programs stall/delay? SSD the issue?

So had the Samsung 840 for awhile and it was fast all the time but after awhile word and outlook and other programs would not load as fast as usual. I would click on word and nothing happens for a couple seconds but then loads. I was told it was crap garbage collection on the Samsung drives. I never saw that with the hardrive...things always popped up instantly but took a few seconds to actually load..no delay. I upgraded to the Sandisk Extreme Pro (the new one) because it was the new performance king and low and behold now it is also doing the same periodically after having it for a couple of months. (i forget how long exactly). I read this in the process of initial googling and was wondering if this is why? It is a periodical stall/delay. It isn't constant and comes in spurts.

Also no AV/AM is going in the background and CPU and GPU are near idle.

Why does my Windows 7 PC / SSD drive keep freezing? - Super User

EDIT: i am trying to shrink the volume to offer more OP but it doesn't allow any and says something about i should defrag to allow more...isn't that a dumb idea?

I never OPed this drive/very little because the reviews showed marginal improvement but i rather be safe then sorry. I just cleared off like 60GB of space so i have 120GB free out of like 446GB

 

***bump***

 

Ordinarily, I would have also guessed it was the storage... but you've now tried two different SSDs neither of which has anything to do with the JMicron controller (as your quote point out, it's been years since drives with that problem were around). I think it's this point its more likely to be some incompatibility of your laptop with SSDs in general.

 

i use the m17x R4 but i do somehow use a lot of writes and reads so maybe a lot is going on unnoticed and bogging things down?

906 hours of running
3361GB written
11831GB read
15,192GB total r/w
3.71 GB per hour and 89 GB per day write
13.06 GB per hour and 313.4 GB per day read
16.77 GB per hour and 402.44 GB per day total r/w

This is according to sandisk dashboard so beats me if those are accurate :/

 

Writing 89GB per day on an SSD with ~60GB free space (before you cleared some space) means the SSD is thoroughly thrashed.

Every single operation will require a read/write dance in addition to the new writes requested of the drive as every single nand cell available is dirty and needs to be erased before it can be written too.

What types of writes are these? Large sequential files or small random writes? If the latter, no consumer drive is rated to last in such a workload.

Are there any more files you can clean off that drive? Even 15 or 20% OP'ing will help in your case - but only if you also have the free space available too for the O/S, programs and temp files which are either user created or otherwise.


Download the trial of PerfectDisk 13 Professional and do a couple of boot time passes in addition to a 'prepare for shrink' defrag operation. Make sure you disable OptiWrite or better yet; uninstall PD once you've shrunk the partition enough. What the boot time passes will allow you to do is shrink the drive as it will move files locked by the O/S when running.

With new 'unallocated' space, create a new partition and format it. Now, just let is sit there for an hour or so (TRIM should kick in here eventually - make sure to disable the system from going to sleep too). After this time is up, delete the new partition you made and leave it as 'unallocated'.


Hope this helps.

 

i am at 20-25% free and i just cleared everything but 30-50GB that i rather only temp remove than completely remove to hardrive...would effect daily activities. I got the sandisk extreme pro because it was said to have every good endurance with no or little recovery time :/ I guess not so much. I tried shrinking but it won't let me because some file i think is sitting on the "edge" of the partition...could i get away with defragmenting to move that one file? I know that'll cause a lot of where but i would shrink it if i could. I didn't shrink in the beginning because tweak town or anandtech showed it has very little impact on this drive. I tried to analyze with io smart defrag to see what file was on the "edge" that is probably stopping me from shrinking but the new version i guess doesn't tell. I could try install smart defrag 2 because that did show what files were in each "block" in the diagram so i could manual delete or move those files. I was hoping the 80-100GB i moved/deleted would have that file in it but no luck. I could clone drive to hard disk and clone it back to shrunk fresh volume but that would be a pain. Is there another option besides this destructive/time consuming ones? Or is that a waste of time?

i currently have 121GB free out of 446GB. I should just get a damn 960GB drive but so much money ATM.


lol sorry i responded to your first part and read the second lol. How much wear will PD 13 due? i know defraging is generally not a good idea.


lol and tiller you were telling me most average users only use a small amount of writes in a day...i am using more then i ever thought. Before i was only using 30-40 but now i am in the 80s #$&#$^?????

