[SOLVED] Is my SSD faulty? If not, what's the problem?

[MrYossu]

Hello,

I have a Dell Precision T5810, whose main drive is a Samsung SSD 850 Pro 1Tb. I haven't had any issues with this, and it seems to be running OK.

Whilst checking another issue, I downloaded and ran a benchmark utility from www.userbenchmark.com, and was quite alarmed that they claimed my SSD was performing way below expectations...

Not altogether trusting this, I installed Samsung Magician, which spent some time scanning the disk and then popped up this message...

After I clicked the inappropriately named OK button (no, it's not OK actually!), the main Magician window showed this...

...which again indicates a pretty serious error.

I tried running Magician's benchmarks, and this gave...

I did a bit of a search, and it seems like these numbers are fine.

The Diagnostic Scan section of Magician showed a message "The selected drive does not support this feature", which again indicates an error, although is probably just a manifestation of the same issue as above. The Performance Optimisation section showed the same (or very similar) message for both optimisations.

However, the drive seems to be working fine. Windows runs, my programs run, my files are there, etc.

Still not convinced, I ran chkdsk on it, which gave the following...

Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.

A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)...
Cleaning up instance tags for file 0x27ac5.
1421056 file records processed. File verification completed.
2655 large file records processed. 0 bad file records processed. 2 EA records processed. 109 reparse records processed. CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 5)...
1862692 index entries processed. Index verification completed.
0 unindexed files scanned. 0 unindexed files recovered. CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)...
1421056 file SDs/SIDs processed. Cleaning up 2078 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 2078 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 2078 unused security descriptors.
Security descriptor verification completed.
220819 data files processed. CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
34889584 USN bytes processed. Usn Journal verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
1421040 files processed. File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
164125245 free clusters processed. Free space verification is complete.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the
master file table (MFT) bitmap.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

1000099839 KB total disk space.
341552880 KB in 928955 files.
490852 KB in 220820 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
1555123 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
656500984 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
250024959 total allocation units on disk.
164125246 allocation units available on disk.

Internal Info:
00 af 15 00 5a 8b 11 00 cc 8e 1e 00 00 00 00 00 ....Z...........
98 0f 00 00 6d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ....m...........
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................

Windows has finished checking your disk.
Please wait while your computer restarts.

As far as I can see, this is all fine.

So, does my SSD have a problem or not? Anyone able to advise?

Thanks

 

[DrummerManSpike]

I believe your SSD is fine. I've gotten the same kind of results from UserBenchmark showing that my drives are in the lower percentile (like 30th I think), however Magician shows me that I'm getting optimal transfer speeds. As long as you haven't personally noticed any performance decreases with real world applications, you should be just fine

 

[MrYossu]

@DrummerManSpike Thanks for the reply. Whilst it was UserBenchmark that made me check it out, I'm more bothered that Samsung's own utility reports problems. Don't know what to make of that.

I can't say I've noticed specific problems with the SSD, but my whole machine is performing pretty badly at the moment, and I haven't worked out the cause.

What do you think of the speeds that Magician showed from the benchmark? From what I could see by searching, they seem fine, but I'm no expert.

Thanks again.

 

[USAFRet]

Those Magician Benchmark numbers look just right.
Identical Sequential to my several Samsung EVOs, a bit faster with the IOPS.

 

[DrummerManSpike]

From the drive's Amazon and Samsung.com spec sheet:
"Ultimate Sequential Read/Write Performance : Up to 550MB/s and 520MB/s Respectively, and Random Read/Write IOPS Performance : Up to 100K and 90K Respectively"

Assuming Magician's readings are accurate (unsure how to verify) you've got great speeds.

According to the Samsung Magician page, the 850 series should be completely compatible. I found an article here that comes with tips for fixing Magician's inability to verify the SSD among other issues. See if any of those help.

 

[MrYossu]

@DrummerManSpik Thanks for the reply. Glad to hear the speeds are OK!

Unfortunately, none of the suggestions in that linked article helped with Magician, but as the drive seems to be running fine, and Magician reports good data transfer speeds, I think I'll assume it's OK and leave well alone.

Thanks again.