SSD Speed Loss?

[AshmerAmadeus]

I built my computer in either late Feb or early March this year. My storage is a couple of old HDDs and a Crucial BX100 250gig SSD. I've noticed over the last week or so that my SSD seems to have slowed down dramatically. I was playing games online with a friend of mine and my load time was longer than his. My computer is superior in every facet, and previously my load times were better than his. I've moved, but I don't think this accounts for the difference. Things done offline seem slower to me as well. I didn't time it, but it feels like the boot time is much closer to what I had when I used a hdd as my boot device rather than my ssd. Any idea what could be causing a slowdown on my ssd?

 

[Elixer]

Check the SMART status with something like crystaldiskinfo.
How full is the SSD?
What OS you using?

 

[AshmerAmadeus]

Check the SMART status with something like crystaldiskinfo.
How full is the SSD?
What OS you using?

I'm not familiar with Crystal Disk Info, so let me know if I'm giving the wrong information. Status comes up as good, and features includes SMART, NCQ, TRIM and DevSleep.

The ssd says 99.1 free out of 232 total.

I've been using Windows 7 for quite some time now, and I don't anticipate it changing until the wrinkles have been ironed out of W10.

 

[Blastman]

Try running CrystalDiskMark and see what scores you get for sequential read/write.

 

[AshmerAmadeus]

Try running CrystalDiskMark and see what scores you get for sequential read/write.

CrystalDiskMark says the following:

5 1GiB C:58% 135/233GiB (This is the SSD, not one of my mechanical drives)
Seq 32T1 499.1 Read 360.2 Write
4k Q32T1 88.03 Read 73.08 Write
Seq 419.8 Read 324.4 Write
4K 20.83 Read 49.94 Write

 

[smakme7757]

I built my computer in either late Feb or early March this year. My storage is a couple of old HDDs and a Crucial BX100 250gig SSD. I've noticed over the last week or so that my SSD seems to have slowed down dramatically. I was playing games online with a friend of mine and my load time was longer than his. My computer is superior in every facet, and previously my load times were better than his. I've moved, but I don't think this accounts for the difference. Things done offline seem slower to me as well. I didn't time it, but it feels like the boot time is much closer to what I had when I used a hdd as my boot device rather than my ssd. Any idea what could be causing a slowdown on my ssd?

Try forcing windows to run TRIM on the drive.

If on Windows 8 or higher you can use the built in Defrag utlity to do this (Yes, it's smart enough to TRIM instead of Defrag an SSD).

Just did it on my work laptop and noticed a nice increase in performance. Hadn't been done since i got it (over a year ago)

 

[AshmerAmadeus]

Try forcing windows to run TRIM on the drive.

If on Windows 8 or higher you can use the built in Defrag utlity to do this (Yes, it's smart enough to TRIM instead of Defrag an SSD).

Just did it on my work laptop and noticed a nice increase in performance. Hadn't been done since i got it (over a year ago)

I'm running W7, as I've never had a good experience with Windows 8. From my own usage, its about as good as Vista. I checked out a youtube video on forcing trim, and I ran a fsutil command as an admin. Running the test again, the numbers are better across the board. I didn't time it, but I loaded up Path of Exile, and loading the next area seems to be faster then it was before. I couldn't believe how every facet of my computer is superior to my friends, and he loaded into area's before I did. We only play on weekends, so that will be my real test. The benchmark looks better, and I think PoE was faster. Huzzah!

 

[AlienTech]

CrystalDiskMark says the following:

5 1GiB C:58% 135/233GiB (This is the SSD, not one of my mechanical drives)
Seq 32T1 499.1 Read 360.2 Write
4k Q32T1 88.03 Read 73.08 Write
Seq 419.8 Read 324.4 Write
4K 20.83 Read 49.94 Write

benchmarks from tools are not accurate.. Although we can get an idea of how well it works.. HDtune or HD Speed would show a better and more accurate report on the drive. IF this crucial uses similar controller like some of their older drives, the smaller drives after a while will lose 50% of its performance once all pages have been remapped and it has to rely on the logical addressing stored for each block. That is because it has to fetch the address of LBA from the storage area and remap to that block and then read the data and the controller is just not fast enough to do this in real time. Reading empty blocks dont need this remapping hence it will show full speeds, just like how some drive using compression shows really fast read speeds.. Those speeds are from the built in cache to the computer memory through the sata interface and not actual drive performance..

To fix this problem you most likely have to create a drive image and then erase the drive to its default modes and then recopy the image back. This would cut down on the number of remapping and LBA fetching access which would show a performance increase.. But it will degrade after a while if you use the drive too much. The garbage collection will remap the blocks even if they are not touched for wear leveling so even if you dont use the entire drive or dont use it much, after a while you still end up in this situation. You can use HDTune to get a more accurate picture of the drive..