Lastly, i have no idea how i use this much. I do due 2 AV AM a day but thats shouldn't hurt writes and i don't do a lot of camera stuff anymore since my Photography class is over so i am lost on how i blow through this much :/ I know hibernations and stuff cause a good 10GB but still.

Lastly lastly , is this caused by garbage collection? is that my problem?

EDIT: sandisk dashboard allows you to set TRIM and manually start it. It was set to a week but i set it to run daily but thats the most often you can do it. So i don't have to do that format drive part right?

 

How often do you hibernate? Possibly turn off hibernation and just use sleep. Hibernation is really only good for long down times. Sleep uses a little battery but only to keep the RAM refreshed and poll the keyboard and USB ports to wake. Plus it will boot up much more quickly, instantly actually, once you open the lid.

I would definitely get a handle on what is causing so many writes though, because there could be some leak in a program. But if you hibernate 2-3 times a day and do lots of photo editing it could easily consume that.

 

HF, random thought, maybe it would help to list the programs you have installed on your system, and any tweaks you have done. When you went from from Samsung to Sandisk was a clean install done?

 

no it wasn'y a fresh install. It take like 3 days to re install this thing from alienwares BS order of operation install list and all the programs i have installed. I cloned with Acronis (awesome program).

I'll post a list later but i can hibernate 1-4 times a day during moving around periods (Monday-Thursday and some Fridays). Traveling, school, going around places, and what not. I bring my backpack almost anywhere. I haven't done any Photo stuff in a while but when i do i take a crap ton of photos because i suck and shake -_- :/

I hibernate becuase sleep doesn't work all the time. It can wake up and i don't want it to melt in my everki titan because it turns on and some program runs and it starts to use 45W of CPU or something. I never tried to see if it can cool or stay in a decent temp zone in closed backpack but i doubt it can. Hibernate and sleep has always been glitchy depending on the system and i don't want to take chances with it melting. Also i don't want to change settings 4 times a say with what the lid does. I use my laptop at my desk at home with 2-3 u2412ms and i leave the laptop screen closed so that would require me to open and close 6 menus to change a single settings several times and would get really annoying. Unless one of you can make a button on desktop that can macro those steps so all i have to do is click.

i ahve posted before how i have experienced some glitchy as hibernation and sleeps on computers and i'll tell you on this one hibernation actually works well and sleep is weird and just turns back on at times.

 

I've found the same thing with sleep/hibernation. Since the great Windows 95, I haven't trusted those modes yet.

I'm curious why you're using it even if it works with an SSD installed?

The time it takes to shutdown and boot up is probably less than the time it takes to hibernate.

Sure, the programs don't stay 'open' where you left them. But sometimes, that's a good thing.

 

sometimes restarts botches tabs and i loose all tab history in chrome and Firefox (opera is awesome and never has that issue but it runs like crap currently), which costs a lot of time plus attempting to remember what i had opened is a joke. I have to open and move around a good few monitoring apps plus verify OC didn't get botched since i have to use intel XTU since m17x R4 BIOS are limited and i haven't got around to unlocking BIOS, outlook, any current MS office suite programs (0-6 open at a time), folder location with files i am working with, 0-6 PDF files could be open, among other things. The time it takes me to restart everything can take a good 5-15+ mins depending what i am working on so going from class to class or house to house or building to building with restarts is not an option. I would use sleep if my laptop wasn't a gaming laptop and could cool itself in a closed environment.

i dont want to reboot and open stuff i was working on 10-30 mins ago 1-4 times a day.

Currently, i am running
2 chrome windows with a slew of tabs
firefox with 2 tabs
outlook
ThrottleStopper
notepad
task manager
GPU-Z
F@H
word
FRAPS
Visio
Steam
and thats it for open programs...if i am studying or doing research on some idea/topic this can explode in whats open or if i have a couple exams in a day with projects (like yesterday) the window count can go huge. This is why i hibernate because it works reliable 99% of the time. I would love sleep and i would even chance it if i had an m18x or ultrabook with good cooling but this thing hits 90C-100C too easily on load to dare let it turn on in a backpack. :/

When i do taxes over a course of a week or two with my regular messing around my computer gets very cluttered with WIPs

My taxes can be kinda time consuming or worse yet...if i get ready for a hearing with my former employer the material can get nuts.

