Why Samsung Evo 840 is so slow? SSD - boot / benchmarks (solved)

[Perene]

Guys, I am having issues here with the samsung evo 840 120 GB SSD. First of all, updating the firmware didn't help, I used the performance restoration and things are the same.

Hardware is core i7 4770, gigabyte h97m-d3h, 8 GB 1600 MHZ RAM, plus seasonic 520w, r7 265 video Card and 3 old sata HDDs. 2 750 GB samsung hd753lj and one Seagate 300 GB.

One thing that happened is the probable dying of one of the samsung, it ceased to be recognized by the bios and system after that. Drive still plugged, will be removed later.

Using Windows 8.1 64 bit. Boot takes at least a minute, very slow. Benchmarks say reading is 400, 450 MB/S and writing 200. Some people had over 500 in the benchmark. HD tune says ssd is ok. I also disabled some things to increase performance. Nothing.

It should be noted I already had Windows installed in this drive. Then I got a vírus and decided to format it. Used diskpart to clean the disk while booting with Windows install disk. One more thing is that I could not simply format any partition using Windows 8 install disk. It kept saying gpt whatever. Diskpart worked. The first install created 3 partititions.

I believe there's some secret way of installing Windows to improve boot time and the speed of this drive in benchmarks, but ai have no clue what to check in the bios. Perhaps it has something to do with this UEFI thing. I am a total newbie in this area.

Or maybe this SSD is slow and I got a bad unit? Still, that doesn't explain the slow boot. If I remember correctly it was fast while booting the HDD (this old drive had Windows 7/8 32 bit in it).

Or maybe Windows 8 is incredibly slow?

Any thoughts? I am out of ideas.

 

[Charlie98]

When you say 'boot'... do you mean the computer booting up, or Windows starting... or both?

 

[Perene]

When you restart Windows or turn on the computer, it takes a minute for Windows be used. That's very slow.

When you run a benchmark it returns slow speeds such as 400 / 200 for read/write.

It has been suggested the dead SATA HDD is slowing things down. Is this the case?

Also, what about this UEFI thing? What is this in terms of installing Windows?

 

[Charlie98]

When you restart Windows or turn on the computer, it takes a minute for Windows be used. That's very slow.

When you run a benchmark it returns slow speeds such as 400 / 200 for read/write.

It has been suggested the dead SATA HDD is slowing things down. Is this the case?

Also, what about this UEFI thing? What is this in terms of installing Windows?

The computer booting and Windows starting are two separate events. Sometimes the boot sequence will delay or hang if there is a bad drive, or something it can't recognize. Pull the dead drive and try it again.

Understand... the smaller ~120GB SSD's don't have the performance numbers, especially write speed, that the ~250GB and up do. 400 is a little slow for read, but 200 is about right for write speed on a 120GB drive.

 

[h9826790]

Agree that 200 write on a 120G 840 Evo is normal. There are less NAND chips inside the SSD, therefore, less bandwidth, and less write speed.

 

[Cerb]

What part of booting up is taking the longest? When you turn the power on the PC POSTs, then runs firmware bits, then boots the OS. Then, Windows loads itself, takes over from the firmware, then goes multi-user, and then loads up what it needs to get you to the login screen.

No modern drive, even low-end 5400 RPM HDDs, should cause it to take a full minute, unless you have some extra features turned on and used (like RAID), or some software is hanging Windows for a little bit.

 

[Charlie98]

What part of booting up is taking the longest? When you turn the power on the PC POSTs, then runs firmware bits, then boots the OS. Then, Windows loads itself, takes over from the firmware, then goes multi-user, and then loads up what it needs to get you to the login screen.

No modern drive, even low-end 5400 RPM HDDs, should cause it to take a full minute, unless you have some extra features turned on and used (like RAID), or some software is hanging Windows for a little bit.

OP posted:

One thing that happened is the probable dying of one of the samsung, it ceased to be recognized by the bios and system after that. Drive still plugged, will be removed later.

...do you think that would make the boot sequence hang? I've had something similar happen...

 

[Cerb]

^ Quite possibly

 

[Perene]

What is taking forever is Windows to load. You can see it takes a minute for the Windows 8 logo to disappear. So it's not the "press del to enter setup" DOS screen that is wasting too much time, instead, it's the Windows one. Although the press del to enter BIOS screen is also slow, but not as much as the Windows loading.

My old q9450 was faster for both things.

I will remove the faulty HDD to see if things are fixed.

 

[Ketchup]

A couple things:

1. Leaving a dead hard drive connected to a motherboard is never a good idea. So if nothing else, your latest plans should help.
2. Make sure your board is on at least the F3 BIOS, as SSD performance is improved here.

 

[razel]

You'll need to log the boot process. That'll at least tell you what's taking so long. Chances are it's a driver or it's doing a chkdsk on every boot. You can actually check the chkdsk part. Google 'ntfs dirty bit' and make sure it's off. Best of luck.

 

[Perene]

You'll need to log the boot process. That'll at least tell you what's taking so long. Chances are it's a driver or it's doing a chkdsk on every boot. You can actually check the chkdsk part. Google 'ntfs dirty bit' and make sure it's off. Best of luck.

how do you log this boot process?

 

[Perene]

Now everything it's OK. BOOT and Windows taking seconds to load, benchmark with proper speed... After removing the dead SATA HDD. So if a drive dies everything is slower in a computer? That's interesting.

P.S. This SSD had the firmware updated.

 

[Topweasel]

Now everything it's OK. BOOT and Windows taking seconds to load, benchmark with proper speed... After removing the dead SATA HDD. So if a drive dies everything is slower in a computer? That's interesting.

P.S. This SSD had the firmware updated.

Any drive you have connected windows will want to mount or load (even if their is no partition) this happens very early into the startup process. So not only can it slow the post time (or cause it to hang) it can also slow the windows startup time (or cause it to hang).

 

[VirtualLarry]

So if a drive dies everything is slower in a computer? That's interesting.

Yes! Windows auto-mounts recognizable filesystems on all available storage connectors. If one of those devices is failing, it can cause that port to hang until it times out, which can easily take a full minute or more.