SSD read speed issue

KoopaCreeper

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Dec 22, 2014
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Hello, I have purchased an OCZ ARC 100 240GB SSD for my laptop after having an excellent experience with the one in my gaming rig. In benchmarking software, my write speed meets the rated ~450MB/s, but my read speeds fail to exceed 20 MB/s. What could be the issue?
 
Solution
If you weren't stuck dealing with it those speed would be pretty funny.

How good is your backup? A secure erase of the drive might reset it. The flow would be create backup, use secure erase from whatever tool OCZ provides. This resets a lot of internal tables. then do the restore and see if it now benchmarks.

Or you can just RMA the device. It's not a bad time to contact OCZ support and point them to this forum append.
Are you doing random 4K reads or a sequential workload. That drive should do between 3K and 10K ios per second at 4K random = 12MB/sec to 40MB/sec. Large block sequential reads the rate should be much higher than 20MB/sec.

Suggest you post the name of the tool used for the benchmark run and the settings you used. Aside: HDTUNE lets you set the block size for its benchmark run. You can flip between 4K and 128K reads and see the benchmark rate hugely improve.
 


Used Passmark- not sure if that's the best. :) I'll try HDTune.
 
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Here, using HDTUNE trial. My desktop with the same SSD achieves the rated speed (much higher).
 
WOW, just like you said, something is badly wrong. As you can see here http://www.anandtech.com/show/8407/ocz-arc-100-240gb-review/5 everything sequential shoudl have hugely better performance.

Get on latest firmware "...ARC 100 1.01 Jan 29, 2015 Mandatory Update Release Notes
IMPORTANT: This is a mandatory update for system stability. OCZ urges all customers to update to 1.01 as soon as possible to ensure the continued reliability of their drives....." If you you were hitting read errors then that would explain the low rates. Samsung had problems with programming their flash that lead to read errors. I wonder what the firware update changes for the ARC 100. (I don't follow bigfoot controllers so don't know).

2. Do you have a tool that can pull the SMART data from this drive? Or does the OCZ toolbox give you smart data? If read performance is still bad after firmware update then suggest you look at smart data for anything that looks like error counts or sata downshift.

This page gives Smart data descriptions. click " Indilinx" for your bigfoot based controller. https://code.google.com/p/hddguardian/wiki/Indilinx_SMART_attributes you can look at some of the other drives for more information on the standard SMART data definitions. Or google it.


Please let us know what happens.
 


So far only attempted to install new firmware- it was rejected. Does it have to not be the boot drive? Should I boot off of my old HDD and then update firmware?

I will keep you posted, in a hurry currently.
 
Verify your sata port is in either ACHI mode or RAID mode (RAID includes ACHI). Many SSDs need ACHI mode to update firmware. (I would have guess you were correctly in ACHI mode from your 450 mb/sec write speed -- that needs the command tag queuing in ACHI mode). Setting sata port mode is done in BIOS. Many of the SSD toolboxes will warn if you are not in ACHI mode.

Does the tool fail with a reject message? Can you post or google it? Maybe there's a clue there.

Does OCZ have an email contact for support? If the drive can't load firmware and runs at the read speed you measure it's defective. Sometimes there is a factory reset process that you can try before RMA time.

re: boot device. I don't know of any drive that requires a destructive firmware load or that cannot be the boot device. I would keep load at a minimum during update - the drive cannot do IO during the many step update process so any paging activity will cause a hang of the processing needing paging or IO. The firmware update tool is designed to work around this.
 
Update- the new firmware installed. I was foolish in not restarting the computer so that it could update. The new firmware hasn't fixed the problem, however.

SMART data looks good- using PassMark DiskCheckup. I'll do stress testing later.

I'm not able to access the SATA controller settings on this laptop's BIOS. I'm sure it isn't in RAID, however.

Here's a screenshot from CrystalDiskMark- there is obviously a problem. One thing that I found interesting is that when I ran the tests the HDD usage LED on my laptop flashed very slowly, maybe twice per second, as a more or less regular interval.

Screenshot_1.png
 
If you weren't stuck dealing with it those speed would be pretty funny.

How good is your backup? A secure erase of the drive might reset it. The flow would be create backup, use secure erase from whatever tool OCZ provides. This resets a lot of internal tables. then do the restore and see if it now benchmarks.

Or you can just RMA the device. It's not a bad time to contact OCZ support and point them to this forum append.
 
Solution


I was thinking of doing an RMA, but before I do, I'd like to ask, could it be the internal SATA cable? It seemed sort of flimsy to me and I wasn't very gentle with it.

Yeah, apparently I got a downgrade from a 5400RPM HDD, haha!
 
You'd think the cable would hit writes as hard as reads. Unless the drive software is running a memory cache and claiming write speeds from that the cable seems like it has to be good. Wonder what problems they fixed with the emergency firmware load "...mandatory update for system stability...".
 


Looks like I'm going to have to do an RMA then. Thanks for the help!