Question Is there a problem with my SSD or am I misunderstanding internet speeds?

[Eliden09]

System Specs -
Built in: 2019
CPU: Ryzen 5 2600
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 2x8 3200mhz
GPU: Ryzen RX 580
MOBO: MSI B450M PRO-VDH
STORAGE: (old/not installed) Western Digital Blue 1TB HDD 7200RPM, (new/installed in late 2021 ) Western Digital Green 1TB SATAIII SSD 6Gb/s up to 500MB/s

In August of 2021 I ordered a Western Digital Green SSD to replace my aging HDD. The HDD was not having any crippling failures but I vaguely remember it beginning to have a stuttering problem.

The SSD arrived and it ran relatively well for a bit, but pretty soon after it was having troubles when it came to downloading large files(notably on Steam but it occurred in other places such as EA where large games would be downloaded. Browser downloads felt unaffected). The disk would be jammed at 100% usage causing the whole system to stutter/freeze and be generally unusable for the duration of the download(or at least until I paused it). Been having this trouble since then and just dealt with it.

However today I set up my PC at my new apartment where I now have access to 1000mb/s internet speeds and an ethernet cable to connect myself to the router. I did a windows restart on my PC as I'd spoken to my Uncle at one point about it and ultimately just decided to reinstall windows now just to clear out any bad installation. Though the computer no longer notably freezes up and is still jams the disk to 100% when downloading a game from Steam causing the download speeds to jump all over the place.

Opened up the disk optimization app for Windows and ran some optimizations. Still having the same trouble. I'm having some new thoughts on what it might be and that perhaps a lot of what's going on can be fixed but I'm going about it the wrong way (i.e. trying to download at speeds the SSD can't handle causing the system to work itself too hard).

Wanted to see what you guys thought and see if maybe I'm just misunderstanding something.

Thank you for your time!

 

[Tioym]

If your download speed is greater than your disk write speed AND if that disk is running your OS while also writing huge files to itself, then yes you will get a lot of lag.

 

[USAFRet]

Assuming it is working correctly, your SSD is massively faster than your internet speed.
Even a spinning HDD is faster.

 

[Eliden09]

If your download speed is greater than your disk write speed AND if that disk is running your OS while also writing huge files to itself, then yes you will get a lot of lag.

That sounds about what I'm doing to the poor thing.

The HDD is currently not hooked up because it was replaced by the current SSD. So the SSD has everything on it, OS included.

I'm going to guess if I were to acquire a second SSD or reuse my HDD and take some of the strain off of the current one it could potentially help speed it up a little?

 

[Eliden09]

Assuming it is working correctly, your SSD is massively faster than your internet speed.
Even a spinning HDD is faster.

The internet is supposed to be a gigabit connection. I've got the cable connected directly to the PC as well.

I think the maximum write speed of the SSD is 500MB/s.

 

[USAFRet]

The internet is supposed to be a gigabit connection. I've got the cable connected directly to the PC as well.

I think the maximum write speed of the SSD is 500MB/s.

megaBytes vs megabits.
Big B vs small b
Bytes vs bits = 8:1 ratio

gigabit = ~120MB/s.

Your SSD can read/write at about 500MB/s.

Approx 4-5 times faster.


Having said that, the WD Green SATA III is a slow performer, even in the SATA world.
But it can accept data much faster than your internet connection can feed it. Assuming it actually works OK.

 

[Eliden09]

megaBytes vs megabits.
Big B vs small b
Bytes vs bits = 8:1 ratio

gigabit = ~120MB/s.

Your SSD can read/write at about 500MB/s.

Approx 4-5 times faster.


Having said that, the WD Green SATA III is a slow performer, even in the SATA world.
But it can accept data much faster than your internet connection can feed it. Assuming it actually works OK.

If I'm finding all the correct information then.

According to Amazon, the WD Green SSD has a data transfer rate of 6 Gigabits per second. It doesn't explain the 500 MegaBytes per second measurement.

According to AT&T, my max internet speed is 940 Megabits per second.

