Samsung 950 Pro 256 GB performance dropping

I've got the 950 Pro mounted in an Asus M.2 PCIe adaptor from day one and have been using it as my OS drive in an ASUS Z97M- Plus mobo with an i7-4790 cpu, 16 GB of ram. It's been in use about 2 years now and no hardware changes to the system since i built the PC.

Original benchmarking with samsung's magician showed sammy's advertised specs -2550 MB/s read & 1500 MB/s write speeds. Other performance utilities, namely AS SSD, ATTO Benchmark & Anvil Benchmark also supported or confirmed Samsung's magician's samplings.

Then i started to notice a downward trend - this afternoon read speed had dropped to 1540 MB/s and write speed to 876 MB/s, so read speed is down 40% and write speed slightly more.

Heat is not an issue as i've had a small 40MMx20mm fan mounted directly above the controller on the SSD, and temps are monitored with Hard Disk Sentinel - have never seen the disk temp go above 57C

Samsung magician also reports the drive is in "good" health and shows 5.1 TB have been written to it.

Are others experiencing that kind of performance drop?
 
Solution
Update. I finally was able to restore my performance. My experience was very similar to yours from a huge drop between installation of the Samsung drive to what it was after a year. This last step seems to have worked for me. I had purchased a new NVMe drive and moved my OS to it. That new drive had the speed that the Samsung used to have, but the Samsung would not improve with all the formatting and updated. I just went into the Disc Management and deleted the old drive. I then went into Device Manager and deleted the Samsung NVMe drivers. After reboot, I used the Samsung Magician to find the drive and erase it. Then I reinstalled the NVMe Express 2.1 software. Went back into Disc Management, made a Simple Drive for the...

rkzhao

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Mar 8, 2016
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SSD performance are expected to drop slightly as the NAND is used up but it shouldn't be anything that drastic.

What about your random performance?

One theory could be that you general use is utilizes more random than sequential workloads so the drive is more preconditioned for random performance, and not for maximum sequential performance.
 


yeah, i had updated the driver to 2.1 hoping that would bring back it's performance

and also i should have said, i used the optimization guide that THESSDReview has detailed on their web. All settings, including the high performance power setting have remained unchanged since i installed this drive.

Random performance benchmarks are showing a similiar drop in speeds

currently, C drive is partitioned with 136 GB with 82 GB free, and the data partition is 94.7 GB with 46 GB free
 
I have a feeling that the partitioning you have done may be responsible for your issues. Performance drops as the drive is feeling with data but in your case the partitioning thing may have made that performance drop even worse. You shouldn't have partitioned such a small SSD.

EDIT: Also what about the over-provisioning, have you enabled it? Because from your partition numbers you don't seem to have. If you had the over-provisioning enabled, you shouldn't experience such a large performance drop.
 
i tried unallocating 27 GB - no increase in speed

what doesn't make sense to me, this is how the OS drive has always been partitioned, ie a "C" and "D" partition and it ran per samsung's specs for quite a while. About six months ago i moved this drive to use as a video "worktable" drive, for maybe 4 months. Before moving it back as an OS drive, i wiped it 5X with EaseUS Partition master, and did a clean re-install of windows from scratch

tks for the responses
 

svan71

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Dec 31, 2007
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941's over 2 years ago were not supported parted magic has had multiple updates since adding nvme support long ago.

 

DingyBell

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Mar 10, 2017
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Update. I finally was able to restore my performance. My experience was very similar to yours from a huge drop between installation of the Samsung drive to what it was after a year. This last step seems to have worked for me. I had purchased a new NVMe drive and moved my OS to it. That new drive had the speed that the Samsung used to have, but the Samsung would not improve with all the formatting and updated. I just went into the Disc Management and deleted the old drive. I then went into Device Manager and deleted the Samsung NVMe drivers. After reboot, I used the Samsung Magician to find the drive and erase it. Then I reinstalled the NVMe Express 2.1 software. Went back into Disc Management, made a Simple Drive for the erased NVMe, formatted it, and rebooted. After that, I used the Magician program again to check performance and it was restored. Hope this helps.
 
Solution