SSD causing games to download painfully slow

[DeliveryGodNoah]

I have two drives in my PC:

One Seagate 300GB HDD 7200RPM
One PNY 480GB Optima SSD

The problem has been that downloading game from Steam (for example, but other digital platforms deliver the same experience) has been very slow when downloading to my SSD.

It will start out fast for about 10 seconds, at ~12 MB/s, and then immedietly drop to speeds of 4 MB/s or less.

I downloaded the exact same game, on the exact same Steam server, just on my HDD, and it downloaded in a matter of minutes at ~28 MB/s constantly, with no drops.

I ran a tool called AS SSD, and the results started at well over 150 MB/s for a brief moment, and quickly dropped to less than 8 MB/s and continuing to drop.

Is my SSD just dying? This is the first SSD I ever had and I only had it for less than 2 years in the same system. And when I download anything to it, programs that were already previously installed on it open a lot slower.

 

[Paul NZ]

See if there's a firmware update for the ssd

 

[photonboy]

I'd be surprised if a firmware update helped. It sounds like the CONTROLLER is failing.

If you plan to try a firmware update (if one exists) you should assume it will BRICK your SSD. Thus you should copy/clone your data to another drive.

You can even use a tool like Seagate's Disc Wizard to make a backup IMAGE (if you have space which I doubt) to backup the SSD. It depends on what you have installed but it MAY compress (use highest compression option) to less than HALF the used space, sometimes even a third. (i.e. if you used 400GB it may compress to 150GB).

If you have enough space you should make a backup Image right frigging now!!

IMO the SSD is on life support and thus could die any day now.

WARRANTY should still apply?

I would consider doing THIS:

1) Buy an SSD (perhaps from Samsung)
2) CLONE the data over
3) RMA (warranty) the SSD
4) Use the SSD for more games or whatever when you get it back

 

[photonboy]

BTW the "150MBps" speed might simply be the SSD cache filling up first, then when the controller tries to move the data over to the main memory it is having problems.

 

[DeliveryGodNoah]

Well I went to the PNY website and got their Firmware updater tool and ran it, selected my drive and the flashware image, but I keep getting a Fatal Error. I tried running as admin as well and no luck.

 

[photonboy]

Well I went to the PNY website and got their Firmware updater tool and ran it, selected my drive and the flashware image, but I keep getting a Fatal Error. I tried running as admin as well and no luck.

as I said, I think the SSD is dying. I would recommend you follow my advice above... though optionally you could get a cheap HDD for now and do this:

1) buy 1TB HDD for $45 or so
2) CLONE SSD to HDD
3) RMA the SSD
4) when replacement SSD arrives clone back, then use 1TB HDD for backup or whatever
5) Make a backup IMAGE of the SSD (Windows drive) in case of failure in the future

*I use Acronis True Image ($50USD) to backup my SSD every week automatically so I can RESTORE a backup for problems just like this. A small learning curve to use it, but basically I have FULL backup, then Differentials for several weeks... then it's set to auto DELETE older backups to save space thus I never touch things.

For a tool like this you also need to have a CD/DVD, or USB stick with the RESTORE utility so you can boot and access the backup IMAGE (i.e. swap to new SSD, then boot to USB stick to restore backup image from HDD to new SSD)

 

[DeliveryGodNoah]

Well I went to the PNY website and got their Firmware updater tool and ran it, selected my drive and the flashware image, but I keep getting a Fatal Error. I tried running as admin as well and no luck.

as I said, I think the SSD is dying. I would recommend you follow my advice above... though optionally you could get a cheap HDD for now and do this:

1) buy 1TB HDD for $45 or so
2) CLONE SSD to HDD
3) RMA the SSD
4) when replacement SSD arrives clone back, then use 1TB HDD for backup or whatever
5) Make a backup IMAGE of the SSD (Windows drive) in case of failure in the future

*I use Acronis True Image ($50USD) to backup my SSD every week automatically so I can RESTORE a backup for problems just like this. A small learning curve to use it, but basically I have FULL backup, then Differentials for several weeks... then it's set to auto DELETE older backups to save space thus I never touch things.

For a tool like this you also need to have a CD/DVD, or USB stick with the RESTORE utility so you can boot and access the backup IMAGE (i.e. swap to new SSD, then boot to USB stick to restore backup image from HDD to new SSD)

The only data on the SSD are games, and I'm not too worried about losing those as I can redownload them whenever. However I appreciate the warning.

It just seems odd that it got this way almost suddenly. I'll just have to grab my smaller SSD from my brother's PC for now then and look into buying a new one I suppose.

 

[JoeMomma]

The question nobody asked is:

Why are you doing a 12MB/s download to a 500MB/s SSD, when your much more durable 100MB/s HDD can easily handle it at 28MB/s?
Oh yeah . . . Steam.

It does sound like your SSD is dying. Drastic slow downs was the first warning sign before mine died.
Is it always nearly full? Have you defragged it? Both of those actions will kill an SSD.
Just getting a new one would be the safest thing.

