Signs of SSD giving up?

i got a Patriot Inferno, which isn't a very popular SSD, but it has been rock solid until now, got it cheap (less than 1£/GB over a year ago), however now it only does 20-30mb/s read, thought it felt slow the past few days... that was copying files to a RAM drive, so it is definitely SSD...

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now this is my first SSD, was meaning to upgrade to a more spacious too, as prices aren't as painful as they used to be, just thought i'd ask for second opinions on what can be done since this was a lovely companion for a while

I will try to reflash the firmware on it, will report with that later so no need to suggest this, however its roughly as far as i can guess other than controller failing. (not overheating either, everything is optimal pretty much, haven't tampered with any magical windows features either)

System is M11x R3, 16gb ram, the SSD(details in screenshots) windows 7 64bit. well kept etc.

 

Is the SSD almost full?

If you have everything backed up, you could try a secure erase.

 

there is plenty of empty space, 15gb at the moment. even when full it doesn't really drop below 120mb/s no matter what...

 

I used a Patriot Inferno 100GB for mere weeks before it was designated to an external enclosure and relegated to 'USB key' duties.

Was glad to finally get rid of it.

15GB free is very full imo - do you have any kind of OP'ing at all on it?

If a secure erase (SE) doesn't bring it back to life; I would be looking for a better option (any current SSD will be worlds better).

If you'll be SE'ing it: make sure to backup your data first...


Good luck.

 

Probably trim or garbage collection issue, typically if the controller go south, the sdd should be dead already.

 

Sandforce right? it doesn't actually support TRIM natively at the hardware level (i.e. TRIM only tells it to initiate its internal garbage collection, whose efficiency depends on how well the Firmware is tuned). I find with most manufacturers other than Intel tend to somehow tradeoff the Sandforce Firmware's GC efficiency in favour of higher speed. This means these SSDs will tend to degrade in performance over time despite TRIM being active + functional and especially if the SSD is mostly full like in your case. Heaven forbid these degradations can also be due to a bad DuraWrite implementation by Patriot.

 

Well believe it or not the drive actually performs perfectly fine on a benchmark test...

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or within fairly reasonable expectation... but in actual usage it is very sluggish unless copying large files... (where before say the asda64 popped up instantly to request admin permissions, now it takes goot 10-20seconds to get there...)

So thats for the update, ill try poking about some more see what happens, then reflash the firmware, if past updates taught me anything ill be getting quite a few BSODs for the first week.

Still, it has been a champ the whole time i owned it, barely dropping in performance when full, really going strong... usually it is sitting with 10% free space too, and it still performs to the 200mb/s read on sequential... Can't complain really considering i paid pretty much half of what other similar performance drives were at the time, had no issues what so ever even before updating the firmware, which was a fairly long time ago. Can only say good things about it, except only 120gb...

 

No benchmarks I know mirror real world performance. Neither does having good 'scores' save a component from embarrassing real world performance (10-20 seconds 'stutter' is below ODD speeds - let alone HDD/SSD performance expectations).


I would guess that even with a SE, your current workflows and typical usage patterns will bring you right back to where you are now, in a very short time.

Save your time; get a current (and larger) SSD and setup your computer once more (instead of being in 'test' mode for the next month or more).


Good luck.