 

That doesn't seem like a very write intensive workload though. RAM consuming, but write intensive no.

 

Sleep just suspends the system to RAM. Nothing else is running. It shouldn't get hot, it's not doing anything but storing data in RAM. Once you come out of sleep, boom, you'll be right where you left off nearly instantly. Just make sure that you don't have anything set to wake the system from sleep with the lid closed.

 

That was mistake # 1. Wouldn't you rather blow a couple of days and have a properly working machine? Why are you installing all the AW bloat to begin with?

Mistake # 2. No need for hibernation. A modern machine with an SSD - which yours is - should boot in under 30 seconds.

 

#1 i have had plenty of laptops that wake from sleep on their own accord and i won't chance it waking for some random reason in my backpack

read the post above

 

Then you best invest in an enterprise SSD for your boot drive and OP 30-40%, and use separate SSD for programs and data. 80-100GB/day will exhaust any modern consumer SSD quickly.

 

I did.

My reference was to shutting the system down, not putting it to sleep.

Unless you have a ton of junk running all over the machine, that laptop should be up within 30 secs.

 

shutting down and re opening and finding all my files on projects takes too long. It can take 5-15 mins to get everything re opened and positioned. As i work i'll alt tab around PDFs and word files to find info but that requires them to be organized in a way that allows them to be shuffled through. Putting them in the order and location i had them last time takes time. starting computer isn't an issue...its the finding all the material in multiple folders that takes time. Ask tiller about my organization and files structure system lol. i also work on several programs at once.

I have 3-4 classes opened at the moment i am working on and personal stuff opened so stopping mid way several times a day with restarts is not an option. I am even the person who is almost tempted to edit the registry so stupid windows doesn'r do this forced reboot on updates. I miss the days of my 2000/XP machine when i restarted it when the thing crashed by overclocks (15-30 days was the average time between reboots). I get so mad when i loose my stuff the next morning .\_/.

OP is really the issue i guess. The anandtech review gave me hopes it wasn't going to be an issue since this drive showed very very little issues with it :/

Also the wear isn't an issue since according to there math...(PC crashes)....jk According to their math this thing supports a lot of writes.

3463GB so far
media wear indicator at .33% ???
dashboard says 100% currently is left. It did say 99% after fresh install but after dashboard update it went to 100% :/


FYI i am at 90GB a day now -_-

 

I'm not sure how far you progressed in the thread towards explaining exactly why the performance drop/stall happens. But what essentially happens is that when all the addressable areas on the disk have been used/written to, and then marked as free afterwards (so it's registered as free space). Then the information on the nand pages are still present, and the area needs to be cleared before it can be written to again. Samsung has this cute whitepaper on it where they explain it as an Etch-a-sketch pad. Where you need to reset the sheet before drawing something new on it.

So to avoid that entire problem, specially since the access times on an ssd approaches zero anyway, and fragmentation makes no difference to anything (the addressing of sequential pages incurs the same overhead as random addressing) - the strategy usually chosen here is to keep using empty blocks whenever you need one. And then not start overwriting old/used pages unless it's absolutely needed. Instead relying on automatic garbage collection to clear blocks when the disk is idle.

This often doesn't work in practice, though. Thanks to for example Windows components having no discipline of any kind when it comes to locking system resources and keeping controller activity high. And some of the controllers on the market are absolutely e anyway.

So what actually happens is that at approximately the point where you've filled half the ssd's space, you tend to have used enough free nand pages that at least some of the new information you need to write will need to do a reset for an entire "nand page" first.

What happens then is that this nand page needs to be moved to a new space. Before the new information you wanted to write is written. And then the other information fitted in the nand-page will have to be written back. In other words, every time you need to do a nand page reset during runtime, every single write operation, no matter how small, incurs a heavy amount of overhead. It's still relatively quick compared to writing to a hdd, though..

