Weird Samsung 830 SSD problem, weird fix -- what was it?

[amrs]

I had some major performance problems with two Samsung 830s in my system. As in AS SSD showing less than 1 MB/s for the 4K test and 8 / 5 ms for Access times for both of them. 4K-64Thrd and sequential were fine. System in general was pretty slow, felt more like a slow HD system.

This system is a recent rebuild with an Asrock Z77 Extreme4 motherboard + 3570K, my old Windows 7 installation imaged from my old Vertex 2. That installation was made on Core 2 Quad but things seemed to go fine with the migration, except for the SSD performance thing.

I installed Intel drivers (SSDs are connected to it and not the Asmedia) and checked alignment but no help.

The fix? Running Samsung's SSD Magician. I let it "optimize" the partition on the other drive (J. And then I ran AS SSD on my drives again and both were fixed. So probably the "optimization" thing didn't matter since it basically just runs TRIM. But now, I have normal microsecond access times and 4K results on both drives. And much faster booting and starting Borderlands 2.

So what magic does the SSD Magician do and what causes this kind of slowdown on Samsung SSDs?

 

[Coup27]

It sounds like your previous installation of Windows using the Core 2 Quad and the Vertex 2 did not have TRIM support and the SSD's were incredibly "dirty". By dirty I mean they had been used heavily. Were they nearly at full capacity?

Anyway, you then imaged a very dirty image onto the SSD's which crippled their performance. By running the Magician you force ran the TRIM command followed by the much more important Garbage Collection system. Garbage collection acted on the information it received from TRIM and cleaned all of the blocks which no longer had data on them, thus restoring performance back to the original levels.

 

[amrs]

Thanks for your input Coup27 but I think your idea fails for a few reasons:

- I had the slowdown problem on two drives and only one of them was imaged. Magician fixed the problem on both even though I only optimized one and it wasn't the imaged one. Even if they were dirty that shouldn't slow reads down but I had slowdown on both reads and wriites but only for the single threaded random case. Hence the weirdness... If the multithreaded random test had been slow then that usually means NCQ is off and I found someone who had that and it was due to having set drives into RAID mode instead of AHCI.

- I seriously doubt imaging an SSD could transfer dirtiness to a completely different drive. Imaging happens on the sector level which has no information about the actual flash block allocation. Wear leveling shuffles sectors around to different flash blocks, right? But that is completely internal to the drive.

- Why wouldn't I have had TRIM before? It's standard in Windows 7 x64 after all and my installation is from late 2011 or early 2012 and it includes SP1.

Anyways, happy as a clam with the SSD performance now!

 

[TemjinGold]

Well, they do call it magic for a reason...