SSD Fluctuating performance

[talon_card]

Howdy,

 

I recently grabbed a Kingston SSDNow UV400 480GB and the performance is a bit off. I know it's a budget SSD and so I wasn't expecting the world, but the read speeds drop down very very low, then speed up, and to me it doesn't seem to be right.

 

 

I've rerun the read tests multiple times and it's always slow at the beginning, then picks up shortly after.

 

Troubleshooting so far;

• Checking all the MB drivers Asus H110I plus (Intel rapid storage, Management Engine etc)
• Updating the BIOS
• Swapping SATA cables & Ports with another drive that doesn't have these issues (WD 240gb Green)
• I can't find in the BIOS any setting for AHCI/Legacy so I've kind of assumed that it can't be turned off
• TRIM is on, as it would be by default in Windows 10
• Checked resource monitor, and nothing but HDTune is looking at the drive during the tests
• No Firmware updates that I can see

 

I'm going to try it in another computer to be sure, but haven't gotten to that yet

 

Anything else I can check?

 

Did I do a dumb by buying this, are these really that bad? Or have I gotten a lemon?

 

The fun part is that I bought 5 of these in total (still waiting on the other 4) so I hope they aren't all this bad...

 

Cheers for any thoughts on this

[KarathKasun]

Garbage collection and caching cause this.

[SupaKomputa]

its normal to get a high burst and massive drop, but it still faster than hdd.

[TechyBen]

https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/kingston-uv400-ssd-review,review-33667.html

 

My fingers are tired...

 

Quote

The UV400 480GB will not win any awards on performance alone, it is a pure value product for an often-neglected corner of the market. Kingston rated the UV400 SSD at 550 MB/s sequential writes, and we reached that high mark but not with a 128KB block size. The UV400 needs larger blocks to reach peak performance, but other products in this category would also offer increased performance with larger blocks.

I got a cheap Kingston for my Uncle as a present... he complained it was no different to his HDD. XD But in reality, as read/write consecutive (so game loading etc) it's fine. But random is slow.

 

IMO a cheap Kingston is a good cheap drive... but it's cheap! Crucial cheap drives are IMO the worse (no idea about their performance line, but their budget line is the worse I've seen, even the TomsHardware tests confirm that).

[LukeSavenije]

4 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/kingston-uv400-ssd-review,review-33667.html

 

My fingers are tired...

 

I got a cheap Kingston for my Uncle as a present... he complained it was no different to his HDD. XD But in reality, as read/write consecutive (so game loading etc) it's fine. But random is slow.

 

IMO a cheap Kingston is a good cheap drive... but it's cheap! Crucial cheap drives are IMO the worse (no idea about their performance line, but their budget line is the worse I've seen, even the TomsHardware tests confirm that).

Crucial? Micron? Ever heared of the mx500?

[SupaKomputa]

Just now, LukeSavenije said:

Crucial? Micron? Ever heared of the mx500?

he said Crucial's Cheap drive.

[LukeSavenije]

2 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

he said Crucial's Cheap drive.

Oh, the newer ones? Those new bx? Are they that bad?

[TechyBen]

1 hour ago, LukeSavenije said:

Oh, the newer ones? Those new bx? Are they that bad?

No idea, but Toms Hardware shows their cheap drives perform the lowest (unless I misread it?). I got a second hand V4 and it was a RIGHT LEMON, as they did not put a controller in it... I think they used a cockroach instead to power the thing. XD

[LukeSavenije]

45 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

No idea, but Toms Hardware shows their cheap drives perform the lowest (unless I misread it?). I got a second hand V4 and it was a RIGHT LEMON, as they did not put a controller in it... I think they used a cockroach instead to power the thing. XD

Yeah. The older ones were really bad but this gen should be fine on a budget

[SSD Sean]

Yeah, the MX500 is great, but the BX500 is no good

[talon_card]

I love the digression in this thread 

 

I managed to solve it as best can be for the drive.

 

So I didn't realize that TRIM was a process that happened as a scheduled task, I thought this was something actively happening constantly as the drive is used.. so I opened up Disk defrag (Now called optimizer) in Windows 10 and clicked optimize, it ran the TRIM and the benchmarks were more aligned with what I'd expect to happen... The drive is nothing amazing (as I expected) with reads as low as 60mb/sec at times, but I'm not getting the drops down to 5mb/sec as I was before and my girlfriend is no longer raging when games hang for her.

 

Cheers for the assistance everyone

[talon_card]

Correction, I tried another drive and that first one of 5 was a dud. I might try a low level format to see if it sorts it, otherwise a refund from the ebay seller

[TechyBen]

3 hours ago, talon_card said:

Correction, I tried another drive and that first one of 5 was a dud. I might try a low level format to see if it sorts it, otherwise a refund from the ebay seller

Again, if the second drive does the same after a few days/weeks, then it's a poor slow controller design. TRIM should happen in the background providing Win10 is setup properly, and the controller on the SSD is a good one. If it's a poor (Like the Crucial V4) controller, then the drive performance plummets whenever it has to do TRIM.

 

Samsung drives are really good at provisioning the space well ahead of time (they use 3 layer access as 1 or 2 to speed it up, then combine into 3 layer when you are not using the drive, and also TRIM periodically and lose little performance during a TRIM). Intel and some other drives are too. I guess Kingston and Crucial are slower?