My ssd is just as slow as my HDD

[Plingen]

hello

 

i bought an ocz agilty 3 120gb SSD back in 2012 and now its starting to perform as bad as my 2tb WD green 5600rpm HDD

 

here is the performance when it was 1 year old...

 

here is what it does today:

 

and this is how my HDD performes

 

is this just an example of how bad the first ssd's was or can i do something about it ? ive tried different motherboarddrivers, bios, satadrivers... i've tried to update firmware on the ssd but it dosent work..

[Princess Luna]

More like a cheap SSD at near full capacity while hosting the OS is never going to perform like it could at peak as a clean storage drive.

[Plingen]

1 minute ago, Princess Luna said:

More like a cheap SSD at near full capacity while hosting the OS is never going to perform like it could at peak as a clean storage drive.

the ssd was just as full at the first test as on the test i did today...

[Eigenvektor]

1 minute ago, Plingen said:

the ssd was just as full at the first test as on the test i did today...

Your screenshot says otherwise, 49% vs 78%.

[Plingen]

1 minute ago, Eigenvektor said:

Your screenshot says otherwise, 49% vs 78%.

i didnt see that x) 

 

[Eigenvektor]

Just now, Plingen said:

i didnt see that x)

Is that Windows 7? You may want to check if TRIM is enabled: https://www.howtogeek.com/257196/how-to-check-if-trim-is-enabled-for-your-ssd-and-enable-it-if-it-isnt/

[Plingen]

but the writespeed should still not be as bad as an 5400rpm hdd ? ?? i guess the ssd's we got today last longer ? 

[Plingen]

4 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Is that Windows 7? You may want to check if TRIM is enabled: https://www.howtogeek.com/257196/how-to-check-if-trim-is-enabled-for-your-ssd-and-enable-it-if-it-isnt/

trim is enabled

 

[paddy-stone]

5 minutes ago, Plingen said:

but the write should still not be as bad as an 5400rpm hdd ? ?? i guess the ssd's we got today last longer ? 

Heh, I had an old Samsung 830 SSD 120GB and 240/250GB - their numbers when new were worse than yours even at new. If I had them handy I'd bench them for you to see, but I gave one to my nephew for a media drive, and the other is in my laptop that doesn't need the speed anyway.

I will say though, that if you have a little spare cash, you can buy 240GB drives with approx 500/500 read/writes for around $30 nowadays.

[Plingen]

1 minute ago, paddy-stone said:

Heh, I had an old Samsung 830 SSD 120GB and 240/250GB - their numbers when new were worse than yours even at new. If I had them handy I'd bench them for you to see, but I gave one to my nephew for a media drive, and the other is in my laptop that doesn't need the speed anyway.

I will say though, that if you have a little spare cash, you can buy 240GB drives with approx 500/500 read/writes for around $30 nowadays.

im looking into buying a new ssd, but i like better to spend money on cars instead of my pc... im running i7 3770k and from what i've read the chipset dosent support nvme ssd's even with an addincard

[Kilrah]

A full erase (using the proper erase command) might bring it back to more normal numbers.

Even if the transfer speeds are lower it'll still be many times more responsive than an HDD since it's the access times that count most.

[paddy-stone]

2 minutes ago, Plingen said:

im looking into buying a new ssd, but i like better to spend money on cars instead of my pc... im running i7 3770k and from what i've read the chipset dosent support nvme ssd's even with an addincard

You really wouldn't see a noticeable benefit of an NVME drive except in certain workloads anyway, mostly for content creation. $30 for a faster SSD is a VERY good option IMO. I paid approx £150+ for my 240/250GB Samsung 830 when I got it

 

[Plingen]

2 hours ago, paddy-stone said:

You really wouldn't see a noticeable benefit of an NVME drive except in certain workloads anyway, mostly for content creation. $30 for a faster SSD is a VERY good option IMO. I paid approx £150+ for my 240/250GB Samsung 830 when I got it

 

okey,  if i buy a new ssd and dont want to install a fresh win7... will it perform good if i clone my current windows install ? im thinking of buying a 1tb ssd

[Kilrah]

Will be better but not optimal. 

[Plingen]

2 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Will be better but not optimal. 

what problems will i encounter ? 

 

i have so much on this install that i think everything will get fucked up if i start from scratch 

 

and how is it to get win10 for free with a fresh install ? 

[mariushm]

Run defrag once on the SSD. It will not defrag the SSD but the software will issue the commands to trim and "garbage collect" the free nand pages. O&O Defrag I know for sure does that, not 100% abuot the built in defragmenting tool.

Use Disk Cleanup to empty some trash on the SSD.

If you have pagefile on defaults, maybe move the pagefile to mechanical drive to free some megabytes on the ssd.

 

 

You could use Macrium Reflect (freeware) to make an image of your SSD or clone your SSD to a new SSD

 

You could also move most of the crap on your mechanical drive temporarily, use disk cleanup to erase temporary files, maybe move some folders to your mech. drive temporarily... basically try to get the size below 32 GB or something like that, to be able to put the image on a usb stick.

Then you could try to format the ssd and then put the disk image back on the ssd.

