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Benchmark problems with 840Pro

Charlie98

Charlie98

Diamond Member
My original 256GB Samsung 840Pro died on me in less than a year (no warning... just BAM and that was it.) Got the de rigueur refurb 840Pro in return; not really trusting it, I ran it in a non-critical laptop for a while, and then finally moved it to my main PC when it didn't show any problems. About 2-3 months ago I started having some crashing issues, I immediately cloned it to another SSD and relegated it to backup duties... and the crashing problems stopped.

One of the things I do to check the drive is occasionally run a benchmark on the drive using Magician software... what I'm seeing now is that it will lock up on the Sequential Write portion of the benchmark, not always but probably 50% of the time. I uninstalled Magician and reinstalled the latest version, to eliminate that, but it's still doing it.

This is from this AM... I wiped the drive with Acronis, reformatted it, and it's completely empty... and with nothing else running on the PC...



...is it RMA goat screw time again? 😡😡😡
 
Read SMART with CrystalDiskInfo to rule out cabling errrors and use a real benchmark like AS SSD. Thanks!
 
Write speeds can be affected if trim hasn't been run in a while. With Windows 7 you can use the Performance Optimization feature in Magician. With windows 8 and 10 you need to go to Disk properties/Tools/Optimize, and the defrag option for an SSD will be replaced with a trim function.
 
CiPHER said:
Read SMART with CrystalDiskInfo to rule out cabling errrors and use a real benchmark like AS SSD. Thanks!
Click to expand...

Here's the SMART... I'll have to fool with another bench.



Try a different SATA port?
Click to expand...

If possible a different cable also.

Super easy to check, but very useful to rule out a flaky controller, or a flaky connection.
Click to expand...

When it was my OS drive, it was on port 0 with a different cable, now it's on port 1. It has shown this behavior on both, and one of the reasons I pulled it out of service.

Write speeds can be affected if trim hasn't been run in a while. With Windows 7 you can use the Performance Optimization feature in Magician. With windows 8 and 10 you need to go to Disk properties/Tools/Optimize, and the defrag option for an SSD will be replaced with a trim function.
Click to expand...

Drive was freshly wiped with Acronis and reformatted. It's completely empty...

As an experiment, I loaded some files on it just to give it something to do and ran the bench (Samsung's) this AM, locked up again.
 
Charlie98 said:
Drive was freshly wiped with Acronis and reformatted. It's completely empty...
Click to expand...

I can't be sure of how Acronis does it's wipes, but a format will only mark sectors ready to be written over. You can delete a partition and format a drive and then completely recover the data that was on it if nothing has been written to the drive since.

It's worth taking a few seconds to do the trim just in case. Would save a lot of time if it happened to be the cause of the slow write performance.
 
Deders said:
I can't be sure of how Acronis does it's wipes, but a format will only mark sectors ready to be written over. You can delete a partition and format a drive and then completely recover the data that was on it if nothing has been written to the drive since.

It's worth taking a few seconds to do the trim just in case. Would save a lot of time if it happened to be the cause of the slow write performance.
Click to expand...

I use the overwrite routine... just a simple wipe for my drives that I'm going to keep. I went ahead and TRIMed it (took 4 seconds.)

Here is the AS bench... my LiteOn on the left, the Samsung (completely empty and TRIMed) on the right...



I may just yank it and throw the drive in my game rig upstairs and see how it does. At this point, I can't trust it as an OS drive, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do...
 
I would at least start the RMA process and see what happens. There are definitely issues with the drive. It won't even run Samsung's own program for pete's sake!
 
Issues with the drive? No, no no!

Issues with the cabling. Do not blame things the drive can do nothing about.

It is right there... UDMA CRC Error Count shows non-zero raw value. 0x9EE7 means 40679 cable errors. This most likely is the cause for his issues.

Thus, replace the cable, and do benchmarks again. Confirm the SMART that UDMA CRC Error Count has not increased (the raw value). The counter will never go down, only up. So if it stays at 0x9EE7 that means no new cable errors have occurred. At least not those that caused detectable data corruption.

Most likely the SSD itself it just fine.
 
CiPHER said:
Issues with the drive? No, no no!

Issues with the cabling. Do not blame things the drive can do nothing about.

It is right there... UDMA CRC Error Count shows non-zero raw value. 0x9EE7 means 40679 cable errors. This most likely is the cause for his issues.

Thus, replace the cable, and do benchmarks again. Confirm the SMART that UDMA CRC Error Count has not increased (the raw value). The counter will never go down, only up. So if it stays at 0x9EE7 that means no new cable errors have occurred. At least not those that caused detectable data corruption.

Most likely the SSD itself it just fine.
Click to expand...

He has tried different cables. Try again.
 
He should verify whether the UDMA CRC Error Count keeps increasing. If it does, he still has cabling problems. Maybe his 'new' cable is in fact bad too. Or he may have folded the cable to steeply.

Either way, 40.000+ cabling errors suggests this is his problem. The chance that the SSD is the root cause of the issue, is somewhat less likely given his SMART readout and the symptons that are very much in line with cabling errors.
 
LTC8K6 said:
Yeah, what's he got to lose?

Get a completely different cable and see what happens.
Click to expand...

I'm on it... 😀

Update: Well, mixed results... I actually think I have 2 bad SATA cables. Now it fails to boot off the newer drive (the LiteOn) using the cable that was on the Samsung, but the Samsung is still acting squirrely. That would make sense since I switched SATA cables when I switched drives...

Time for some new cables... and then we'll give it another try.

Cipher... we are up to 45000+ CRC errors at this point... I'll have to monitor it. Unfortunately, my LiteOn doesn't provide CRC info... 🙁
 
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