SSD Dying (Samsung EVO)

[Catsrules]

Today I booted up my old laptop and it was incredibly slow. Took about 30 minutes to boot into windows, the disk access light never turns off.

 

I checked the task manager (took at good 3 minutes for it to come up) and disk activity was at 100% and the average response time was extremely high 500 ms to 15000 ms.

 

Figuring it was something with the drive I turn off the laptop and pulled out the SSD Samsung 840 EVO and put it in a USB to SATA adapter and tried it on my desktop. Same thing, disc activity was 100% average response time was high but hovered around 25 ms (guessing because it wasn't trying to run windows like it was on the laptop).

 

I tried to copy of file off of it and got 500 KB to 1 MB.

 

Is this drive dying/dead? I have never had an SSD do this before, most of the time it just kills over dead without warning.

[Mateyyy]

I mean the 840 EVO is around 7 years old (assuming you got it at launch), so it wouldn't be entirely surprising, depending on how much data you've written on it.

Make sure it's not completely full though, as SSDs will need some free space to run optimally.

[svmlegacy]

4 minutes ago, Catsrules said:

Today I booted up my old laptop and it was incredibly slow. Took about 30 minutes to boot into windows, the disk access light never turns off.

 

I checked the task manager (took at good 3 minutes for it to come up) and disk activity was at 100% and the average response time was extremely high 500 ms to 15000 ms.

 

Figuring it was something with the drive I turn off the laptop and pulled out the SSD Samsung 840 EVO and put it in a USB to SATA adapter and tried it on my desktop. Same thing, disc activity was 100% average response time was high but hovered around 25 ms (guessing because it wasn't trying to run windows like it was on the laptop).

 

I tried to copy of file off of it and got 500 KB to 1 MB.

 

Is this drive dying/dead? I have never had an SSD do this before, most of the time it just kills over dead without warning.

First, make sure it isn't overheating. SATA SSD's may get a little warm, but shouldn't be hot to the touch.

 

Check the SMART status of the drive (HWiNFO is a good tool for this). If it's in warn, then consider it failing.

 

If you're running Windows 7, Is TRIM enabled?

[DailyProcrastinator]

11 minutes ago, Catsrules said:

Is this drive dying/dead? I have never had an SSD do this before, most of the time it just kills over dead without warning.

Use CrysatDiskMark and check rive health status.

https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskmark/

[Geeksta84]

6 minutes ago, svmlegacy said:

First, make sure it isn't overheating. SATA SSD's may get a little warm, but shouldn't be hot to the touch.

 

Check the SMART status of the drive (HWiNFO is a good tool for this). If it's in warn, then consider it failing.

 

If you're running Windows 7, Is TRIM enabled?

Even if it is on windows 10 still worth checking optimize drives  and making sure trim is enabled.

 

I would agree with TheDailyProcrastinator though easiest to just check with crystal disk but health status is shown in CrystalDiskInfo https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/ not CrystalDiskMark.

[Catsrules]

1 minute ago, Mateyyy said:

I mean the 840 EVO is around 7 years old (assuming you got it at launch), so it wouldn't be entirely surprising, depending on how much data you've written on it.

Make sure it's not completely full though, as SSDs will need some free space to run optimally.

It is about 1/3 full.

 

I don't remember exactly when I got it, I think I put it in my laptop maybe 3-4 years ago. But I don't know if it was new in the box when I did that.

HWiNFO64 saids

[F1] Total Host Writes:                                                         99/Always OK, Worst: 99 (Data = 3534528127,8)

 

No idea what units those are in or what the ,8 signify. I am  guessing Kelobytes? So about 3.5TB?

6 minutes ago, svmlegacy said:

First, make sure it isn't overheating. SATA SSD's may get a little warm, but shouldn't be hot to the touch.

 

Check the SMART status of the drive (HWiNFO is a good tool for this). If it's in warn, then consider it failing.

 

If you're running Windows 7, Is TRIM enabled?

 

 

I ran HWiNFO64, it passed all of the S.M.A.R.T. Test.

 

No I am running Windows 10. Trim is enabled.

[svmlegacy]

2 minutes ago, Catsrules said:

It is about 1/3 full.

 

I don't remember exactly when I got it, I think I put it in my laptop maybe 3-4 years ago. But I don't know if it was new in the box when I did that.

HWiNFO64 saids

[F1] Total Host Writes:                                                         99/Always OK, Worst: 99 (Data = 3534528127,8)

 

No idea what units those are in or what the ,8 signify. I am  guessing Kelobytes? So about 3.5TB?

 

 

I ran HWiNFO64, it passed all of the S.M.A.R.T. Test.

 

No I am running Windows 10. Trim is enabled.