Does this further support the theory that the SSD is faster than the internet? If so, what causes it to jam up to 100% Disk usage and cause the system to stutter?

 

[USAFRet]

If I'm finding all the correct information then.

According to Amazon, the WD Green SSD has a data transfer rate of 6 Gigabits per second. It doesn't explain the 500 MegaBytes per second measurement.

According to AT&T, my max internet speed is 940 Megabits per second.

Does this further support the theory that the SSD is faster than the internet? If so, what causes it to jam up to 100% Disk usage and cause the system to stutter?

The 500MB/s is around the max for the SATA III bus.
All SATA III SSDs do around that, or a little more. Maybe 550-560.
I have 4 such in my current system.

While I don't have gigabit internet service, I do have a standard gigabit LAN connection between my PC and my NAS
Substituting the gigabit LAN connection for your gigabit internet connection....the network is the limiting factor.

 

[Eliden09]

The 500MB/s is around the max for the SATA III bus.
All SATA III SSDs do around that, or a little more. Maybe 550-560.
I have 4 such in my current system.

While I don't have gigabit internet service, I do have a standard gigabit LAN connection between my PC and my NAS
Substituting the gigabit LAN connection for your gigabit internet connection....the network is the limiting factor.

That doesn't fully explain why the disk gets jammed at 100% usage causing the system to lock up. What is that about?

Is the earlier response correct about having the OS installed on this SSD a reason for it to lag or does that mean a potential fault somewhere in the hardware/software?

 

[USAFRet]

That doesn't fully explain why the disk gets jammed at 100% usage causing the system to lock up. What is that about?

Is the earlier response correct about having the OS installed on this SSD a reason for it to lag or does that mean a potential fault somewhere in the hardware/software?

The OS being on the same drive as the games and Stream download affects, but NOT in any major way.
That is the default configuration for most people and systems.

How full is this WD Green?

 

[Eliden09]

The OS being on the same drive as the games and Stream download affects, but NOT in any major way.
That is the default configuration for most people and systems.

How full is this WD Green?

Currently at 461gb out of 929gb.

Usually hover around the 100gb mark if it weren't for the windows reset. I typically try to keep it above 100gb's of storage.

Though I can note that though the disk gets jammed to 100% it does not lock up the system as of now.

 

[MWink64]

megaBytes vs megabits.
Big B vs small b
Bytes vs bits = 8:1 ratio

gigabit = ~120MB/s.

Your SSD can read/write at about 500MB/s.

Approx 4-5 times faster.


Having said that, the WD Green SATA III is a slow performer, even in the SATA world.
But it can accept data much faster than your internet connection can feed it. Assuming it actually works OK.

500MB/s is best case scenario sequentials. Real world performance is likely to be much lower, especially on such a low end drive. It's possible that the pSLC cache is filling up. 120MB/s is well beyond the direct-to-TLC/QLC speeds of most cheap SATA drives. That doesn't even get into the possibility that this isn't all sequential writes. Additionally, some drives do have issues that can cause frequent freezing. I don't know if the WD Green is one of them but I know some consider it "garbage" tier.

 

[Eliden09]

500MB/s is best case scenario sequentials. Real world performance is likely to be much lower, especially on such a low end drive. It's possible that the pSLC cache is filling up. 120MB/s is well beyond the direct-to-TLC/QLC speeds of most cheap SATA drives. That doesn't even get into the possibility that this isn't all sequential writes. Additionally, some drives do have issues that can cause frequent freezing. I don't know if the WD Green is one of them but I know some consider it "garbage" tier.

Is there a way to remedy the problem or am I just going to have to tough it out until I'm able to rebuild a different PC and shoot for a more reliable brand of SSD?

 

[USAFRet]

Is there a way to remedy the problem or am I just going to have to tough it out until I'm able to rebuild a different PC and shoot for a more reliable brand of SSD?

First, you need to determine what :the problem" is. If there actually is a problem.

It might be the drive.
Or the data coming from Steam.
Or your ISP.
Or something else in your system.

