I've been having slow writes with my Samsung on big transfers. I noticed with the Black Magic disk test on the Mac it'd start out at 400 MB/s and then drop to about 20 MB/s.
So I transferred it over to my PC and updated the firmware to EMT02B6Q. Now it writes at 0.8 MB/s or less. Samsung Magician says its status is good.
Anyone encounter this issue? If this means it's dead, that would be my second Samsung death out of 4.
Samsung 840: Died with a 1 GB total drive size. Got a replacement, but replacement running fine.
Samsung 850 EVO 250: Fine (1.6 TB written)
Samsung 850 EVO 500: Drive described above (4.5 TB written)
Maybe.
I have two M.2 drives in USB enclosures like you but can't remember them ever having write speeds that low.
However I've also encountered an issue with some drives also in USB enclosures where write speeds dropped to around 20MB/s (and the WA could go way up).
This was not actually when they were really full but instead was after removing the folders on them (which ironically was done in order to keep the WA low).
Didn't really test thoroughly however how well they recovered if they were allowed to idle long enough.
Have seen this with both Marvell and Samsung controllers (though I think there may have been at least one Marvell controller that did not suffer from the same issue).
The controller in the Trion 100 (modified Phison S10 basically) seemed to manage it pretty well but that doesn't necessarily mean that other drives using the same controller will be free of it as well.
Plus I don't think that there's another drive besides the Patriot Ignite that is both M.2 and uses the Phison S10.
Well, whaddya know...
I just let the drive sit empty and idle but powered up for several hours. And then I get this:
It would seem it is indeed TRIM related, because the results seem to mirror this article:
SSD in USB 3.0 enclosure
After a secure erase, the performance is decent:
However, over time, the performance degrades to abysmal:
So, what drives would you recommend for external SSD storage?
If it's kind of the same issue that some of my drives had then going with a fast drive may not help because I've seen an 850 Pro go down to around 20MB/s and its WA shot through the roof.
Nor am I certain of which drives that will not be affected, aside from the Patriot Ignite, maybe drives using MLC combined with a Silicon Motion controller will do better (haven't had the opportunity to see if a drive with a Silicon Motion controller will have similar issues though).
What I would recommend is probably to try to find out what causes this since I haven't seen it with my drives and/or overprovisioning the drive so it has enough spare area to play around with.
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