Excessive writes to SSD without my knowledge.

[patriotsfan82]

Hi All,

Some information to start:

I ran with a 128GB Samsung 830 SSD for nearly 2 years. In that time I primarily had my OS installed and occasionally used SteamMover to run the latest game off of it. In that time, I racked up 5.26 TB of writes.

About 2 months ago I upgraded to a 250GB Samsung 840 Evo SSD. I installed Windows twice early on but haven't worked it much harder than that. I have installed a couple games, but have done almost no constant/back and forth transfers. I fired up Samsung Magician on a whim today and noticed a shocking number: 27.84 TB of writes in ~2 months.

I have Hibernation disabled and have moved the pagefile to a separate HDD. Has anyone experienced this kind of ridiculous system/background writes to an SSD? Any potential programs I should be wary of that may be causing this?

Thanks for the help.

Running Windows 8.1 Update 1.

 

[Coup27]

I have no experience with Windows 8 but something is clearly writing in the background without your knowledge. I would open resource monitor by pressing "Ctrl+Alt+Del>Task Manager>Performance Tab>Resource Monitor. That's where it is on Win7 so if that doesn't work on Win8 you'll have to see where it's moved to.

In here, you can see detailed analysis of what's going on. Go on the disk tab and monitor it for a period of time and you should be able to see what's causing all the writes.

Alternatively, there maybe a program you can install which will give you a summary of writes across the board in a given time frame. I don't know of one myself but if resource monitor isn't helping, try looking for something like that.

 

[patriotsfan82]

Thanks,

I'm currently using the Resource Monitor and a tool called "SSDReady" to actively monitor writes to the disk. Nothing unusual so far, so I'll have to put the system through a few tests to see if I can find more.

Are there any known cases of rogue SSD controllers or is this likely to be some piece of broken software running wild (I'm hesitant with this as I really don't much software on this PC for any significant amount of time beyond a few things like Steam & Skype).

 

[Carfax83]

I have Windows 8.1 x64 Pro w/ update 1, and a Samsung 840 Evo drive as well. I've also owned this SSD for about 2 months like you, and installed Windows twice on it.

But Samsung Magician is only showing 1.06 TB of writes so far. 27.84 TB is insane and it has to be wrong.

How much capacity are you using? It shouldn't be hard to figure out if it's correct. I mean there's no way you could write that much to your SSD in so short a time without a serious reduction in capacity.

 

[Tristor]

Windows 8/8.1 has been doing some freaky stuff with my SSD RAID as well. In fact, I noticed after a patch about 2 months ago that my box started being extremely sluggish. Obviously this should not be, all things considered. Luckily it happened during a time when I was trying to install a game from Steam, which helpfully told me "Disk Busy" with a big red image of a light.

Opening Task Manager I immediately noticed that "System" was using 100% of my disk and was writing at ~100MB/s to disk. Doing research online I found that this has several possible causes. Just Google "Windows 8 100 disk usage" and you too will find /thousands/ of posts across the Internet about this subject. In the end, I went through the Services and shut off anything I didn't feel was necessary (I wouldn't suggest this unless you know what you're doing) and also completely disabled my pagefile (I previously had a 600MB pagefile so I could get basic dumps). Additionally I disabled all scheduled disk maintenance tasks through both Task Scheduler and the Disk Optimizer.

After a reboot, it seems to have resolved the issue, although I initially rebooted before disabling one particular service and still saw momentary spikes. That service was the Windows Search service. After disabling it, I saw no more spikes at all but the Start-Search functionality no longer works (I don't use it though, so I'm not worried about it).

Good luck to you, but I believe this is your issue. It's enraging that Windows 8 would be able to actually max out the performance capacity of 2 SSDs in RAID0 just doing it's background bullshit. There's a 15 page thread about this on the Microsoft Community page for Windows 8, and the comments in there from Microsoft employees range from unhelpful to idiotic.

 

[Phynaz]

Do the math. There's no way you are writing 500GB a day to an SSD without knowing about it. It's just not possible to do that much background writing.

 

[patriotsfan82]

Do the math. There's no way you are writing 500GB a day to an SSD without knowing about it. It's just not possible to do that much background writing.

That was certainly my thought. Since day 1 however, the hard drive has sat at about 115 GB used, 117 GB free. Installed is Windows, Office, a few programs and Titanfall (massive 50GB for that game). The amount used hasn't changed by any drastic amount (It hasn't suddenly been 50GB free one moment, and then 100 GB free later that day).

Since I haven't noticed any drastic changes with the reported usage, I have to assume that some program is caching data out of control (rewriting the same blocks over and over again). The alternative is a faulty SSD.

I'm going to run what I can to see if I can ascertain a discrepancy between what the SSD is reporting vs what is actually being written to it. I'm also attempting to pin it down to any games or programs I've only started using recently since my previous SSD had no such issue for ~2 years.