The SSD arrived and it ran relatively well for a bit, but pretty soon after it was having troubles when it came to downloading large files(notably on Steam but it occurred in other places such as EA where large games would be downloaded. Browser downloads felt unaffected).

To me, this suggests that "the problem" is not on your end.

 

[Misgar]

I found this review of the 1TB WD Blue SATA SSD drive which should be similar to the 1TB WD Green SATA SSD, but not exactly the same.

https://www.fudzilla.com/reviews/41822-wd-blue-1tb-ssd-review?start=4

The Crystal Disk Mark results show the 1TB Blue is saturating the SATA3 bus at 556.3MB/s when reading back very large sequential files.

Random read performance of small files with a block size of 4K is much slower at only 37.45MB/s, but this figure is still orders of magnitude better than most hard drives.

If you're downloading thousands of small files from Steam, disk performance will slow down considerably. Sequential Read/Write speeds for individual large files (tens or hundreds of MB each) will be much better.

As a contrast, modern high speed Gen5 M.2 NVMe drives are much faster than SATA SSDs. See below.

 

[kanewolf]

I found this review of the 1TB WD Blue SATA SSD drive which should be similar to the 1TB WD Green SATA SSD, but not exactly the same.

https://www.fudzilla.com/reviews/41822-wd-blue-1tb-ssd-review?start=4

The Crystal Disk Mark results show the 1TB Blue is saturating the SATA3 bus at 556.3MB/s when reading back very large sequential files.

Random read performance of small files with a block size of 4K is much slower at only 37.45MB/s, but this figure is still orders of magnitude better than most hard drives.

If you're downloading thousands of small files from Steam, disk performance will slow down considerably. Sequential Read/Write speeds for individual large files (tens or hundreds of MB each) will be much better.

As a contrast, modern high speed Gen5 M.2 NVMe drives are much faster than SATA SSDs. See below.

M.2 NVMe drives BENCHMARK much faster. Real life differences are sub-second and typically not noticeable in day to day usage. Could you notice a large scene load faster in a game? Possible. Will you notice a difference in downloading a game file? No. Is the 0.5 second difference in opening Word noticable? No.

 

[USAFRet]

Again, the drive speed is "faster" than the download speed.

Even a crappy WD Green running at 1/2 SATA III speed is faster than gigabit from your ISP.

 

[MWink64]

First, you need to determine what :the problem" is. If there actually is a problem.

It might be the drive.
Or the data coming from Steam.
Or your ISP.
Or something else in your system.



To me, this suggests that "the problem" is not on your end.

IMO, the fact that the drive is being pegged at 100% pretty much rules out the first two. It very much suggests the problem is on his end. Some SSDs do behave this way and can drop to speeds worse than a HD.

Additionally, some people don't realize just how much data Steam can write. When installing a new game, Steam begins by pre-allocating all the space it will use. It actually writes that quantity of data, before it even starts downloading anything. If you're installing a 100GB game, that's 100GB of writes, BEFORE the download even begins. This can easily overwhelm the pSLC buffer of many drives.

Updates can also be messy. Sometimes, even a very small update can result in a large amount of writes. The download may only be a few MB but require numerous GBs worth of writes.

I found this review of the 1TB WD Blue SATA SSD drive which should be similar to the 1TB WD Green SATA SSD, but not exactly the same.

https://www.fudzilla.com/reviews/41822-wd-blue-1tb-ssd-review?start=4

The Crystal Disk Mark results show the 1TB Blue is saturating the SATA3 bus at 556.3MB/s when reading back very large sequential files.

Random read performance of small files with a block size of 4K is much slower at only 37.45MB/s, but this figure is still orders of magnitude better than most hard drives.

If you're downloading thousands of small files from Steam, disk performance will slow down considerably. Sequential Read/Write speeds for individual large files (tens or hundreds of MB each) will be much better.

As a contrast, modern high speed Gen5 M.2 NVMe drives are much faster than SATA SSDs. See below.

The WD Blue (especially the ancient variant in that review) is substantially different than the WD Green. The Green and some variants of the Blue were on opposite ends of the spectrum. BTW, you absolutely don't need a gen 5 NVMe to get good speeds.