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Western Digital SSDs experiencing read performance degradation

According to several Chinese forum posts and my own experience, some (if not the most) Western Digital SSDs have serious performance regression problems. The read performance of old data drops significantly on drives such as WD Blue SATA, SN500, SN550, SN700, SN750 etc.

 

Users reporting this problem are experiencing very long game loading time, extremely slow copying speed and the initial test results showed that the read rate for old files could be as low as 5 to 20 MB/s. Below are some screenshots:

 

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The testing software is called SSDReadSpeedTester and was originally developed to test a similar issue with Samsung 840 EVO SSDs back in the day. The graph directly above is supposed to show the relation between data rate and age. 

Some related links to the 840 EVO issue:

 

The exact cause of this problem is still under speculation, since these drives have such a large installation base and the issue only occurs this month. We should have seen large amounts of reports long before if the nature of TLC-NAND and the SSD controller design flaw is to blame. I'll link the discussion post on the Chinese forum below.

 

The temporary solution to this is to just rewrite the old files to the drive once, and the read speed should be back to normal. I myself experienced this issue while using a WD Blue SATA SSD for my PS4. Earlier this month I tried to play some old games which was on the drive since the SSD upgrade and never ever touched, in this case Devil May Cry 5 specifically. It felt very slow to load and to make things worse, it has cut scenes and loading screens everywhere. I didn't even remember the HDD to be that slow. Today I deleted and reinstalled the game then suddenly everything was back to normal.

However, rewriting old files may not be a viable option for everyone. Optimally WD would release some form of a firmware update which move the data every several months automatically under the hood, but the WD China customer service didn't come back with relieving answers as for now.

 

Has anyone also experienced similar problems? I've done some search but found nothing in the English-speaking community.

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😀 Thanks for summary. It seems like a TLC drive issue. I'd switch to 970 EVO. 

 

Data is more important for me.

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  • 1 month later...

Rex Fan:

 

Seeing the same issues with a WD BLUE SSD .  Terrible read/write performance (1 to 10 Meg sec) and machine running slower than a Windows 10 Machine during a background HDD inline major Windows Update (that painful).  Computer has been power off for about 5 months before powering it on a few days ago. so it seems to be time related.

 

Also noted similar issues with the cheaper Kingston A400 SSDs  (about 7 of the 9 I've installed also had major performance issues within 9 months of installing)

 

As Josh mentioned, switching to a Samsung Evo is now also my go-to solution and I now feel that I should of never cheaped out to save a few bucks 🙂

 

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Yea my wd blue m.2 hasn't been a great performer when it comes to games and large software but music software, vsts, and content,wav,mp3,mp4 and such seem to work as they should no issues, I only have a couple games still installed on it that haven't noticed perform issue, it's my second drive of three so I'm not to worried, my primary drive is WD blue nvme no issues at all

                          Ryzen 5800X3D(Because who doesn't like a phat stack of cache?) GPU - 7700Xt

                                                           X470 Strix f gaming, 32GB Corsair vengeance, WD Blue 500GB NVME-WD Blue2TB HDD, 700watts EVGA Br

 ~Extra L3 cache is exciting, every time you load up a new game or program you never know what your going to get, will it perform like a 5700x or are we beating the 14900k today? 😅~

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Also side note I found atleast with my experience is later after dealing with the performance issues I had installed the WD dashboard software and apparently trim was not enabled automatically with my WD SSD and needed to be enabled and reoccurring schedule set,since them it's been much better not perfect but better

                          Ryzen 5800X3D(Because who doesn't like a phat stack of cache?) GPU - 7700Xt

                                                           X470 Strix f gaming, 32GB Corsair vengeance, WD Blue 500GB NVME-WD Blue2TB HDD, 700watts EVGA Br

 ~Extra L3 cache is exciting, every time you load up a new game or program you never know what your going to get, will it perform like a 5700x or are we beating the 14900k today? 😅~

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  • 6 months later...

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