Also, uggh. Just pulled out my receipt. Purchased on 03/12/2014. Wasn't installed until a couple of days after. That's 28.74 TB in about 42 days. 700GB a day is starting to get me to lean towards something faulty with the SSD. If I find out otherwise, I'll share what I can.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Too bad you didn't check the lifetime writes at install time - it may have been a return sold as new that somebody else did a bunch of writing on.

Pop open task manager, go to "performance" and open resource monitor. Leave it open for a day or two and see which applications are using all the disk I/O.

 

[h9826790]

The number doesn't make any sense, unless your SSD is not a real brand new one.

 

[Jovec]

I have a 4 month old 840 pro that has almost 7TB of writes. It replaced a 12+ month old 840 pro that has 1.6TB of writes. Usage paterns are the same, and the older 840 pro has at least 2 reinstalls on it (and possibly 3), which mainly consist of OS, 50GB+ of game installs, and 20GB of music copied. The newer 840 pro has one such install. I also have three 840 evos with a few similar installs and reinstalls, and they are all sitting around 1.5TB.

The biggest difference between the 7TB 840 and 1.6TB 840 is that the 7TB has Win8.1 and is on 24/7. The 1.6TB had Win7 and spent half it's time in sleep/off states.

I've been monitoring it since I discovered the high writes, but I'll never know the answer unless the writes jump up again and I can track it down. It's entirely possible the writes are legitimate if I used Windows Media Center without moving the live TV buffer to my HDD first, or some other user induced writes.

Edit:
This guy makes a fairly strong case that Win8 is erroneously defraging SSDs under certain circumstances.
http://www.outsidethebox.ms/why-windows-8-defragments-your-ssd-and-how-you-can-avoid-this/

I have plenty of "retrimming C:" in my event logs and a few "defraging C:" Microsoft claims this to be a bad message, but the article presents some good questions that should be answered before dismissing it as a bad log entry.

I had a fresh Win8 sitting on an old Intel 311, and when I ran the defrag task via the scheduler, I got the "defraging c:" dialogue. I may try this on an Evo - Measure TB, install Win 8 and my standard apps, measure, then force the defrag task and measure afterwards.

 

[Z15CAM]

I run a RAMDisk and Point all Win temporary writes and Application Temp Files to say a 2 or 4 GB partition in Ram. That way with every reboot you flush all your Temporary Files and prevent excessive writes to the SSD with each Windows Session and your System is FASTER.

My RAMDisk Partiton would look something like this: Audition Cash - Bridge C6 Cash - NERO Temp - PowerISO Temp - PSP9 Temp - 7-Zip Temp - AnyDVD Temp - Firefox Cash - Local Temp - IE Temporary Internet Files - Windows Temp - Winevt - WinRAR Temp and WinZIP Temp ... etc

Place your Pagefile on HDD Raid-0, not back into RAM and keep it off your SSD.

Never DownLoad or Capture Movies to your SSD. You can install and run Games off your SSD.

 

[SSBrain]

There's an easy way to check out if your SSD is getting defragmented in Windows 8. On the command console with elevated privileges type "defrag c: /a". This will invoke a file system analysis. If it's never higher than 10% and from time to time the file fragmentation rate drops to 1% or otherwise low single digit values, Windows is defragmenting your drive. If it doesn't, it will keep increasing with usage. Mine is currently at 26%:

C:\Windows\system32>defrag c: /a
Microsoft Drive Optimizer
Copyright (c) 2013 Microsoft Corp.

Invoking analysis on System (C:)...


The operation completed successfully.

Post Defragmentation Report:

        Volume Information:
                Volume size                 = 446.78 GB
                Free space                  = 136.30 GB
                Total fragmented space      = 26%
                Largest free space size     = 93.78 GB

        Note: File fragments larger than 64MB are not included in the fragmentation statistics.

        It is recommended that you defragment this volume.

I did disable the "scheduled optimization" for my SSD, and I am currently performing the command with an automated task I created.

 

[R0H1T]

I have no experience with Windows 8 but something is clearly writing in the background without your knowledge. I would open resource monitor by pressing "Ctrl+Alt+Del>Task Manager>Performance Tab>Resource Monitor. That's where it is on Win7 so if that doesn't work on Win8 you'll have to see where it's moved to.

In here, you can see detailed analysis of what's going on. Go on the disk tab and monitor it for a period of time and you should be able to see what's causing all the writes.

Alternatively, there maybe a program you can install which will give you a summary of writes across the board in a given time frame. I don't know of one myself but if resource monitor isn't helping, try looking for something like that.

process hacker

 

[cytg111]

taskmanager -> details -> right click column and choose select columns -> add columns for the 6 types of IO (read write other / sec total) .. If something is trashing your drive it will be quite evident what it is here.

 

[cytg111]

process hacker

- Or just taskmanager

 

[R0H1T]

- Or just taskmanager

Task manager doesn't show the file that's being read/written nor the drive it's located on, the read/write (total avg) rates, I/O priority & response time is also missing from it, task manager is good for a lot of things but it doesn't compare remotely to process hacker which does lots more than even process explorer.