840 Evo - Suddenly high responsetime?

Hi, I have the 250GB-version of Samaung's 840 Evo (for almost 1 year now)
My notebook began to feel slower and slower a few weeks ago..
Today I made a benchmark and found the bottleneck: got over 3ms responsetime!!
At the beginning it was about 0,x ms !



How can this be?
Please help

- 5754

 

I would read this if I were you. I would never put an EVO as my main OS Driver. I just keep it for storing videos, pics, music, etc. for performance, an MLC NAND SSD is a must in my books. I had a 1TB 840 EVO as my main OS drive and man! that thing flew when I first got it, then it slowly starts dropping in performance to unacceptable levels

Samsung 840 EVO read speed drops on old-written data in the drive

 

You probably caught the drive with it's pants down, it was doing idle time GC when you ran the benchmarks. Try running the optimize drive function from Samsung Magician and run the benchmarks again. If the issue is because of the garbage collection, overprovisioning your drive by about 20-30% should prevent future issues.

 

Yes true that, I OP all my SSDs by 30% as the number one pro and matermind in SSDs tillerofthearth has taught me

 

Definitely run the samsung magician optimize drive utility. Then logoff (Win + L) your Windows session overnight (turn off sleep). If it doesn't recover then, then it's time to backup, and do a clean install. No need to OP 30%. It's already OP'd by about 10% due to Gigabyte to Gibibyte and 250GB of the 256GB. OP'ing 50% even won't correct an issue with garbage collection.

Have you been doing a massive amount of writes lately? Like copying huge files back and forth? Or anything out of the ordinary?

 

With ~150GB of data on an effectively ~232GB drive, I'm not shocked by this post.

OP'ing, imo, is not accepting what the manufacturer is happy with - they are simply concerned with the drive making it past warranty while giving the best numbers on the box for marketing purposes - OP'ing is giving your drive the best chance at giving you the performance it can when you want it (not when it's finished doing it's internal routines). The point that that happens in my experience with various SSD's is at least 30% of the actual, usable space (not what the capacity it was sold as).

In this case; I would have OP'd 232GB by 30% giving me a usable capacity of ~160GB.

As you can see, using 150GB for the O/S and Data is using this SSD (in your particular workflow/use) far above what it can effectively work with. (In my mind, you effectively have only 10GB 'free').


Even if you can't afford to leave ~70GB as 'unallocated' on this setup - you can still shrink the drive in Disk Management, create a new partition, format that partition and leave the system idle (make sure it doesn't sleep during this time) for about an hour, then, delete the new partition you created and either leave the partition as 'unallocated', or expand the used partition as little as you can (taking into consideration how you use the computer and leaving at least ~25GB free on the O/S drive).

Either way, by shrinking the drive (I would do it once for each partition you have...) and creating and formatting a new partition from that space, you will effectively clean the nand to an 'as new' state and therefore bring your performance back up significantly. Without doing a clean install.


You may want to move as much data and clean up any junk files off the drive as possible before you do the above steps (even if you copy some of that data back) to clean as many nand cells as possible.

Right click on your C: drive and select Properties, Disk Cleanup and then select Clean System files and select all the checkboxes (this will clean up all the Windows updates). This step will take a long time... make sure the computer doesn't sleep or turn off before it completes.

You can also download a trial copy of PerfectDisk to prepare the drive before you shrink it (otherwise, Windows will inform you that you can only shrink a much smaller amount than your free space would indicate) too. Use the prepare for Shrink option and also deleting the hibernation and page files (even just for this exercise) will help with increasing the speed of your SSD again.

If you do the above you should see a dramatic difference in your system's responsiveness.

If you can't get the performance up to your expectations, I would be inclined to buy a much larger SSD and properly OP it right from the first install. Not only will the extra capacity be useful, I'm sure - but the performance issues you see now will be avoided too.

Good luck.

 

Get a sandisk next time

 

Hi there, thx 4 answers
I actually solved the problem by updating the firmware, I get 0,3ms again :thumbsup:

Well, I have this SSD for a year now and back then the evo series was recommened on almoste every forum.
U know that every time there is something better coming and better and better

 

Evo is good for benching. Sandisk is good for heavy io. Everything else is good for the price