 

A 120-240 GB SSD is almost as expensive as a quality 32-64 GB usb stick, so it may make more sense to just buy a new SSD.

 

See if macrium reflect sees your mechanical drive if you boot from usb stick with it (may not have drivers for the sata controller built in)

 

 

 

[Roswell]

3 hours ago, Princess Luna said:

More like a cheap SSD at near full capacity while hosting the OS is never going to perform like it could at peak as a clean storage drive.

That wasn't a cheap SSD, it was one of the better drives of the time.

 

3 hours ago, Plingen said:

but the writespeed should still not be as bad as an 5400rpm hdd ? ?? i guess the ssd's we got today last longer ? 

Your drive is too full to realize its full speed.

 

21 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Run defrag once on the SSD. It will not defrag the SSD but the software will issue the commands to trim and "garbage collect" the free nand pages. O&O Defrag I know for sure does that, not 100% abuot the built in defragmenting tool.

Use Disk Cleanup to empty some trash on the SSD.

If you have pagefile on defaults, maybe move the pagefile to mechanical drive to free some megabytes on the ssd.

 

 

You could use Macrium Reflect (freeware) to make an image of your SSD or clone your SSD to a new SSD

 

You could also move most of the crap on your mechanical drive temporarily, use disk cleanup to erase temporary files, maybe move some folders to your mech. drive temporarily... basically try to get the size below 32 GB or something like that, to be able to put the image on a usb stick.

Then you could try to format the ssd and then put the disk image back on the ssd.

 

A 120-240 GB SSD is almost as expensive as a quality 32-64 GB usb stick, so it may make more sense to just buy a new SSD.

 

See if macrium reflect sees your mechanical drive if you boot from usb stick with it (may not have drivers for the sata controller built in)

 

 

 

You don't need to run a defrag command... Windows has had built-in TRIM support with dialogue boxes to initiate it since 7. Windows has also had super easy disk imaging built-in since 7, no need to download additional software for most people.

[Plingen]

4 hours ago, Vitamanic said:

 

 

Your drive is too full to realize its full speed.

 

 

the drive should not have only 1/4 of its perfomance just because its almost full

 

[Roswell]

26 minutes ago, Plingen said:

the drive should not have only 1/4 of its perfomance just because its almost full

 

That's something you'll have to take up with the engineers that design flash storage solutions. It's not an issue with your drive, it's due to how flash memory is designed.

[mariushm]

The agility 3 uses Sandforce controller, which is supposed to do on-the-fly compression of the data to use less nand memory.

It could be as you get close to maximum capacity there's very little actual memory pages available to have data written to

Anandtech says the 120 GB model saves ~12% of nand capacity as spare, you have 128 GiB of memory and due to them using multiples of 1000 like mechanical drives  you have only 118 GiB accessible in Windows : https://www.anandtech.com/show/4346/ocz-agility-3-240gb-review

 

Could you look at the SMART data for the SSD? What's the health indicator at? Maybe it's getting close to the maximum erase cycles for some cells.

 

I'd still try to force trim on the ssd

[Plingen]

19 minutes ago, mariushm said:

The agility 3 uses Sandforce controller, which is supposed to do on-the-fly compression of the data to use less nand memory.

It could be as you get close to maximum capacity there's very little actual memory pages available to have data written to

Anandtech says the 120 GB model saves ~12% of nand capacity as spare, you have 128 GiB of memory and due to them using multiples of 1000 like mechanical drives  you have only 118 GiB accessible in Windows : https://www.anandtech.com/show/4346/ocz-agility-3-240gb-review

 

Could you look at the SMART data for the SSD? What's the health indicator at? Maybe it's getting close to the maximum erase cycles for some cells.

 

I'd still try to force trim on the ssd

how do i look up that ? 

trim is enabled

 

[Plingen]

openhardwaremonitor says 97% is left

[Kilrah]

6 hours ago, Vitamanic said:

You don't need to run a defrag command... Windows has had built-in TRIM support with dialogue boxes to initiate it since 7.

AFAIK Windows only TRIMs blocks it knows it has been using and are now not used any more and can be freed, so it keeps track of usage. When you copy an install to another drive its tracking now no longer corresponds to reality, which can lead to performance reductions.

[mariushm]

Aida64 and various tools that list the SMART information.

I understand trim is enabled, but you can manually force it...

 

Here's the option in O&O Defrag:

Also shows up on right click (says Optimize SSD with TRIM)

 

[Kilrah]

2 hours ago, Plingen said:

the drive should not have only 1/4 of its perfomance just because its almost full

 

But that's how it works. Flash can only be erased in pages. When a page is empty it can be written to directly. But anytime something is written to a page that is smaller than the page there is some free space within that page. Now when you want to use that free space or change the contents of the page the SSD can't just write to it, it has to read the existing contents, erase the page, and write the new contents with the existing and additional/modified data. That obviously takes more time. SSD speeds are rated based on writing to empty pages and those are used first, so after some amount of data has been written (depending on data type and operations) there won't be any free pages to write to without doing the read/modify/write cycles, reducing performance.