Question Kingston SSD slower than my HDD

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NirzarLakhia

May 14, 2019
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Yesterday I swapped my old hdd for a new Kingston 480gb ssd. Thinking that the performance would improve, but to my embarasment I think it is much slower than my hdd. I have 2 hard drive slots, hence I have SSD in 1 and my old HDD in other , I have tried to copy 11 GB of data in both. But it took exactly 5 minutes in SSD , While it takes only 4 minutes or even less in my age old HDD?very funny, now I think I should have simply bought a new HDD? Any idea why this is happening? ... I have Toshiba 2nd generation laptop with 8 GB ram
 
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bigpinkdragon286

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Oct 3, 2012
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I wouldn't spend any time bench marking the SSD. It's likely just fine, and you'll be asking yourself why it benches fine but doesn't work in your real world scenario.

SSDs are not better at large, sustained data writes, especially low capacity or cheap SSDs. If you need high amounts of sustained writing capacity, at high speeds, you're looking at a different tier of SSD altogether.

In short, you exceeded the drive's internal cache that it uses to maintain fast write speeds, which on a Kingston drive like that is very likely around 8 GB, and as a result, you got stuck writing at the underlying TLC speed of the flash chips, rather than the SLC/MLC buffer write speeds. Don't overrun the buffer and the drive should do just fine. The buffer will flush after a period of inactivity, so it isn't as though the drive will be permanently hobbled.

Slow writes aside, SSDs have very high, uniform seek rates, fast reads, and good throughput. The great seek times are what make them so responsive.

If you want a larger buffer, some higher priced drives have 16 GB while others still are equipped with 32 GB. This is also dependent on the capacity of the drive, as capacity is being taken from the flash chips and partitioned as SLC/MLC rather than TLC/QLC to facilitate the higher write speeds.
 
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Darkbreeze

Darkbreeze

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^^^That.

Your new SSD is probably not going to be any faster unless you are copying from or to another SSD. Your speeds will be limited (When copying to or from other devices) by the speed of the slowest device. Accessing the data that is already ON the drive, or saving/creating files to the drive from memory, will be magnitudes faster, independent of any other factors.

SSDs are not better at large, sustained data writes
Click to expand...

That's wrong. That is EXACTLY what they ARE good at. Much better in fact, not even comparable, to mechanical hard drives. But it also matters, again, what you are writing to or copying from.

It's random operations where SSDs tend to fall short and not offer a terrific improvement over hard drives. Optane and some newer SSDs with improvements in control and design are getting better in that area though. Probably won't be long before they are much better at both sequential and random operations, by a significant margin. Fact is though, they are already better at both. There is nothing that a mechanical hard drive can do better than an SSD, except, in some cases, last.
 
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bigpinkdragon286

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Darkbreeze said:
That's wrong. That is EXACTLY what they ARE good at. Much better in fact, not even comparable, to mechanical hard drives. But it also matters, again, what you are writing to or copying from.
Click to expand...

To quote a Tom's article:
Sustained Sequential Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSD makers implement an SLC cache buffer, which is a fast area of SLC-programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the SLC cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We hammer the SSDs with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the SLC buffer and performance after the buffer is saturated.
Click to expand...

Once the buffer space or any RAM backing gets used up when writing to an SSD, writes slow down to the speed of the underlying flash chips, in conjunction with whatever data juggling techniques the particular make/model of SSD has baked into firmware. This has improved drastically over the years, and in many cases now, writes are still faster after the buffer space has been used up than most hard drives, but not in all cases.

This behavior is evident in benchmarks.

Without a specific model of drive to reference, even though the OP has said the drive is new, it could be a model that has been on a store shelf for a few years already, and not have newer techniques for improved write speeds available in it.

Darkbreeze said:
It's random operations where SSDs tend to fall short and not offer a terrific improvement over hard drives.
Click to expand...
SSDs are rated in multiples of thousands of IOPS whereas hard drives are rated in hundreds so what are you talking about?
 
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ElectrO_90

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If the OP is copying from a HDD to SSD - how does he think it would be faster since it would go as fast as the HDD gives out the information.
Also, he probably then copied HDD to HDD which now means the HDD is copying internally.

That's my guess, since he hasn't come up with any information stating how he did it, or what his PC is
 
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NirzarLakhia

May 14, 2019
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Darkbreeze

Darkbreeze

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bigpinkdragon286 said:
To quote a Tom's article:


Once the buffer space or any RAM backing gets used up when writing to an SSD, writes slow down to the speed of the underlying flash chips, in conjunction with whatever data juggling techniques the particular make/model of SSD has baked into firmware. This has improved drastically over the years, and in many cases now, writes are still faster after the buffer space has been used up than most hard drives, but not in all cases.

This behavior is evident in benchmarks.

Without a specific model of drive to reference, even though the OP has said the drive is new, it could be a model that has been on a store shelf for a few years already, and not have newer techniques for improved write speeds available in it.

SSDs are rated in multiples of thousands of IOPS whereas hard drives are rated in hundreds so what are you talking about?
Click to expand...

You're living in the world of synthetic benchmarks, not real world usage.
 
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USAFRet

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NirzarLakhia said:
I randomly took 11gb data from my old HDD and copied to SSD and then I copied from SSD as well as old HDD back to other HDD. Both cases my HDD showed better speed
Click to expand...
Performance depends on the slowest device in the chain.

Here, either or both HDD's.
The SSD can only read from, or write to, an HDD as fast as the HDD can perform.

In both of your trials, the SSD was mostly sitting around waiting for the HDD.
Copy that same 11GB between 2 different SSD's, and your results would be markedly different.

On my system, just now:
Copying 10.5GB data from a SanDisk Ultra II 1TB to a Samsung 860 EVO 1TB.
166 files. 1x 6.8GB and the rest scattered smaller files, totaling 4.07GB.
26.1 sec
 
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USAFRet

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Or, between 2 much older SSD's. Samsung 840 EVO 250GB, from 2014.

Copying 9.9GB, a single .avi file
28.7 sec.

In this 9.9GB copy procedure, you can absolutely tell when the buffer fills. But it is still way faster than a spinning drive.
 
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