NP900X3C SSD performance troubles

Hi,

I have this fabulous ultrabook since june 2012, and I love it. Unfortunatly, I had to send it to repair in december 2012 for lags, and crashes.
Now, the same troubles start again for the last few weeks and I don't really know what to do.

IMHO, I think the SSD is the source of all the troubles. The lags occurs when the SSD is under heavy load, especially write loads (program install, updates, file copy). Here is a benchmark, as you can see : read 340MB/s, write 14MB/s.
.

I'm running W7 Pro 64bits, all updates (W7 and Samsung).

 

what SSD is it? are they not intergrated non standard size/shape on these ultra books, if so you're probably going to have to fall back on your warranty..... and if your out of warranty, I did see one of these 128gb long thin ssd's go for under £20 on ebay, as they're little use to anyone else

- pretty rubbish performance 14mb, are you missing a digit, like a 2 or 3 at the beginning, 214mb/s sounds more reasonable!

 

it's kinda weird, Samsung using Sandisk SSD in one of their laptops.

try ATTO to benchmark with.

if it's under warranty, back up your data and send it in for repair.

 

No I'm not missing a digit... see bye yourself on the benchmark. And it's 18MB/s, not 14... but the problem isn't here

With ATTO benchmark, the performance issue isn't easily noticeable. But the computer freeses and is unusable while the benchmark is running. It varies a lot from a test to another...


My opinion is : as the problem is linked to the write on the SSD, something may be wrong with the TRIM... I checked everything and the TRIM is definetly ON in W7.

The laptop is still under warranty but not for long...

 

Send it in for repair while you can.

 

I'm sure the SSD is the Sandisk U100 which chokes on concurrent reading and writing (it's got a very small cache).

My workaround is documented here but you could try to persuade Samsung that the SSD is defective and have it replaced.

John

 

Hi John, glad to read you.

It's been several months and I was hopping things to be better. I've reinstalled a fresh W7 Pro 64bits.
I've deleted all the partitions and recreated them in order to force the SSD to generate a whole TRIM command (I've read that some of them can detect this).
I can say that it was really better at the beginning, but performances started to decrease again...

I really suspect a TRIM issue, either not correctly handled by Windows (drivers, ...), by the chipset or another chip not forwarding the command to the SSD, or the SSD itself.

The easiest solution as you say John will be to replace the SSD, myself, as the laptop isn't under warranty anymore.

Thanks for your help.

 

One factor may be that as the SSD fills up then it is less able to do efficient garbage collection.

Replacement with a higher capacity SSD will both improve performance and reduce the performance degradation (and give you more space).

John

 

260MB/s sequential write :thumbsup:

Honestly, I really gave up when I saw the end of the warranty passed out, but I couldn't afford not to have my laptop for 2 weeks... Ok, so what was the problem ?
The problem was simply a BIOS setting. The SSD interface is by default set on "AUTO" with the description : "AHCI for supported OS" and "IDE for unsupported OS". Ok... let's see what happens if I set MANUAL AHCI...
I think the OS isn't well detected by the BIOS at boot, ant it sets the SSD as an IDE compliant device. Thus, the TRIM (and others AHCI specific commands) aren't passed to the SSD...

Happy

 

Thanks for the update.

That's a rare problem - the Auto setting usually works. At some stage your BIOS must have had a problem detecting the SSD and switched into IDE mode. And once switched it never tried AHCI again.

I wonder whether, now that you have got the interface out of IDE mode you will find that the Auto will also work.

John