[SOLVED] SSD Performing Poorly

yaspresents

Prominent
Jul 8, 2019
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Yo, my SSD is performing way worse than it should and therefore I am writing this post.

CPU: Ryzen 5 3600
GPU: Sapphire RX 5700 8GB
MOBO: MSI X570 Gaming Plus
PSU: Super Flower Leadex lll 650w
RAM: Kingston HyperX Predator 2x8 (3200mhz)
SSD: Kingston A400 480GB

222GB of 448GB is used.


Briefly, the drive seems to climb up to 100% usage when downloading patches etc, which deteriorates the writing speeds. Other than that and the overall "meh"-performance, it benchmarks horribly on UBM. My system is generally performing "way above expectations", but the SSD is definitely not. I very well know that the drive itself is absolutely not one of the better ones, but people with identical builds benchmark a ton better than I do.

I'm not a guru when it comes down to SSDs and drives in general, so I'm seeking assistance from you more enlightened people. Please hit me up with possible workarounds and fixes that I could try :)

IMPORTANT: When reflecting my SSD's benchmark on set averages, my write speeds and read speeds are identical to them, but when it gets to "Mixed" mine is 10 mb/s and the average speed is 292 mb/s? What on earth is going on here? SusWrite is also only 100 mb/s.

Additional information:

CrystalDiskInfo says SSD state is GOOD.
Kingston SSD Manager: Wear Indicator 97%, status healthy.
When the SSD-usage is spiking, temps still stay around 40ish Celsius.

TRIM is enabled.
Write caching is enabled.
Kingston Firmware for the drive is up to date.
Running the latest non-beta BIOS (7C37vA7, 01/2020).


Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks a lot in advance :)
 
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Solution
What SATA port are you using? Any chance you are using a non native SATA port? Make sure it's in the correct port before deciding it's garbage. I agree that they should all perform about the same and a 50% drive shouldn't perform that much worse than a 20% drive. Unless there is something wrong.

4745454b

Titan
Moderator
In the good ole days an SSD stored one bit of info per cell on it's memory. While this was fast and everything, it really limited how large an SSD could be. These days 3 bits per cell and now even 4bits is possible. The problem with storing more bits per space is speed. Only the first bit spot is fast. The others require more time to write to. So what they do is use the first bit space as sort of a cache. It will write to this spot first, and then move the data to the deeper spots later.

This for the most part can work, and it works well in most of the time. Where you get issues again is when the drive fills up. You run out of the deeper spots, and then your cache part starts to fill up. You said you are currently using 222GB of 448GB overall, or roughly 50%. With a low end controller as found in your drive and so much space being used, you will start to have drops in your write performance. The only real solution is to free up space, or get a better drive.
 

yaspresents

Prominent
Jul 8, 2019
42
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545
Thanks a lot for your contribution and especially that ambient way of explaining the issue. I have a follow up question though and would highly appreciate an answer to it as well.

So, since forever I've been reading about SSDs slowing down when 90%+ capacity or around 80ish has been reached.

My drive benchmarked horribly when it was around 150GB/448GB used and I've never heard that a 50% full SSD would cause a significantly deteriorating sequential write speeds, BUT I recall observing threads concerning Samsung etc. "better" SSDs. Don't have an overall picture of how it affects the inferior drives like this one.

So, is your answer sort of an elegant way of expressing that the A400 is an absolute piece of junk? Like I and many think.

Anyway, grabbing an MX500 like I was supposed to to from the beginning until I saw this drive for 50€ and got fooled by the Kingston branding 😄.
 

4745454b

Titan
Moderator
What type of cells it has matters. SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC, etc.. The controller matters as well. The one you have had two channels and no cache memory. Such a drive will never be a speedy drive.

I have the mx500 1TB drive. So far so good. Though to be honest i haven't benched it. But I'm happy with the performance.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Anyway, grabbing an MX500 like I was supposed to to from the beginning until I saw this drive for 50€ and got fooled by the Kingston branding 😄.
In my system, I currently have 5x Samsungs, from the 2x 250GB 840 (5.5 yrs old) to a 1 year old 1TB 860 EVO.

All benchmark almost identically, and just as if they were new. Sequential around 535-550MB/s, both read and write.
Zero difference.

Of all the SSD's I've had, only the old Kingston had slowed down considerably. HyperX 3K, 120GB.
It can be sort of excused as to age, but only a year older than the 840 EVOs.

Cheap drives are cheap for a reason.
 
Short answer: the A400 is not a good drive

Long answer: it's DRAM-less with a large SLC cache so has inconsistent performance especially with sustained workloads

If you want to learn more, check the link in my signature. Included at my sub are buying guides etc.
 

yaspresents

Prominent
Jul 8, 2019
42
2
545
Thanks a ton for all of you who contributed and shared your insights.

Lastly, is there a rational and simple solution as of why the drive's average benchmark is 76% and I'm so massively below it. Some even go 100%+. I doubt that those have all been completed with rather empty drives. Especially when I benchmarked terrible results with just Windows and Steam on the drive back in Autumn.

Cheers in advance regarding a possible answer to this final question and yet again I really appreciate your inputs towards this "issue".

All in all grabbing the MX500 in the upcoming days :)
 

4745454b

Titan
Moderator
What SATA port are you using? Any chance you are using a non native SATA port? Make sure it's in the correct port before deciding it's garbage. I agree that they should all perform about the same and a 50% drive shouldn't perform that much worse than a 20% drive. Unless there is something wrong.
 
Solution

yaspresents

Prominent
Jul 8, 2019
42
2
545
What SATA port are you using? Any chance you are using a non native SATA port? Make sure it's in the correct port before deciding it's garbage. I agree that they should all perform about the same and a 50% drive shouldn't perform that much worse than a 20% drive. Unless there is something wrong.

Love you man.

As simple as your question was, it actually solved the case. I had the drive connected to SATA Port 1, out of habit acquired from playing around with older HDD's. Also, I bought the mobo when it was launched and the "first gen" MSI manual didn't have any mentions about the fact that 1 & 2 (SATA Ports) are managed by AsMedia and not by the X570 chipset.

Should not be relying on UBM completely, but the benchmark went from 34% to 70% when I connected the drive to the SATA 5-port. Seq writes are still low, but everything else skyrocketed. The seq writes staying lowish can be explained with the 50%+ capacity and poor quality of the drive I assume :)?

Cheers a ton for this casual reminder, which turned out to be much more. Still grabbing the MX500, but now a 500GB one as I'll keep this one in my system due to it working fairly well as of now.

Also thanks to everyone that contributed to this yet again, very helpful and informative posts.
 
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4745454b

Titan
Moderator
Sweet. Something clicked when you mentioned others performing better. Native chipsets attached to the southbridge or whatever it's called always perform better than those attached to other chips. I had that happen with my Samsung 840pro. Glad to hear things working better.