But Samsung unwisely solves this by having a user-set area for overprovisioning. Or for an unused part of the disk where that reset nand-page can be written to before it's written back to the areas on the disk. So it's technically possible to force some fallback solution or other through the OS during the nand-page resets. And it's possible that that is going to literally give you a lock during write operations. If there's a wait condition every time some memory is claimed, or cache is written, etc., that's not going to be very fast.

Like other people in the thread home into as well, hibernation also is kind of the quickest way in Windows to spend the nand-pages during successive massive writes (even if it's to the same "place" on the addressable areas on the disk. So unless you really need it, I wouldn't keep using it. Try to tweak the power settings instead, disable the hinge switch, disable keyboard/usb/network/pad being able to wake the thing. Make sure the component for software waking the computer isn't installed or it's shut down. Etc.

But two things to do with the ssd: Make sure there's a 10% or so unpartitioned space at the end of the disk. Maybe try to not spend the entire disk before freeing space. And run the Samsung Magician software and force a trim once in a while.

----
Outside of that, though -- take up boxing, or something like that? Take it from me - tweaking windows-computers is the single least effective way to burn frustration you can ever come up with.

 

HopelesslyFaithful,

Just want to point out again that yes, the SSD you're using does support a lot of writes. But I would bet they are for sequential writes (only)...

And the kind of workflow you have may be leaning more towards 4K Random R/W which lowers the claimed and actual endurance significantly. Not to mention it would void a warranty claim if they see any indications of the 'enterprise' type of use that they never claimed to support.

 

But i am just a college student working on homework and working on several projects at once :/

once in a while i shoot photos for fun or family events :/

that can't also live without his laptop with him :/

 

ok so i did the shrinking and the issue is page files...they load at the end of the drive. Is there a way to get around this? I tried the boot up one but it just skips the process. Should i try safe made?

 

More details please.

Are you using PerfectDisk or something else?

 

using perfect disk 13 pro. everything is moved to the front execpt pagefile and i even did the boot shrink as well

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1m8o3ez1zxm1s2s/PD 13 pro.png?dl=0

should i just throw it into a desktop to shrink it if no option to fix pagefile location? i can do that tonight or tomorrow. I deleted/ moved everything possible so this is the smallest the drive can ever get

 

Ah! What I would do is disable the pagefile and the hibernation file, reboot twice, then you should be able to do a more thorough boot time defrag.

After you have shrunk the volume you can enable those again.

:

 

does that quote also disable the page file?
also i forget if i have this set up but how do you set up windows so it doesn't use hardrive as ram? are those page files?

 

The pagefile is not disabled with those commands.

On the desktop:
Right click on Computer,
Select Properties,
Click Advanced System Settings,
Click Performance Settings,
Click Advanced,
Click Change under Virtual memory,
Select No paging file,
Click Set,
Click OK, OK until it asks to reboot.

 

ok so page file is the thing i disabled on my little netbook to make it faster. thanks


no need to turn off hibernation. page file did it woot woot. What is the orginal size of disk so i can shrink to 25% OP? i know it comes OP by a small amount right?

Also why does the sandisk extreme pro say 80TB endurance but the dashboard is saying far far higher? or it is reading writes wrong and its a lot lower. They also claim 80TB for 240, 480, 960 GB drive, which if i understand this correctly...that just doesn't make sense. The larger drive should offer more writes.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8170/sandisk-extreme-pro-240gb-480gb-960gb-review

you think 80GB unallocated is good for OP?

 

I think generally the numbers suggest that in even in worst case scenarios (masses of intense writes that deplete all free blocks before garbage collection completes), the write amplification increase drops off if the overprovision is somewhere around 30%. Usually, 10% is more than enough, though. We're normally talking servers with constant writes, that sort of thing.

By the way - note that on an ssd, the addressing space, nand pages, and actual nand blocks are completely different things. On an hdd, the OS will physically address the actual sectors. While on an ssd, the controller software handles where the data is actually written.