 

[DeliveryGodNoah]

The question nobody asked is:

Why are you doing a 12MB/s download to a 500MB/s SSD, when your much more durable 100MB/s HDD can easily handle it at 28MB/s?
Oh yeah . . . Steam.

It does sound like your SSD is dying. Drastic slow downs was the first warning sign before mine died.
Is it always nearly full? Have you defragged it? Both of those actions will kill an SSD.
Just getting a new one would be the safest thing.

I don't understand your question.

I'm trying to download them to the SSD because I thought they'd load faster, and because game with texture streaming have less hitching while loading textures in off the SSD.

And that's one thing I forgot to mention is that I don't exactly have long load times in games at all, in fact most times it's still faster than my HDD, but maybe not as fast as it once was.

But no, I haven't defragged it ever, and it's always had about 80-100GBs free with the exception of one time when I had Elder Scrolls Online installed.

 

[JoeMomma]

The question nobody asked is:
Why are you doing a 12MB/s download to a 500MB/s SSD, when your much more durable 100MB/s HDD can easily handle it at 28MB/s?

I don't understand your question.

The question can be summarized as this.
Just because you connect a fire hose to your kitchen faucet, you are not going to get any more water out of it.

A download will never go faster than a Hard Drive can keep up with (unless you have some super duper connection). And using a SSD as a download drive is a waste. But I understand, my Steam library is on a SSD too, so it downloads there by default.

My point is, slow downloads are not usually caused by your drive, unless it is broken.
Look elsewhere for the bottleneck.

 

[DeliveryGodNoah]

The question nobody asked is:
Why are you doing a 12MB/s download to a 500MB/s SSD, when your much more durable 100MB/s HDD can easily handle it at 28MB/s?

I don't understand your question.

The question can be summarized as this.
Just because you connect a fire hose to your kitchen faucet, you are not going to get any more water out of it.

A download will never go faster than a Hard Drive can keep up with (unless you have some super duper connection). And using a SSD as a download drive is a waste. But I understand, my Steam library is on a SSD too, so it downloads there by default.

My point is, slow downloads are not usually caused by your drive, unless it is broken.
Look elsewhere for the bottleneck.

But I don't understand what else would be the cause if it's not broken.

If the game can download at the speed my internet can handle on my hard drive, why would is suddenly download so slow on my SSD? It was the exact same game from the exact same server, I can't understand where else the bottleneck would possibly be.

I'm not asking my SSD to download faster than my hard drive, I'm wondering why it's downloading so dramatically slower.

 

[JoeMomma]

The question nobody asked is:
Why are you doing a 12MB/s download to a 500MB/s SSD, when your much more durable 100MB/s HDD can easily handle it at 28MB/s?

I don't understand your question.

The question can be summarized as this.
Just because you connect a fire hose to your kitchen faucet, you are not going to get any more water out of it.

A download will never go faster than a Hard Drive can keep up with (unless you have some super duper connection). And using a SSD as a download drive is a waste. But I understand, my Steam library is on a SSD too, so it downloads there by default.

My point is, slow downloads are not usually caused by your drive, unless it is broken.
Look elsewhere for the bottleneck.

But I don't understand what else would be the cause if it's not broken.

If the game can download at the speed my internet can handle on my hard drive, why would is suddenly download so slow on my SSD? It was the exact same game from the exact same server, I can't understand where else the bottleneck would possibly be.

I'm not asking my SSD to download faster than my hard drive, I'm wondering why it's downloading so dramatically slower.

I'm sorry I don't know the answer.
It just seemed to me that you were asking the wrong question.

Unfortunately this may be one of those times when the best answer is to throw money at the problem and put in a New SSD so you can test to see if it helps.

 

[photonboy]

Again, I'm fairly certain it's a failing SSD.

You have two indicators:
1) slow transfer speed, and
2) Fatal Error trying to flash the SSD

Other:
a) if you keep the "Steamapps" folder for Steam then all the games in it will not need to be downloaded again. Just use the same FOLDER in Steam library settings and move the Steamapps folder back over if you copied to an HDD temporarily

I know you said you don't care

b) I don't quite understand "JoeMomma" point either. This one:
"My point is, slow downloads are not usually caused by your drive, unless it is broken.
Look elsewhere for the bottleneck."

Yes, the drive IS broken likely. Why look "elsewhere" for the bottleneck when the download happens FASTER to an HDD? Everything else is the same, and of course he tested with AS-SSD which also showed a problem.

Summary:
So to be CLEAR, again, I'm fairly certain that what you see is that the SSD onboard cache (small, fast buffer) is filling up first during testing/transfers, but then there is a PROBLEM writing to the main memory of the SSD so the speed plummets.

There's mainly a Controller, fast memory cache, and main SSD memory so I'd guess the Controller but regardless it is almost certainly a bad SSD.

 

[DeliveryGodNoah]

I just wanted to update and say it was indeed the SSD going bad. I ended up getting a replacement and downloading anything to the new SSD is as fast as my internet will allow.