Extremely Unreliable SSD With E6400. Whose Fault?

Attached is the benchmark for the Kingston 64gb SSD. I just got it off Ebay, clean installed Windows 7 and all the drivers, including Intel Rapid Storage and Chipset.

Set to AHCI, TRIM enabled, aligned corrected.

Did not try to update the Firmware of the Kingston SSD as I fear the bricking.

My Win7 Disk score was stuck at 5.9 until I installed the Intel Rapid Storage driver. Then it went to 6.6. It was going in between 100-150mb in reading speed, until I installed the latest Intel chipset driver. Then it was going 150-180mb in the benchmark.

But the spikes down seem very unreliable. Perhaps this is when I experience weird lags in real performance when doing heavy office work.

Some different drivers installation did change the drive performance as I can see. As far as I know, I should get at least 200mb in speed. Is the performance somehow limited to the Dell mobo or the processor/ram combo?

Something is definitely strange, including this spike reliability problem. All advice will be appreciated! Thanks.

 

I doubt that it's a mobo or processor/ram issue. It's a relatively old SSD, so the performance of the SSD itself probably degraded over time.

Also, I assume that you didn't secure erase the drive before installing Windows. If the drive was previously full, then the performance probably suffered (even though technically, TRIM should work eventually). Try to secure erase the drive first (make a bootable USB of many such utilities), and then install Windows. I had the same issue with an OCZ Vertex 2: I simply reinstalled Windows and got a WEI of 5.9. After secure erasing the drive and reinstalling, I got a WEI of 7.5 (originally 7.8, but after two years the performance degraded).

 

By secure erasing, do you mean doing a zero fill to completely get rid of the old files in there?

 

Use parted magic and select secure erase, not zero fill, that will do the trick: http://www.corsair.com/applicationnote/secure-erase. You can use these instructions, they are SSD brand agnostic.

If i recall correctly, a secure erase will tell the controller to set all NAND back to a certain voltage state

 

Thanks for getting back to me.

So is this the ultimate only way?

 

Well, that depends what the problem is, but if it's because there isn't enough empty NAND (not talking about free space visible to the OS here) on the drive for GC to work it's magic then yes. however, if the drive is near full capacity, wiping it and filling it back up to near full capacity won't solve your issue. You want about 20% of that formatted space free at least.

 

Thanks again.

I will try when I witness another "lag" and find some time to redo the OS and software installs.

With 64gb and all the softwares, I am looking at 15% empty, but that 15% is a guaranteed number.

 

From the looks of it, this drive uses a JMicron/Toshiba (JMF618) controller which in turn is basically a slightly modified version of a 3 year old chipset (JMF612). The older JMicron drives aren't really built for performance and used to have a lot of pausing/lag/freezing related to lack of buffer and bad alignment (a lot of this was supposedly fixed).

1. Check the SMART values using something like CrystalDiskInfo (CrystalDiskInfo - Software - Crystal Dew World). Some firmware will tell you how many worn or reallocated sectors there are on the drive. It will also tell you how many times and how long the drive has been powered on throughout its lifetime, and possibly the wear value.
2. Make sure you are running the latest firmware for your SSD. Flashing it shouldn't brick it, though it might wipe out the data depending on changes in that update. This particular model apparently had a firmware update required to correct some performance issues. products
3. Verify your Event Viewer to see if there are any "disk" or "ftdisk" error entries in the System log. <= if you see any, probably bad disk
4. Verify partition alignment. msinfo32, Components: Storage: Disks, verify each "Partition Starting Offset" is divisible by 4096.
5. Verify AHCI is enabled. Under "Device Manager", under "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" OR "Storage Controllers" there should be an "Intel(R) ICH10R SATA AHCI Controller" or something to that effect (if it says "Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller", you should install the Intel version).
6. Verify TRIM is enabled. Use an Administrator CMD box and make sure "fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify" gives a response "DisableDeleteNotify = 0".

Wouldn't trust those sort of things from eBay, could be worn out or have long-term issues and you'd never know it.

If you buy another SSD, make sure it's a Intel, Crucial, or Samsung. Most other manufacturers don't have as stringent of a QA process for both their firmware and hardware.

 

Oh man I really appreciate you putting in all this effort to help me out. I will look into each process individually. This is a very detailed response.

Again, thank you very much to each of you.

 

Do note that Crucial.s latest firmwares haven't been as well regarded by the community as their previous ones, still pretty good drives and I personally have not had any issues with my M4s. Still I'm an Intel SSD fan for their 5 years warranty on the 520.

If you're ever interested in knowing a bit more on how SSDs work, here's a good primer on why performance drops as the SSD fills up: AnandTech - The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ. Just know that this article was written in 2009 so when the author talks about TRIM coming, it's been here for a while now.