is plugged into a SATA 3 port on a Z68 motherboard in AHCI mode, so that's all fine...



Edit: I ran the test a second time to make sure nothing was accessing the drive... the graph looks almost identical. Not sure where to start troubleshooting, here...

 

[Unknown-One]

Bit of a bump:

I've updated the firmware to 007 and then went ahead and force-TRIMed the drive to make sure it's squeaky clean. No change in performance

 

[extide]

Is there data on there? You will probably need to move the data off, then do a secure erase, and then put it back on.

 

[Unknown-One]

There's data on there, yeah (it's my boot drive in this machine).

I haven't done anything special to put it in this state, just normal day-to-day usage. Even if moving the data off and doing a secure-erase did fix it, wouldn't the problem just come back again in a few months? Seems fairly pointless to keep this SSD, if that's the case...

 

[extide]

All SSD's degrade over time like that. Some are better than others, however their main advantage (near zero seek times) remains even if sequential transfer speeds slow down.

I have a 128GB C300 in my laptop and just for shits and giggles I ran that same bench on it and I am getting less performance than you however it is much more consistent. (~170-200MB/sec).It's still better than a platter drive.

As new SSD's come out in the future I would expect this specific issue to be where much of the improvements come. We already have plenty fast sequential speeds, we just need to improve the performance degradation over time.

 

[Unknown-One]

Alright, I went ahead and made an image of the drive, secure-erased the SSD, then wrote the image back to the drive.

HD Tune results are still identical to what they were before... Is the drive now permanently going to run at ~200 MB/s rather than its rated 355 MB/s?

I also notice Windows Experience Index now rates the drive at 5.9 when it originally scored 7.9. I know WEI isn't great as a benchmark, but that does show a massive drop in relative performance. I'm considering a warranty replacement at this point...

 

[Old Hippie]

Any ideas what might be causing this horrendous performance graph?

Nope, but since you have nothing to compare it with when the drive was new it may not have changed.

I also notice Windows Experience Index now rates the drive at 5.9 when it originally scored 7.9.

I don't know anything about it.

It still looks like something is accessing the drive.

 

[Unknown-One]

Nope, but since you have nothing to compare it with when the drive was new it may not have changed.

I have another PC with a C300 series SSD that has a nice flat line at ~350 MB/s, which is exactly what I expect from an SSD. The newer M4 series SSDs produce the same thing. Flat line in HD-Tune around 500 MB/s.

Can't figure out why this one is so weird...

It still looks like something is accessing the drive.

Drive access wouldn't produce a near-identical graph every single time the test is run, though...

 

[ob1]

Yeah, I agree with hippie here, it looks like something might be accessing the drive. I know a clean install doesn't sound like something you want to do, but it might be necessary, unless you can go through and try to turn off services, AV, stuff like that one at a time and see if it changes anything.

 

[Old Hippie]

I have another PC with a C300 series SSD that has a nice flat line at ~350 MB/s, which is exactly what I expect from an SSD.

I'd be swapping them to see if there's a difference.

 

[tangoseal]

HD tune is NOT tuned for SSDs period. I have heard they might release something but I dont know.

Use something else like ASSSD. End of discussion.

 

[Unknown-One]

I'd be swapping them to see if there's a difference.

There's a pretty obvious difference in speed between this C300 and the one that's operating normally. It's apparent in everyday usage, booting the system, launching apps, etc.

I was having weird performance issues with Firefox, so I moved my Firefox profile folder off the SSD and onto a Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB hard disk. Performance issues went away.

If it can't even handle Firefox as well as a hard disk, I'd say it seems pretty obvious that something isn't right with this C300...

HD tune is NOT tuned for SSDs period. I have heard they might release something but I dont know.

Use something else like ASSSD. End of discussion.

It's not tuned for SSD's, but it is internally consistent. Consider the following:

- Two SSD's that are operating normally and delivering expected performance produce an almost perfectly flat line at the rated speed of the drive.
- One SSD that is not delivering expected performance produces a line that hovers around ~200 MB/s (well below the rated speed of the drive) with a few brief spikes up to ~350 MB/s.

One of these things is not like the others...

Going to call up Crucial today, see what they say. I was just hoping someone here had experienced this with an SSD before and had some kind of solution...

 

[Old Hippie]

I was having weird performance issues with Firefox, so I moved my Firefox profile folder off the SSD and onto a Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB hard disk. Performance issues went away.

I'd say it seems pretty obvious that something isn't right with this C300...

I'd say you're correct.

Hopefully Crucial will help ya out.

Good Luck!