That is, when a program claims addressing space on an ssd in an orderly increasing space, this space can be placed on different nand pages in random order, that again one of the physical nand blocks will contain several of. And if you then have masses of small writes rather than a more efficient queued system (hi, Microsoft engineers), the write amplification is at the highest always, since each small write operation will still need to: 1. Copy each nand page in a nand block to a new nand block for backup. 2. Erase the nand block. 3. Write back the old and new content. (Exact implementation varies between brands/controller setups).

What I'm getting at is that "sequential writes" in the case of an ssd doesn't mean writing to a set of sectors that come one after another, and that there's "free space" on a contiguous set of addresses, that again mirror the disk, and so on. It means having sustained writes to fill the controller buffer, so that each nand block that is used can be filled as much as possible in one rewrite operation. But if garbage collection works well, like I said further up, there will always be enough free nand blocks that you will approach the maximum write capacity of the drive with both small and large workloads.

The question is probably what exactly is happening that exhausts the free nand blocks that the garbage collection should be clearing during low or idle states for the controller. A very large page file might be it (usually setting it to a fixed size makes sure it at least isn't continuously enlarged and shrinked, by the way. You don't need to remove it - though doing so doesn't necessarily cause any issues). But I'm wondering if there are other types of "normal" activity that keeps the disk occupied as well. And that you're seeing this more easily on the Samsung drives, since they have larger nand blocks and lower write speeds than many ssds.

...If you download and run process explorer, for example, you can see what sort of programs are writing to the disk, and how much, how often, etc. It would be interesting to know what it might be.

 

Go to Disk Management, click/select the C: Drive, right click and select Shrink.

See the total MB's it shows? Multiply that by 0.75 to get the amount of space to shrink the disk by.

This, of course assumes that you have only one partition (don't worry about the little partitions Windows uses...).


I ignore the ~7% that is used by the GB to GiB conversion - the manufacturer is hoping that playing with numbers can keep the disk fast - as you've found out, it did squat for you.

But if you want to that that into consideration; simply multiply the Total Capacity before shrink by 0.82 (1-.25+.07).



Edit: What I would do in your case though is shrink the drive as much as it allows you, create a new partition and format it. Leave the system idle for at least an hour or so (turn off any sleep timers) and by idle, I mean go see a movie.

After that period, delete the partition and expand the drive to the size you want it at (either 25% OP'd or 18% OP'd... depending on whether you are using Tiller OP scale or not).

 

why must i format the unallocated?

@nipsen I am using sandisk extreme pro 480GB not samsung. I abandoned samsung a month or two ago

sigh i need to shrink 30 more GB i have no free space -_- i am buying another 480 when it goes on sale and just raid 0ing....or is TRIM not supported in raid 0?

 

You don't. Like I said, formatting, partitioning, zeroing, etc., etc. doesn't actually erase the nand blocks. And filling them all before marking them erased won't make a difference. The ssd controller software and the garbage collection takes care of that. Just make some unpartitioned space and leave it alone for a while, like tiller said.

Err.. What? .. Isn't that drive supposed to have 100.000 billion IOPS on sustained writes, or something like that? With overprovision in-built and so on?

Seems to me you're running into some extremely rare combo of unusually frequent writes, and software problems here. That it's not the drive that is the problem, and that extra overprovision isn't going to make a huge difference.

Did sandisk have some tool or other that can check how long it is since maintenance ran? How frequent the process seems to be, that sort of thing? Or maybe you could check the counters on the disk itself. Via "s.m.a.r.t" or whatever it's called now.

Not sure. I suppose it depends on the raid controller and the drivers for the motherboard.

 

Must? No, but if you do and leave the drive alone as suggested it will TRIM the nand chips making the SSD perform almost like you had OP'd it since day one of ownership.


See:
AnandTech | Corsair Neutron GTX SSD Review (240GB): Link A Media Controller Tested

 

Nice. I stand corrected.

 

But I can run trim from sandisk dashboard. with a single click I did that after each time I tried a shrink in order to reduce write amplification

and large file writes

 

Running TRIM from the SanDisk Dashboard is not equivalent to performing a quick format. The SanDisk Dashboard cannot TRIM the 'unallocated' nand.

While the Quick Format option in Windows 7 and above will - then, after a period of time you can delete the newly made partition and leave it as 'unallocated' for OP'ing purposes.

