Question 980 Pro slow write speeds - not the only one with this issue

[Deleted member 2720853]

I have a ROG Strix B550-F with a Ryzen 9 3900X, 4x8GB Trident Z Neo 3600 16-16-16-36, RTX 3070. Latest chipset drivers, Windows build (19042.746), BIOS update (AGESA 1.1.8.0).

Bought a 500GB 980 Pro a few months ago as my first NVMe. I don't do any workstation work or heavy writing so I don't even know why I chose this as my first but still, the price was good. All was well at first, 6800 mb/s read, 5000 mb/s write.

However, flash forward to now and the write speeds have diminished significantly:

The drive is running at PCIe Gen 4 x 4 as reported by Samsung Magician.

I am not the only one with this issue:

Getting slow NVME write speeds

I have a Samsung 980 Pro PCI 4 drive and I did a benchmark, and Im getting good read speeds, but very slow write speeds at 1,100 mb. The drive is only 1/3 full, and its running on the PCI x4 mode as listed in the bios. I tested other NVMEs and they are working fine. SATA mode is in the BIOS...

www.techpowerup.com

https://us.community.samsung.com/t5/Monitors-and-Memory/Samsung-980-PRO-SLOW-WRITE-TIME/td-p/1632405

I'm not sure if this is just a problem with the AMD chipset drivers, the 980 Pro itself or something else. I doubt it's something I did, I already tried everything possible to get it running well again. Trimming the drive, verifying write cache is on, checking the drive health (all good), reseating the drive, temperatures are fine.

I don't see a difference in day to day use personally but it would still be nice to get the speeds I paid for.

 

[helpstar]

is the firmware up to date of the drive?

Are the latest AMD chipset drivers installed from here? Updates by AMD tools won´t be that new sometimes
https://www.amd.com/en/support

check with a different tool like:
christaldiskmark
or as ssd

Is it running at PCIe 4.0 or 3.0?

Any other background apps writing on it when you run the benchmark?

 

[Deleted member 2720853]

is the firmware up to date of the drive?

Are the latest AMD chipset drivers installed from here? Updates by AMD tools won´t be that new sometimes
https://www.amd.com/en/support

check with a different tool like:
christaldiskmark
or as ssd

Is it running at PCIe 4.0 or 3.0?

Any other background apps writing on it when you run the benchmark?

Firmware is up to date. Chipset drivers are up to date. It's running at PCIe 4. All benchmark software you mentioned have the same 6800 mb/s read, 1200 mb/s write.
No background apps.

 

[mdd1963]

Samsung's NVME driver reinstalled? (might have had some elements overwritten in WIndows updates, chipset driver updates, etc.)

Within Device Manager/Storage Controllers, is 'Samsung NVME Controller' shown?

 

[Deleted member 2720853]

Samsung's NVME driver reinstalled? (might have had some elements overwritten in WIndows updates, chipset driver updates, etc.)

Within Device Manager/Storage Controllers, is 'Samsung NVME Controller' shown?

There is no Samsung NVMe driver for 980 Pro.

 

[helpstar]

I think I found the culprit:
intelligent Turbo write technology
the cache's size is 512MB, after that, the speed will decrease. so that should be normal. try with IOmeter
Samsung writes :
¹ Performance may vary depending on the SSD’s firmware version and the system hardware & system configuration. Performance measurements are based on IOmeter 1.1.0. The write performances were measured with Intelligent TurboWrite technology being activated. The sequential write performances after Intelligent TurboWrite region are: up to 500MB/s(250GB), 1,000MB/s(500GB) and 2,000MB/s(1TB and 2TB).

 

[Maxxify]

TurboWrite is just Samsung's name for SLC caching. Indeed, TLC speeds are much lower than SLC for sequential writes. You can even calculate it - as stated by the poster above me, Samsung lists it as 1000 MB/s for the 500GB SKU, but it's a simple matter of 16 dies (256Gb/32GiB dies up to 512GiB of flash) times two-way interleaving (two planes) times 450µs tPROG (as given by Samsung's technical document) with a 16KiB page size and you get ~1100 MiB/s (math here) or 1165 MB/s which matches OP's result.

 

[Deleted member 2720853]

got the 3B2QGXA7 firmware today, and it fixed this issue... we'll see how long it lasts...

 

[seandillon]

I've installed last firmware (3B2QGXA7). But I didn't see any change after new firmware. You can see previous and current results. Also I've added my second NVMe (WD Blue SN550 NVMe) results to compare. At least after firmware write speed is stable but very slow. Before firmware I saw 2Gb/S write speed sometimes.

Samsung 980 Pro Results :
before firmware :

After firmware :

WD Blue SN550 NVMe - Results :

 

[Deleted member 2720853]

I've installed last firmware (3B2QGXA7). But I didn't see any change after new firmware. You can see previous and current results. Also I've added my second NVMe (WD Blue SN550 NVMe) results to compare. At least after firmware write speed is stable but very slow. Before firmware I saw 2Gb/S write speed sometimes.

Samsung 980 Pro Results :
before firmware :

After firmware :

WD Blue SN550 NVMe - Results :

That's way too slow even for the exhausted write cache. I think there's something else going on here.

 

[seandillon]

That's way too slow even for the exhausted write cache. I think there's something else going on here.

Could you please try and share results with close "Enable write caching on the device" from DeviceManager->DiskDrives->Disk->Properties->Policies?
I've added two situation.

Thank you