Huge issues with SSD's and my needs.

Interested in this as a fellow arch student who does too many renders, what school?
 
Kinda sad.

This looks like the Gen1 SSDs when GC couldn't keep up with the writing demands.

Looks like you'll need more drive space to continue with Samsung drives.

The Secure Erase thing is another baffling matter.

I'd be trying a different brand. :)
 
That's pretty much the conclusion I came to. I was this close to getting a Crucial M4 but decided to hold off just because I read that their drives have a far greater performance over time degradation than Samsung's 830 (read that from anandtech). Intel unfortunately is still out of my price range due to the amount of space I need, still can't justify 500 dollars for a 256gb drive, and after what I've discovered the past few weeks, no drive out there can ultimately meet the demands of the type of work load I do.

On a different note, since I have a 390.00 store credit and it's good through 90 days, are there any future drives coming out in that time that I might want to consider? That's probably what I am looking at doing for now....
 
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The only other drive coming short term is intel 520, but this is a sanforce based drive, it was suppose to come in november... but intel delayed it, my guess is they are working out the firmware well to not release it with the issues that ssd like vertex 3 had. But i would probably not bet on it either, its most likely going to be 25nm flash nad, i still think the intel 510 with 32nm nad is your best bet, even though its out of your reach in budget, and even then might not be good enough of usage you have, maybe wait for the next gen of ssds and get the biggest you can and overprovision 30-40% of the drive.
 
Been following up on this thread since they've been actively discussing the Samsung 830 issue which resonates with mine. Anyways, one of them members had a theory as to the problem:


The relocation event ties in exactly with an increase in write speed. The relocation occurred during idle time following the Windows update. I thought the increase was due to the idle time, but the drive has still maintained faster speeds a day later. I therefore suspect that both read and write speeds will be impacted before the sectors get relocated, and I would guess that this is exactly what caused Christopher’s drive to slow down.

Could someone elaborate further what he means by that, since it got a bit too technical for me to understand.
 
Appologize for bringing up this old thread again, but since I got a replacement drive 2½ months ago my Samsung 830 had been running just fine till this weekend upon booting up my drive the same performance endurance has dropped big time all over again, where bootups are taking 2 minutes to load into the login screen and every program installed on my SSD drive takes longer to open than a normal hard drive does.

As you can see from this thread, I've done everything imaginable to try and find a way to diagnose the issue ranging from:

disabling pagefetch
making sure to enable AHCI
trim is enabled.
disabled hibernation
turned off pagefile
disabling the defragmenter
putting movies and games on the second hard drive to limit the read/writes done on ssd
leaving my computer idle 10 hours a week to allow garbage collection
secure erasing and installing a fresh copy
updated to latest firmware
disabled system restore
disabling prefetch and superfetch

Believe me when I said I've done my research in terms of finding a solution and trying to find anyone who's had similar problems as me, but I'm pretty much the only guy who's had this kind of bad luck with my Samsung 830. Because this is already my 2nd SSD since December I'm weary of having to replace it with another drive through Samsung, plus the limited 30 day warranty through Newegg expired long ago. If there is anyone else who has any suggestions, I'll be grateful for any insight you can give me, thanks....
 
I suspect disabling pagefile may have something to do with the slowness, set a fix size of 2048 and maximum of 4096, over provisioning 10% or whatever magician recommended, and give the drive another try, you have nothing else to lose at this point to give it another go.
 
Thanks Ben,

I forgot to mention I did both of those options as well on my first drive. And during that time my drive only lasted 3 weeks. But don't feel too discouraged at any more suggestions you might have. I'll take anything at this point...
 
Ski --
Just out of curiosity, are you running CXM01B1QFW? Could you post some screen shots? I know the OP was from December, but I missed it then. That the replacement drive is doing something similar -- well, I think your workload is just write heavy, but the 830 is really good at GC. I think I may know exactly what is wrong, but I'd need to see some shots of the SMART data to confirm.

Could you post some screen shots?
 
You've barely used that drive -- there are about 1911GB of host writes on it, and it only took 13 PE cycles to get there -- one for every ~147GB written.

I was expecting to see something totally different.

Are your read speeds affected? Your drive should always have similar read performance to new, give or take a few percent.
 
Yea read speeds are just as bad as my writes, it's frustrating too because my toshiba which is on my secondary slot all the stuff I open up from there loads faster than my ssd, kinda funny actually.