 

Why? 10 characters

 

Read first sentence you quoted. TRIM only works on an NTFS partition in Windows.

 

read second sentence of your post. That is why thanks

So trim can't do FAT32 or exFAT?

still curious why trim can't do that portion or how that would affect it. It should treat unallocated as empty right.

 

Don't have any current experience with Fat32 or exFAT - any version of FAT based file systems have given me nothing but grief and are to be avoided at all costs.


Let me try to explain it a little better as to why Dashboard is not equivalent to a quick format.

The assumptions are that you've already OP'd the drive after using it for awhile. Therefore ALL nand cells are dirty. Even the nand cells in the 'unallocated' section.


With the above as a given, running Dashboard's TRIM command will force the O/S to tell the SSD's controller to clear any discrepancies between what the O/S knows to be unused capacity and what the SSD's controller knows what is 'dirty' nand that can be cleaned without resaving the data on those cells. While the O/S suggests TRIM can happen to the SSD, the controller will do so when it feels it should...

Meanwhile, anything in the 'unallocated' space will still contain dirty nand and an erase/write cycle will need to be performed before the OP'd portion of the SSD can be used to speed up it's performance. Meaning; it's performance will still not be sped up until all that 'unallocated' nand is forced to be used (over and above the free space still available on the SSD). This could mean days, weeks or months before any performance/consistency improvement is actually noticed in real world use.


With a quick format performed on the 'unallocated' nand, all the cells become available for writes without the penalty of erasing the blocks first.


The distinction is important and easily noticed by dozens of my clients which I've performed these steps with their own systems used daily (even if in 'light duty mode').

Hope this explains it a bit better?

 

i'll have to take your word for it. I'll do that tomorrow. I currently have it set up to have 340.1GB free /447.13 GB total so i have 107.03 unallocated so i have ~24% unallocated or not allocated...whatever is grammatically correct -_-

This should work for me. Seeing some off number for total storage will probably bug me so 340GB it is. It just looks clean

Also is there a way to turn off the red coloring if you get like 90% full. I'll have 90% full if i don't have to stare at that stupid red bar every time i open my computer. It is super annoying and also why i never wanted to shrink in the beginning.

EDIT: i also did page file to 800-1000MB so it can save data if PC crashes but small enough it should force nearly everything to ram.

 

Do this

Go to:

C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download

then delete all the folders/files in there but not the download folder itself. Those are the temp setup files of the Windows updates but Microshaft forgot to delete them after installing them, oops

That can give you anywhere from 200 to 600 MB more of free space

 

thanks for the advise but i am concerned about GBs at this point not MB. if i had a 128GB or 256GB i might bother. Interesting though

 

which just reminds me, I hope you did disable hibernation because that frees up space which is equal to how much RAM you have on your system.

 

What about if you don't OP and then let the Sandisk utility TRIM once a week (or however often it recommends)? Have you already confirmed if TRIM is enabled and working?

Do the stalls seem related more to reads or writes? Have you tried disabling Link Power management in Intel Rapid Storage Technology performance settings?

 

More of a question than a solution ... Can SSD misalignment be an issue in this case? IMO I would check it anyway but has anyone experienced the symptoms of a misaligned SSD?
+1 Namaiki thanks for reminder about LPM!

 

It seems to be "I think" reads. I notice when i open programs like word, excel, chrome, outlook, and others that it just stalls. I click button and nothing happens for like 1-5 seconds and then the program loads.

I'll do the alignment thing later

where is the LPM i checked intel RST program by opening it from the icon but i dont see it.

Also it stated that it is 512B sector physical and logical for SSD
hardrive is 4KB physical and 512B logical

I have it set to daily TRIM FYI

Also these happen when laptop is on power cord so its not a on battery only issue.

 

Just out of curiosity, I hope you disabled NTFS compression from within the registry

 

To check the alignment of your SSD's partition:

Run msinfo32

select Components, Storage, Disks

Look for your SSD and check the 'Partition Starting Offset'

If it is divisible by 4096 (returns a whole number - no fractions); the alignment is fine.

 

open RST program, performance - you should see enable or disable options