tales of a well-worn 16GB embedded SSD

[VirtualLarry]

I recently bought some "InnoDisk InnoLite II 16GB SATA 2.5" SSD"(s) from ebay, for around $9 shipped each.

I thought, hey, SSDs are always fast, and these are a bargain... only, they're not always fast, and therefore, not much of a bargain.

Note that when I received them, they had a prior Windows 7 Pro install on them.

I tried booting that install, but it wouldn't quite work. From inspecting the filesystem before I tried that, it appears that these came from some sort of ticket-dispensing amusement machine. They were listed as "used", but then mentioned replacing the HDDs on new computers, so you might think "new pull", but they had POH times of nearly a year straight. So the listing was a little on the deceptive side.

Anyways, I installed Win10 1607 Home 64-bit on it, and I deleted the existing single partition, and then it said it recommended 18.13GiB of disk space to install the OS, but it let me click "Next" anyways, so I did.

When it finished installing, I had 2.66GiB free, but then after it finished downloading and installing apps and the video driver, and I installed Waterfox 49.0.2, and CDM 5.2.0, I have around 1.38GiB left. This PC has 4GB of DDR4 installed, it's a Skylake G4400 in an Asus H110 mobo. SSD is plugged into the first SATA6G port on the mobo.

CDM scores, 500MiB test (because I didn't have enough disk space free for the default 1GiB test):
Seq QD32T1: read=104.5, write=18.19
4K QD32T1: read=20.79, write=0.203 (!)
Seq: read=116.2, write=14.68
4K: read=15.77, write=0.047 (!)

So, seems like a performance problem with writes, and 100MB/sec sequential read is not too good either. (16GB capacity == single NAND die???)

I did NOT "Secure Erase", nor did I create a partition, format it, and then delete it (TRIM blank space) during the Win10 install.

I may boot a Linux LiveUSB and try a secure erase, and then re-do the Win10 install and benchmark.

These drives may not work out for my purposes, if they are really THAT slow...

Edit: When I went into Linux, and did a hdparm -I on it, it didn't even have a "Security" sections. I tried to do a secure erase anyways, but it gave "I/O error", both on the set-pass and erase commands.

Sigh. Guess I'm stuck with some "embedded" SSDs. Can someone suggest a use for them? (Besides target practice.)

 

[XavierMace]

Oh Larry...

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, guess I over-economized, a bit.

The problem is, these were $9 shipped, whereas, the cheapest 30/32GB new SSD is like $20 shipped, from HK or China.

Edit: Well, I'm going to see how Linux installs on one of these suckers.

 

[XavierMace]

The problem is that you see $10 savings for a used drive with half the space as a good deal. Especially when you get a new 120Gb drive for $40.

 

[Elixer]

You feel like cracking one open, to see what kind of NAND chips & controller these are using, or, are you going to return them?

 

[VirtualLarry]

You feel like cracking one open, to see what kind of NAND chips & controller these are using, or, are you going to return them?

Well, that didn't go so well. I guess I don't have the right Implements of Destruction (tm), to do that. It has some really small phillips or JIS screws, and the best I could do was a small flat-head jeweler's screwdriver from a $10 toolkit. Which worked for two of the screws, but the two screws under the stickers didn't want to budge, and I damaged the screwdriver.

 

[hojnikb]

That must be an early jmicron ssd, which were total pipe of crap. Worse than HDDs actually.

I really hope you didn't sell those to customers.

 

[cbn]

That must be an early jmicron ssd, which were total pipe of crap. Worse than HDDs actually.

I really hope you didn't sell those to customers.

The SSD controller that had the problem with pausing?

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/adata-su700-maxiotek.2474654/#post-38275491

 

[VirtualLarry]

Nah, I don't think it's early Jmicron, I haven't noticed pausing. Just overall slowness writing.
4K QD32 write of 1.3MB/sec, and seq write QD32 of 18MB/sec, is fairly slow.

With Linux Mint 18 Mate installed, with 4GB of RAM / 4GB swap, there's 4GB left on the drive. So, looks like Mint takes up 8GB, 4GB for Swap, and 4GB free. Approx.

http://www.memorydepot.com/ssd/ssddetails.html?prodid=D2ST2-16GJ30AC1QN

Edit: I did notice some pausing, up to 10sec, when opening a bunch of tabs in Firefox in Mint 18 Mate. But Firefox does that anyways in Mint, for some reason, with my streaming radio station in the background, so I'm not 100% sure that's the SSD pausing. I have Win10 64-bit Home 1607 installed on the other one, and even with 1GB or less free, I don't get pausing. At least, none that I've noticed, yet.

 

[hojnikb]

The SSD controller that had the problem with pausing?

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/adata-su700-maxiotek.2474654/#post-38275491

I was thinking older ones from jm6xx series. Those were complete pile of dog sh***

 

[hojnikb]

Nah, I don't think it's early Jmicron, I haven't noticed pausing. Just overall slowness writing.
4K QD32 write of 1.3MB/sec, and seq write QD32 of 18MB/sec, is fairly slow.

With Linux Mint 18 Mate installed, with 4GB of RAM / 4GB swap, there's 4GB left on the drive. So, looks like Mint takes up 8GB, 4GB for Swap, and 4GB free. Approx.

http://www.memorydepot.com/ssd/ssddetails.html?prodid=D2ST2-16GJ30AC1QN

Wait some time, those cheaper ssds tend to become much slower over time due to poor garbage collection and trim support.
An example of such drive was crucial v4; out of the box decent at the time but over time speeds dropped to like 0,01MB/s for write. Luckily firmware revisions somewhat fixed that.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Wait some time, those cheaper ssds tend to become much slower over time due to poor garbage collection and trim support.
An example of such drive was crucial v4; out of the box decent at the time but over time speeds dropped to like 0,01MB/s for write.

I think that's basically what has happened here. There's no support for Secure Erase, that I can see. So no way to reset the drive to factory block order.

I booted back into Win10, deleted the main and swap Linux partitions, which wasn't instant, so perhaps it was TRIMming, but it wouldn't delete the EFI partition, so I had to bust out DiskPart, and do a "clean", then I refreshed Disk Management, then I initialized the disk to GPT, created a partition / formatted the volume "quick", then I re-formatted it for good measure.

Then I used CDM to benchmark the secondary SSD, with nothing running on it.

Still, 4K QD32 write was like 0.1MB/sec. Ugh.

 

[hojnikb]

i doubt it was doing any trimming, probably just bogged down from all the write requests.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, the SSDs are usable for CloudReady installs.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I wouldn't expect any SSD to perform super-well with ~1GB of free space.

 

[corkyg]

I wouldn't expect any SSD to perform super-well with ~1GB of free space.

I totally agree, Dave. I look at storage drives as if they were small boats, and free space roughly equates to freeboard. I never let my drives, HD or SSD exceed more than 75% of capacity. Drives need space in order to move around quickly.

 

[hojnikb]

I totally agree, Dave. I look at storage drives as if they were small boats, and free space roughly equates to freeboard. I never let my drives, HD or SSD exceed more than 75% of capacity. Drives need space in order to move around quickly.

Good ssds don't need much free space to perform optimally. Case in point samsung 850 pro
http://www.techspot.com/review/838-samsung-850-pro-ssd/page8.html

 

[corkyg]

Agree - but these are not "good" SSDs. My rule of thumb applies more to HDDs, however, SSDs need variable space to accommodate temp Internet files and a flexible page file.

 

[deustroop]

As an aside, I have also noticed that the Samsung Magician software shows that the less data stored, the better the ssd performs against normal metrics.