[SOLVED] SSD health problem, need help on how to diagnose this and also need help on transferring the pagefile.sys

[killerblade257]

Hey guys! This is my first post here, so sorry if I'm doing mistakes/violating rules. This is gonna be a two part thread in one single thread — Dunno if it makes sense but here it goes.

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I bought this Kingston's A400 (240GB) SSD on November 15. I had to reformat is for a fresh install of W10. No biggie. SSD was running smooth. I went over to my friend (Who bought the same SSD on the same day) and asked him for SSD benchmarks, we both used CrystalDisk. His SSD was about 50% faster than mine. I wondered why, so I researched and noticed my SATA was set to IDE.

Again, I had to slap a fresh W10 on the SSD just to set my drives to AHCI. So we got that, yes. Everything was working fine. Read and writes (benchmark) were on the level of my friend's SSD (which is the advertised speed), so I was good. Until I checked on November 28th, my SSD health went to 98%, I don't know how but that's how it is and NOTE my friend is just 1% healthier than me. So whenever I go down a %, he goes down too. The only "major writes/reads" I have done is transferring damn Adobe Media Encoder to my harddrive as I suspected it was the cause of the health decrease. I transferred it about 10x until I figured out a way on how to slap them into my HDD. Time moves forward, it decreases and decreases until today. December 18 of 2018, my SSD is lowered to 95% — HERE are screenshots of what Hard Disk Sentinel says along with the S.M.A.R.T data
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Why 2 part you say? Because apparently my friend found a solution to this problem. It stopped his SSD health from going down, that's for sure. His SSD's health is stuck at 97% now instead of being 96% (as mentioned, he's just 1% healthier than me) which means his solution worked. The solution was this

I did the exact same thing exact I still have a page file on my SSD, which to my head, it didn't work despite I have done what it said on the linked solution. And yes, my friend did it successfully, which is why his SSD is at 97%.

Here's a screenshot of how my VM is configured

Here's a screenshot of an error I keep getting each time I launch my PC and when I go to the VM settings

Here's a screenshot of both C: and HDD drive (F: ) with the pagefile.sys

and finally, this is what it tells me when I try to delete pagefile.sys on my C: drive

I AM SORRY IF THERE'S ANY MISTAKES please tell me when there is one and I'll be damn happy to edit/fix it. I'm just worried about my SSD health, knowing it's health is degrading that fast in just 1 month.

 

[RealBeast]

Drive Life: I wouldn't worry about it. You've written 3.31 TB and the specification for this drive calls for 80TBW (TB written) but I would expect that you will get more, probably a lot more. You've done a few Windows installs and those generate a lot of writes. I suspect that the life indicator is simply based upon assuming that it will fail at its guaranteed minimum life (80 TBW) so quit testing it and just use your computer.

Paging file: I would set a minimum static file size on the SSD just to make Windows happy (so custom size 16MB minimum and maximum size) and then on one of your HDDs set a static paging file of 2048MB or 4096MB -- so set both the upper and lower size to that value. You don't want Windows to waste time resizing the file, thus just set it to a static size and don't worry about it any more.

 

[killerblade257]

Drive Life: I wouldn't worry about it. You've written 3.31 TB and the specification for this drive calls for 80TBW (TB written) but I would expect that you will get more, probably a lot more. You've done a few Windows installs and those generate a lot of writes. I suspect that the life indicator is simply based upon assuming that it will fail at its guaranteed minimum life (80 TBW) so quit testing it and just use your computer.

Paging file: I would set a minimum static file size on the SSD just to make Windows happy (so custom size 16MB minimum and maximum size) and then on one of your HDDs set a static paging file of 2048MB or 4096MB -- so set both the upper and lower size to that value. You don't want Windows to waste time resizing the file, thus just set it to a static size and don't worry about it any more.

And what about my SSDs health? Isn't 95% after 1 month a bit weird and worrisome for you? Well it is for me knowing people have their SSD and it dropping to 92% after like a year or more of use with like 35 ~ 50 TBW

 

[RealBeast]

SSD Health = my Drive Life comment, it is simply a calculation that I would not be concerned about. Just use your computer and keep an eye on it periodically. It seems that Kingston SSD Manager may run on it and it might be worth using.

 

[killerblade257]

SSD Health = my Drive Life comment, it is simply a calculation that I would not be concerned about. Just use your computer and keep an eye on it periodically. It seems that Kingston SSD Manager may run on it and it might be worth using.

I have used your solution and it just kept crashing my game (Rainbow Six Siege) on startup as the total paging file size was on 16MB. I changed it to this — Yes I have used safe mode. I also did my current configuration with safe mode too, booting into normal mode it just gave me the same error from above.

HERE are screenshots from using Kingston SSD Manager, I didn't posted them since they are the same with HDSentinel

 

[RealBeast]

How much physical memory do you have?

Try a larger page file size on the SSD but keep it static, I would start with 1024MB for the upper and lower custom limits. It is very odd that you are having this problem with a large pagefile on your HDD.

 

[killerblade257]

How much physical memory do you have?

Try a larger page file size on the SSD but keep it static, I would start with 1024MB for the upper and lower custom limits. It is very odd that you are having this problem with a large pagefile on your HDD.

Sorry for the late reply. I have 8GBx2@DDR3 of RAM. Planning to upgrade soon though. Build might be finished by mid-2019. But yea, about my SSD and it's health + pagefile.sys problem

 

[RealBeast]

No problem, sometimes we have to work or do honey-do's. :lol:

With 16GB of physical memory you should rarely access the paging file.

Clearly something seems amiss, you'll have to just keep adjusting until the issue resolves. I've not run any paging file for a long time on any computer with 16GB of memory or more and never had an issue, although all of those machines are W7.

 

[killerblade257]

No problem, sometimes we have to work or do honey-do's. :lol:

With 16GB of physical memory you should rarely access the paging file.

Clearly something seems amiss, you'll have to just keep adjusting until the issue resolves. I've not run any paging file for a long time on any computer with 16GB of memory or more and never had an issue, although all of those machines are W7.

Oh well, I just hope my SSD will last until this build gets completed. If you want to leave suggestions go ahead, I don't wanna fully OC it to the max, just some tweaks. I also won't be getting a B450 MOBA as I could get a 470x during sales.

And oh, SSD life % does not decrease performance, right? So if like my SSD is at 50% will I still get the same performance as how it was back on 100% or will I be experiencing lags, stutters, crashes and stuff

 

[RealBeast]

No, the SSD life indicator increasing does not decrease performance.

But that 80TBW value is probably pretty conservative, I still run an old Intel 80GB X25M that has hundreds of TBW as a scratch file for Adobe -- I'll run it until it dies, which may be after me.