And this is my whole point, I still haven't even exhausted this drive at all and I'm getting these problems.
 
Ski said:
Yea read speeds are just as bad as my writes, it's frustrating too because my toshiba which is on my secondary slot all the stuff I open up from there loads faster than my ssd, kinda funny actually.

And this is my whole point, I still haven't even exhausted this drive at all and I'm getting these problems.
Click to expand...

Do you have any benches to illustrate this?
 
Any particular benches you would like for me to use? I'm not familiar with the most standard ones but I can download them, lemme know
 
Just a quick one with CrystalDiskMark should be fine. It's free and easy to use.
 
Yes, but that was the first drive, right? Can you bench the one you're using now?
 
As you can see they're even lower than my previous one.

 
Wow. That is what I was expecting to see. And you've tried secure erasing the drive? And it's still that slow?

TBH, I wasn't expecting your 4Ks to as bad. I had this happen to one drive, which is why I was curious.

You're using a Toshiba SSD in another bay?
 
Yea I wasn't joking when I said my old hard drive was performing faster than my Samsung. And no, I'm using my regular Toshiba 5400rpm drive in my second bay for my larger programs, movies, games, and mp3's.

I kinda knew it was pretty fruitless in figuring out what caused my speeds to drop so dramatically, and there hasn't really been a precedent before me to explain what's going on. So I just put in an RMA request since it's still under the manufacturer warranty. However, I know 3-4 weeks maybe months down the road I'm gonna experience this same problem all over again, so uncovering the problem now would help me prevent it from happening further.
 
What is going on is not normal. I know this, because this happened to a drive over at XtremeSystems.org. It's not performance degradation ; it's something that can't be fixed with any secure erase.

To be honest, it shouldn't have happened twice. I've been trying to replicate this problem for months now, and without much luck.
 
Well I can say that I'm one of the few people out there who mess with 3d modelling programs such as 3ds max and rhino, along with rendering with takes hours to finish, so there's times where my drive has very little time for TRIM to kick in, so it's possible that attributed to the problem. But as I said before, not very many people that I've encountered have an SSD and are a 3D modeller.

Also, I don't know if this helps or not, but I remember the first time my drive failed on me it occurred after I forgot to plug in my A/C to my battery and a power failure happened, because my laptop is already 5 years old, the lithium charge degraded over time. So unless I keep my A/C constantly plugged in to my laptop, the battery dies within 2-4 minutes max. After that happened when I replugged the cord and powered up my system, that's when it started. I can't say that's exactly what caused the first drive to become defective, but it's possible that some sort of power failure did something to the drive. Who knows, I'm only speculating of course.

Btw, I appreciate all your input you have given me so far, so keep them coming. Regarding the part where you referred to something similar happen on the xtremesystem forums, I was wondering if you could provide the link to that topic, thanx..........
 
Actually, XS did some reorganizing, and I can't seem to find the thread anymore. But I'll PM you some info.
 
Ski said:
As you can see they're even lower than my previous one.

Click to expand...

That is a bizarre result.

Looks like a hard drive until you read the 4K QD64 result :confused:

I've not read the whole thread - I understand you have tried 2 830's? Have you tried other SSDs?
 
msitpro said:
That is a bizarre result.

Looks like a hard drive until you read the 4K QD64 result :confused:

I've not read the whole thread - I understand you have tried 2 830's? Have you tried other SSDs?
Click to expand...

Yea this is my 2nd 830, and unfortunately at this time the 30 day return policy from Newegg expired months ago, so I'm left with just the manufacturers warranty and am already in the process of RMA'ing it. Additionally, the price of the 830 has come down to the point where selling it wouldn't allow me to break even enough to get an intel 520 which is finally at $370. I'm just super broke these days to the point where I can barely spare 20 bucks for anything anymore.
 
Ski said:
Also, I don't know if this helps or not, but I remember the first time my drive failed on me it occurred after I forgot to plug in my A/C to my battery and a power failure happened, because my laptop is already 5 years old, the lithium charge degraded over time. So unless I keep my A/C constantly plugged in to my laptop, the battery dies within 2-4 minutes max. After that happened when I replugged the cord and powered up my system, that's when it started. I can't say that's exactly what caused the first drive to become defective, but it's possible that some sort of power failure did something to the drive. Who knows, I'm only speculating of course.
Click to expand...
Totally random, did your machine ever actually perform well w/the Samsung 830? As I posted at http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...ml+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a (as cwerdna, not sure what happened to the original threadd, when I put my Samsung 830 128 gig into my Lenovo T61p, I pretty early on ran into these weird pauses w/the drive light being on solid.
Side note: I ran into weird intermittent (entire system) pauses w/the HDD light on solid when I installed the Samsung 830 in my Lenovo T61p, accompanied by "Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period." in my event log.

