[Corsair Extreme x64] SSD write performance degradation / Health is dropping fast

[Maxhedroom]

Thanx for dropping by GR...cool little site eh? ;)

Pardon my absence...been MIA for the last 7 days. Gotta love life's little curve balls... <_<

[toyo]

I tried flashing the SSD with Supertalent 2142 FW, but failed, as the Indilinx MPTool did not have a profile for 64 GB NAND of my type, only for 128/256. At least I didn't kill the drive :-D

Oh well. I would really like to try the new 2142 FW, but Corsair won't release it. Sigh.

[toyo]

Anniversary issue, just look at the perfect numbers: 10.000 P/E, 90% life, 1000 Cycles :P 90% reached 2 days ago :( Sometimes, I just leave the computer idle for a few hours, then when I come back, 10-15 cycles are gone... I mean, how the hell can the SSD waste 10 cycles is 5 hours? It has 64 GB, and there's no application that's writing even a GB of data, not to mention something close to 64x10=640 GB of data :(

I'm so pissed off about this and I can only hope the SSD won't die when I will reach 0%, I cannot imagine a PC without one now...

PS: SSDLife Pro trial expired... I need to find a solution, then its the screenshots will return ;)

[HX1]

I wonder if somewhere in the logistics of the Power Configuration of your system and Windows... ( maybe even Task Scheduler and Defrag or something similar ) which could be at fault.. if you notice it when idle.. it should be something you can do.

[toyo]

Defrag is disabled by Win 7 for detected SSDs, including this one, so it won't move data and wear it down faster. Power config is everything on High Performance, with the drives set Turn Off: Never, so the Garbage Collection can kick in when needed. I have Perfect Disk 12, that has a SSD Optimize mode, but I think it's pretty much useless too, and it writes data, obviously, so I turned it off for now after a test-run a while ago.

What annoys me even more is that I have moved EVERYTHING that is write intensive off the SSD, evidently this makes the PC slower, but F. that, I want it to last longer, not to give the best performance, if I need to chose. Only Kaspersky is updating/scanning stuff and Windows, plus a few small apps I have installed.

It would be so nice if I just found a few other guys with the same type of SSD that could monitor their drive for a while... seems an impossible task though.

You know, I got this drive 7 weeks ago, at 98%/50 cycles/400 GB written. In less than 2 months, I ate 8%/950 cycles (out of the specified 10.000)/and I only wrote 450 GB!!! I mean, 450 GB is NOTHING... others have SSDs that wrote TBs until a percent was gone.

I'm telling you, from this point of view, it's better to have a HDD that you don't know exactly when it will fail on you, instead of seeing this happening before your eyes. I probably wouldn't give a sh1t about this SSD failing if I knew I can buy a new one as soon as it dies, but I'm rather sure that a SSD will be a luxury item I won't be able to replace in one year or so...

[HX1]

You did check VSS.. and did you make any alterations to SuperFetch registry entries? ..or behavior? You can tweak it to only work with specific types of files...

[toyo]

Prefetch/Superfetch are disabled, they increase the writes for no real performance gain on a SSD. (reg entries=0)

As for System Restore, is Off for all HDDs. Using ATI (of course, backups are on a HDD). VSS is still enabled I see. I don't think anything depends on it, but I might be wrong.

What would I gain (for the SSD) if I turn it down...

[mara-]

I think you are stressing yourself to much. Just use it and enjoy. If it fails, you can't do much about it, except to never buy Corsair again.

Cheers ;)

[toyo]

I think you are stressing yourself to much. Just use it and enjoy. If it fails, you can't do much about it, except to never buy Corsair again.

Cheers ;)

Hehe, it's not like I have much else to do... will use it until failure :P

[HX1]

Prefetch/Superfetch are disabled, they increase the writes for no real performance gain on a SSD. (reg entries=0)

As for System Restore, is Off for all HDDs. Using ATI (of course, backups are on a HDD). VSS is still enabled I see. I don't think anything depends on it, but I might be wrong.

What would I gain (for the SSD) if I turn it down...

Well VSS.. as a part of System Restore/Recovery and other onslaughts.. backs up every file which is written to or altered in anyway.. every time some is changed.... SO you have like huge GB's of data which are nothing more than 'System Volume Information' and backups.. The size of this are once it gets full and/or starts swapping stuff out can be a problem for your situation.. I at first thought of two things.. ( 3 ) the size of your RAM... relative to Superfetch and swap to disk.. and backups and System Restore..( VSS ).. But you have to disable several things to shut it down... anyways for every thing you access on that drive it is being backed up.. especially if a write operation takes place.. but in some cases it is with almost every file. I originally thought this area was simply for like only major things.. but it would seem not looking at how often I had topped out the moderate space I have allocated to it.. and the error which is logged.. abut not being able to grow.. Added work for your drive and writes to known files..

[toyo]

System Restore is OFF, for all drives, including the SSD. RAM=4GB, pagefile is on the HDD (told you I moved everything off the SSD :P)

I really don't know much about VSS's internals and what it does other than sys restore and backup (which I don't use), but I'll try to find out more about it.

