Valantar
Golden Member
Ever since my Ryzen upgrade last week, I've been having some intermittent slowdowns/freezes, where even simple operations like opening an app or loading a level in Fallout 4 takes way longer than expected. As in tens of seconds for simple operations. I couldn't pinpoint any reason for it, so I decided to run some tests on my SSDs. I have two: an 840 Pro 256GB for the OS+apps, and a 500GB game drive. They currently both have ~90GB free. I first ran the benchmark in Samsung Magician, which gave very inconsistent results for the 840 Pro between runs - especially read speeds varied from ~520MB/s to ~450MB/s. Since HDTune was brought up in another tread recently (and was the best way to diagnose faulty 840 Evos way back when), I thought I'd give it a spin. I didn't expect to get anything out of it (it's not a test meant for SSDs, after all), but at least I'd get to compare the read consistency of my drives. Lo and behold: I was wrong.
Yep, my Evo was showing read rates of ~30MB/s for the first ~100GB of drive space. And the rest wasn't really any better. What the hell?
I decided to run the test again, just to be sure. The result was the same, except for perhaps a minor improvement (although now access times were all over the place). Closed Steam, did a third run: minor improvement again. Especially the "slow start" seemed to be shorter, now closer to 10% of the drive than 20%. Weird. Tried another run: again, a small improvement. Started up Steam again, to see if that was the culprit, but no. Another small improvement. After 11 runs, the graph is now more or less a steady line, with only a couple of drops down to 300-350MB/s.
Some info: the drive is my games drive from my previous Windows installation, and has not been formatted or otherwise changed in a while. It used to be quite full (~20GB or less free), but I cleaned up a bit a couple of days ago which left around 90GB free. While the folder structure is mostly left over from before, I've made sure to get access to the entire drive from my current user account.
Does anyone have the slightest clue what is going on here? Is this just the kind of weird, random stuff that might happen? Is this some utterly weird dynamic between the access patterns of HDTune and how the Evo handles data? Or did repeated HDTune runs somehow fix an issue with read speeds on my drive? That sounds absurd. I ran CrystalDiskMark before I started the HDTune runs, and tested again after. There was one noticeable difference: sequential read speeds increased from 454MB/s before the HDTune runs to ~490MB/s after (consistent across three tests, unfortunately only ran one before). Everything else seems within reasonable margins of error.
So it seems like something has changed. But what? And how? Can this be some cousin of the notorious 840 Evo bug? It's not throttling - as you can see from the sliver of HWMonitor in the big screeshot, temps have never exceeded 44 degrees - which is warm, but not hot. I'm really baffled by this. Any ideas?
Yep, my Evo was showing read rates of ~30MB/s for the first ~100GB of drive space. And the rest wasn't really any better. What the hell?
I decided to run the test again, just to be sure. The result was the same, except for perhaps a minor improvement (although now access times were all over the place). Closed Steam, did a third run: minor improvement again. Especially the "slow start" seemed to be shorter, now closer to 10% of the drive than 20%. Weird. Tried another run: again, a small improvement. Started up Steam again, to see if that was the culprit, but no. Another small improvement. After 11 runs, the graph is now more or less a steady line, with only a couple of drops down to 300-350MB/s.
Some info: the drive is my games drive from my previous Windows installation, and has not been formatted or otherwise changed in a while. It used to be quite full (~20GB or less free), but I cleaned up a bit a couple of days ago which left around 90GB free. While the folder structure is mostly left over from before, I've made sure to get access to the entire drive from my current user account.
Does anyone have the slightest clue what is going on here? Is this just the kind of weird, random stuff that might happen? Is this some utterly weird dynamic between the access patterns of HDTune and how the Evo handles data? Or did repeated HDTune runs somehow fix an issue with read speeds on my drive? That sounds absurd. I ran CrystalDiskMark before I started the HDTune runs, and tested again after. There was one noticeable difference: sequential read speeds increased from 454MB/s before the HDTune runs to ~490MB/s after (consistent across three tests, unfortunately only ran one before). Everything else seems within reasonable margins of error.