Turns out I ran into the problem described at http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-S...eze-ups-in-Windows-7-solved-for-me/td-p/38766

The latest Install RST drivers refused to install, so I ended up editing my registry as described there for port0. It seems that did the trick. I haven't hit any pauses nor iastor0 timeouts after using my machine for a few hours.
__________________
Thinkpad T61p, 2.2 ghz C2D T7500, Samsung 830 128 gb SSD, Quadro 570M video, 3 gigs of RAM,
Click to expand...
Are you seeing anything in your event log like the above? Your HP machine might be of similar vintage to my T61p.

How much data has been written to the problem drive? You can find out w/tools like http://ssd-life.com/eng/download-ssdlife.html.

Did you overprovision your drive so that there's unallocated space? In other words, did you leave space not allocated to any partition? Samsung recommends 7-10% OP...

Regarding your battery, the Power Manager utility that Lenovo Thinkpads (and a more primitive version that seems to come on many/all of their consumer notebooks now) helps with keeping the battery from being killed. See http://web.archive.org/web/20100828085633/http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=52. Too bad all the images are dead now. I bought my T61p in late August/early September 07. I'm still on the original battery and it's fine. I can still run it off the original battery for >3 hours, which I did <2 months ago. It's because I have it set to usually only charge if down to 35% and only charge up to 65% instead of continually topping off.

This is why I prefer Lenovos now.
 
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How common is this problem? I have two 256gb Samsung 830's arriving today. I plan to put them in my main work machine. I went with 830's because everyone said they were the most reliable after Intel. I can't have my work box crapping out on me all the time...
 
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Sorry to drudge up this old thread, but hopefully helps clarify some things for some...

Hopefully some of you guys remember my past issues regarding the Samsung 830 SSD and the huge performance drop over time.

Well this being my 3rd drive and lasting longer than the previous 2, it was a matter of time before this problem was bound to happen again, and it did. But this time I have a theory that it's the HDX 9494NR Dragon laptop as the root cause of the problem and not the SSD. I believe it's my battery or something to do with the power regulation going on with the system, but you guys decide.

Earlier last night I hooked up my laptop to the TV in the other room, so I had put the computer to sleep before moving it. Hooked everything up and and worked fine. When I was done I turned off the system instead of putting it to sleep, and when I came back to my room and replugged everything back in, I got the dreaded 2 minute boot issue, so I knew the SSD was failing.

My battery lost it's charge almost 2 years ago, so I've been forced to plug it in the A/C 24/7 otherwise the the battery will die in 3 minutes. I'm no expert on electricity but is it possible that there's some sort of short occurring or power fluctuation that's the root cause? Thinking about it more I'm starting to recollect that in the past I did something similar by unplugging and re-plugging the A/C at random times, however the SSD never failed, so something was going on different which I couldn't figure out. Since I've have this 3rd SSD I've maybe unplugged it like 3-4 times in 4 months, however I don't know what happened this time that was different in the past. But at least I know exactly what I did in the last moment before SSD failed on me.

As you may not probably know, I'm currently using the Nvidia Geforce 8800m gpu with the latest 301.42 driver installed. A little over a year ago, anyone with this gpu on this laptop couldn't use any drivers past the197.XX series because it was causing lockups and BSOD's. Someone later discovered that the issue was related to the voltage fluctuation causing the crashes.

To counter this problem all of us HDX dragon owners use this program called "NVidia PowerMizer Manager" which disables/enables the powermizer features on the graphics card thereby allowing us to use any of the latest Nvidia drivers. This program not only fixes the voltage issue but it also allows you to over/under clock the gpu to specific clocks depending on the needs at the time. Whenever I'm switching to low, med, or max performance I shift+click apply the settings so that I won't have to reload the drivers by rebooting the laptop, sort of like a quick flash. Another thing to note" whenever I'm switching from low or med to the max settings the voltage goes from .9 volts to 1.0 volts. this is by default because you can't run max settings without upping the voltage to 1.0. Whereas in low or med settings the voltage runs at .9 volts for each. Here's a pic for some clarity.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/51608894/powermizer.jpg

All of what I'm saying is normal, and I've been doing this for a long time, but here's the problem with all this which I just now noticed. In the powermizer options below the AC adapter tab I'm constantly going changing from low, med, or max all the time to conserve on power and lower the temps and everything is fine. But each and every single time I change the settings I always have to shit+click to apply the settings otherwise the computer needs to reboot because of the voltage which I previously mentioned, especially when switching max settings.