The real issue (I think...) here is with how the SSD optimises itself through TRIM and Garbage Collection. This implies data movement and is managed by the SSD controller (Indilinx Barefoot) and the firmware. This is why I even risked to brick the SSD with the firmware update from Supertalent, as I hoped it will correct the algorithms for Garbage Collection.

[HX1]

Should be fairly easy to turn off VSS.. Could also kill your logging and related services.. it also creates a lot of disk access... but for me personally I don't like to or my system would be even more optimized .. especially when it comes to the audit section...

[mara-]

There is also a possibility that your drive is perfectly fine, just that those values are bad.

Cheers ;)

[toyo]

There is also a possibility that your drive is perfectly fine, just that those values are bad.

Cheers ;)

I certainly hope so :P

[Maxhedroom]

I agree...given the crazy behavior, I don't think you should give the readings much weight at all.

The barefoot controller is indeed well known for it's aggressive idle time GC. There is one member on the Ocz forum who has been running 6 Vertex 30gb on R0 for well over a year...meaning no trim and he recently broke the array and posted benches to show how the drives are very resilient even without trim. There has also been a few long threads re: whether moving the pagefile to a spinner is really worth doing. The general consensus is that it's not worth the possible performance hit if your running the latest firmwares...but to each his own. The 'minimize writes' train of thought by moving stuff to a spinner and even using ramdisks, was born during the 1st gen of JMicron drives with questionable wear leveling...and as of Indilinx fw 1.5 - 1.7 (or it's corsair equivalent) it's no longer an issue. The main tweaks that have carried over is disabling prefetch and super-fetch and also disabling indexing on all ssds. You can compare the early versions of SSD Tweaker to the more recent ones and you'll see a lot of the older suggestions have been totally removed. I would quote the exact changes but I'm a bit busy atm...but you can trust the recent versions as the changes were well researched before being released.

[Xeo]

seems like a pain in the but, we know who doesnt have a good QC (quality check) team/division

[toyo]

I agree...given the crazy behavior, I don't think you should give the readings much weight at all.

The barefoot controller is indeed well known for it's aggressive idle time GC. There is one member on the Ocz forum who has been running 6 Vertex 30gb on R0 for well over a year...meaning no trim and he recently broke the array and posted benches to show how the drives are very resilient even without trim. There has also been a few long threads re: whether moving the pagefile to a spinner is really worth doing. The general consensus is that it's not worth the possible performance hit if your running the latest firmwares...but to each his own. The 'minimize writes' train of thought by moving stuff to a spinner and even using ramdisks, was born during the 1st gen of JMicron drives with questionable wear leveling...and as of Indilinx fw 1.5 - 1.7 (or it's corsair equivalent) it's no longer an issue. The main tweaks that have carried over is disabling prefetch and super-fetch and also disabling indexing on all ssds. You can compare the early versions of SSD Tweaker to the more recent ones and you'll see a lot of the older suggestions have been totally removed. I would quote the exact changes but I'm a bit busy atm...but you can trust the recent versions as the changes were well researched before being released.

Yeah, know all this... I kinda learned a lot about the SSDs in the last 2 months, especially since I knew nothing about them (thought you just plug it in like an expensive HDD and there you go). I got an Indilinx SMART reader (directly from the controller manufacturer, for those not knowing this) and it reports the same values. I'm split between two possibilities:

1) SMART is reported incorrectly because of some SSD problem

2) SMART is correctly reported and, due to some SSD problem (that I think is related to many small writes from the OS), the SSD GC (probably) algorithm does not function correctly, eating cycles like crazy.

For the sake of documenting information, I will post screenshots of the drive every 10%, also for other persons in the same situation like mine, wondering "WTF is with my SSD?", so they can have a reference point. From what I know, when I reach 0%, the SSD will show 100% again :wut:

And I would certainly don't care much about this SSD (or any other PC component I have) if I could replace them easily. But I'm a realistic person and I'm pretty sure I need to take real good care about this PC, as the times will get only worse from a financial perspective here.

[Maxhedroom]

I totally understand...until last month I was running 2007 stuff (P35 based). Most recommend a 2 year upgrade cycle...you can double that in my case...lol. I also think that you'll keep seeing this 'rollover' effect...heh, that's gotta mess with your head none the less..lol.

If you are interested in checking out some (more) of the related theory, I found the Jan. 2009 (with 2010 1st post updates) thread I was thinking of if you have not already found it yourself....tho you probably have already leaned the vast majority in your quest for answers.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?49779-SSD-Tweak-Utility

At least you can retain a little peace of mind given the fact that if the nand does somehow exhaust, the drive will most likely end up becoming read-only vs becoming a brick.

[toyo]

I don't have anything important on the OS partitions :P Everything can be reinstalled or restored from ATI backups. That SSDtweaker thing was one of the first things I've found, chose not to use it and do the changes I need manually.

I actually read quite a few OCZ topics and even found 2-3 that had apparently the same lifetime issues as me, but it looked like they RMA-ed the drives and topics went forgotten...