SSD is always busy, extremely slow speeds

[SirLucas]

I have 2 drives, a 240GB SSD from PNY that my operating system and some games are on and a 1TB seagate hardrive for everything else. Lately it has been running extremely slow and whenever i try to move files or download something, it stops periodically and says it is busy writing to disk. This happens in normal system operation when nothing is open and i try to access a windows function like control panel or the task manager as well. Everything freezes for minutes at a time.
My system is:
i7 4770k
GTX 780ti dual classified from EVGA
8GB ram
win7
1000W PSU (has been making a high pitch sound on occasion in high usage)

Any help or ideas would be apppriciated

 

[jsmithepa]

It will happen when it starts filling up, don't go beyond 80% full. Run a maintenance utility if your SSD came with one. Run some benchmarks, if your SSD is performing worse than your HD then that guy is dying.

 

[ArtPog]

You obviously have a very nice system and shouldn't be experiencing the problem you described, at least to any degree.

The problem, of course, is what's causing this problem. The first thing we usually think of are the drives. It probably would be a good idea at the outset to test them using a diagnostic testing program (assuming you haven't do so already). I don't think PNY has a diagnostic test available for their SSDs but check it out at their website in case they do. If not, a decent program is this one at...http://hddscan.com/

For the Seagate use their SeaTools diagnostic at...
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/item/seatools-win-master/

The "whining" on occasion of the PSU may, or may not, be a source of the problem. It's hard to tell. With PSUs the only definitive way to determine if they're the source of a problem is to substitute another PSU. If you have a PSU tester that might prove useful.

Even the graphics card can be at the root of the problem. Again, only a replacement can determine whether a defective graphics card is the cause of the problem.

Anyway, at the least test the drives.

 

[SirLucas]

I just did the test using the software you provided and the read speeds were anywhere between 350MB/s and 400MB/s and never dropped below 350 and had 0 Bad sectors, the hard drive is also working fine it seems like (testing now). the problem started happening whilst playing GTA, it slowly started to get more and more frequent freezes but would recover but while it was frozen i couldn't alt tab or start task manager to close it and the only way to stop it was to do a cold reset. I deleted GTA and now while trying to re download it, it downloads for a bit then stops for a bit. When it's stopped, it's saying busy writing to disk and this happens frequently now (never happened before). I checked for viruses but scans came up clean. Benchmarks for my graphics card are still good but can get periodic freezes. Seems like whenever the 780 is drawing power, the power supply starts buzzing (pretty quietly though).

I am almost positive it is something with software though because of Steam saying busy writing to disk all the time and whenever i do an action like clicking on the start button or a separate window, the computer freezes for a bit and recovers like its doing something in the background. I can transfer from the SSD to the hard drive fine (100MB/s) but HDD to SSD starts out at 200MB/s and eventually goes down to about 3.

 

[SirLucas]

I Just downloaded a program called AS SSD Benchmark and it is showing the seq. write speed to be 1 MB/s but my seq read speed is 385 MB/s. this is most defiantly the problem and everything else makes sense now if this is correct. Write speed was exactly 1 MB/s the whole time so could this be software/firmware with the drive or is it the hardware itself? The SSD is only a few months old and once I put my operating system and a couple games on it I never touched it again. I heard SSDs can still last a long time with lots of reads and writes but the fact I never change the data on it raises suspicion. Do I have to replace it?

 

[ArtPog]

It certainly appears you have a defective PNY SSD on your hands. Probably advisable to pursue a RMA at this point. See...
http://www4.pny.com/rma/rmaRequest2.aspx

 

[SirLucas]

Update: Sent the SSD for an RMA and did a fresh install of windows on my hard drive and still having the same problems as before....

 

[SirLucas]

Same problems as in crashing and freezing a lot at desktop, taking a while to open start menu and search things as well as web pages not loading