Now here's the kicker, upon looking at what my settings were at the time after the SSD failure, the AC tab was set to max and the battery was set to "medium". When I first moved my laptop to the TV I put the computer on sleep before unplugging everything, and hooked everything back up and started it just fine with zero problems. When I was finished I shut down the computer instead of putting it to sleep. My settings at this time were at AC - maximum and Battery - Medium. And like an idiot I forgot to plug in the AC to the laptop when I booted it, so this is when the system detected it running on battery so it must of tried reloading to medium settings during this point. It was only then 3 minutes later when my computer messaged me my battery was at 1% that I noticed the AC wasn't plugged in. This got me thinking that because I didn't have the powermizer for both settings at maximum that this may have caused the power irregularity during the boot process by going from Max to Medium and caused my Samsung to suddenly perform like shit.

Unfortunately I'll never be able to figure out if the powermizer manager program or the dead charge on my old battery is the root cause. But I do know now that I've narrowed it down to something going on with the AC. And I can also say this is exactly what happened the last time too with my 1st and 2nd SSD, I was just too focused on everything else to actually think about the AC as the problem. My question to you guys who are familiar with this kinda area, is if it's possible for the AC, battery, or powermizer manager have some sort of relationship with the SSD?
 
Bad power can manifest itself as almost anything in a system. 3 fried SSDs in somewhat rapid succession (in the grand scheme of things) would lead me to believe it is a bad power regulator feeding your SATA port(s). Most laptop adapters are from 15-20 vdc, then the onboard power circuitry brings it down to 5vdc for the SATA ports. At least to test the AC, do you have a UPS you could test with, something that you could disconnect from the mains to at least try another source of power? Or bring it to another location and run it for a while there? If you are electronically inclined, you could build a quick interposer connect rig and put a multimeter on it and watch it there.
 
Would you mind linking me what a UPS is, I consider myself technically savvy, but when it comes to this sorta thing I'm clueless.

Edit: Nevermind, I know what you're talking about now, but yea I don't anyone who has a UPS unfortunately. What else could I used to test it?
 
An Uninterruptable Power Supply (battery backup in case of loss of AC power). One of those things if you have to ask you probably don't have one. In any case, I would bring it to another location to try and rule out your AC power as a problem, but from what I read I would more suspect component problems in the laptop.
 
Agreed, at this point I'm going to try and take it in to some place and test out the AC. Just another thought though, if the AC is the culprit wouldn't it have affected other parts of my system like my secondary hard disk or optical drive? Because none of my other parts have failed or dropped in performance other than just my SSD.
 
Well, I am not just talking about your AC/DC adapter for the laptop, I am talking about the AC power coming out of your wall. Bad power external to the laptop could definitely affect other parts of the system, but it is not always a given. In any case, like I said above my guess is a power regulator part on the motherboard, which absent the proper electronic hardware (smd soldering, etc) is not something you can fix yourself, usually it requires a motherboard swap.
 
mwroobel,

I have one more question for you if you don't mind.

I've been using a replacement AC cord for like over 1½ years ever since the other one wore down, the cord that connects from the AC to the power supply. The label on it says 13A - 125v. Additionally I have another AC cord lying around that says 10A - 125v. I don't understand if this makes a difference or not, unfortunately engineering wasn't my strong suit. I couldn't find any info on the HDX manual about the AC cord, so was hoping some of you could shed some light here. The specs on my power supply are as follows:

Input Voltage: 100V-240V 50/60hz
Output Voltage: 19V
Output Amperage: 9.5A
Plug Size: 7.4mm X 5.0mm (Centre Pin)

Here's a link with full specs

http://www.laptoppartsexpert.com/i-4272928-ac-adapter-180w-smart.html
 
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I highly doubt that the AC adapter is the problem.

Edit: I got confused and thought you replaced the power brick.. The cord will make no difference at all. That I am 100% sure of.
 
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