Look very carefully at the [BE] Airflow Temperature: 68/Always OK, Worst: 1. This drive has overheated at some point in its life, thermal throttling. The rest all look fine. The Data field is specific to the drive, and it's up to the host to know how to interpret it. Look at the 99 value, that's the key. (100 is good. 0 is bad)

[Catsrules]

3 minutes ago, svmlegacy said:

Look very carefully at the [BE] Airflow Temperature: 68/Always OK, Worst: 1. This drive has overheated at some point in its life, thermal throttling. The rest all look fine. The Data field is specific to the drive, and it's up to the host to know how to interpret it. Look at the 99 value, that's the key. (100 is good. 0 is bad)

That might have been when the laptop tried to cook itself. About a year or so ago I put the laptop to sleep and put it in my backpack, at some point the laptop decided it should wake up from sleep. Being in a closed up padded laptop backpack there is zero breathing room. I only notice when I happened to walk passed my backup and heard fans noises coming from the laptop. The battery was almost dead so it was probably on for awhile 1-2 hours. 

 

[Catsrules]

23 minutes ago, Geeksta84 said:

Even if it is on windows 10 still worth checking optimize drives  and making sure trim is enabled.

 

I would agree with TheDailyProcrastinator though easiest to just check with crystal disk but health status is shown in CrystalDiskInfo https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/ not CrystalDiskMark.

I am optimizing it now. But it is trying to defragment the drive is that normal? I thought SSDs shouldn't be defragmented as they don't need it and it would wear them out.

[Geeksta84]

2 minutes ago, Catsrules said:

I am optimizing it now. But it is trying to defragment the drive is that normal? I thought SSDs shouldn't be defragmented?

That is normal, technically speaking it will lower the overall life just like writing to the drive many times normally would but it will improve performance so it is worth it in my opinion.

 

Anyone else feel free to correct me but that is how I understand it.

[Geeksta84]

3 minutes ago, Geeksta84 said:

That is normal, technically speaking it will lower the overall life just like writing to the drive many times normally would but it will improve performance so it is worth it in my opinion.

 

Anyone else feel free to correct me but that is how I understand it.

After looking into it more, sounds like you may be right. Although it certainly isn't going to kill your drive from doing it every once in an effort to improve performance. The few people that have done their own testing to see if it improves performance have not seen any noticeable benefit in performance. It is also worth noting the tests Im seeing people did, were performed on heavily used ssds but not ones that were currently experiencing performance problems...

[Catsrules]

5 minutes ago, Geeksta84 said:

After looking into it more, sounds like you may be right. Although it certainly isn't going to kill your drive from doing it every once in an effort to improve performance. The few people that have done their own testing to see if it improves performance have not seen any noticeable benefit in performance. It is also worth noting the tests Im seeing people did, were performed on heavily used ssds but not ones that were currently experiencing performance problems...

From my understanding defragmenting is only really useful on hard drives, as they physically need to move the head to find data. It is beneficial for it to have a file stored in one contiguous block so the read head can just scan along the platters without needing to jump (seek) to another spot to grab data.  

This isn't a problem for SSDs as all of there data is just stored in flash memory you can access any memory location at the speed of light so it doesn't really matter if a file is stored in a continuous block or not "seek time" is the same. 

[svmlegacy]

34 minutes ago, Catsrules said:

I am optimizing it now. But it is trying to defragment the drive is that normal? I thought SSDs shouldn't be defragmented as they don't need it and it would wear them out.

Is this over USB or in the laptop? Windows 10 doesn't even give me the option to defragment my 860 EVO.

[Catsrules]

Just now, svmlegacy said:

Is this over USB or in the laptop? Windows 10 doesn't even give me the option to defragment my 860 EVO.

Ahh that might be it, this is over USB on my desktop. I just clicked optimized button on the Optimized Drives tool in windows and it started defragmenting.

 

I am going to plug this in via SATA on my desktop later today, as Samsung Magician doesn't recognize it as a Samsung drive. I wanted to see if there is any firmware updates to run on it.

[svmlegacy]

11 minutes ago, Catsrules said:

Ahh that might be it, this is over USB on my desktop. I just clicked optimized button on the Optimized Drives tool in windows and it started defragmenting.

 

I am going to plug this in via SATA on my desktop later today, as Samsung Magician doesn't recognize it as a Samsung drive. I wanted to see if there is any firmware updates to run on it.

This is what mine looks like, anyways. Should be just "Optimizing", not defragmenting.

[Catsrules]

1 minute ago, svmlegacy said:

This is what mine looks like, anyways. Should be just "Optimizing", not defragmenting.

I just notice the Media type column it lists the external SSD as a Hard Disk Drive. So that is why it defragmented. I am sure plugging it in via SATA will fix this issue.