When do SSDs start slowing down?

[steelo]

2 minutes ago, bungusboy81 said:

Oh, I'll likely never get anywhere near that! Thank you!

You should be fine then, no need to overthink or lose sleep over this! I would run trim once a week and not worry =)

 

I only have a 240gb SSD, which I also use as a boot drive so I'm VERY careful what games I install onto it.

[bungusboy81]

Just now, steelo said:

You should be fine then, no need to overthink or lose sleep! LOL

 

I only have a 240gb SSD, which I also use as a boot drive so I'm VERY careful what games I install onto it.

I'm planning on a 1TB SSD, with no HDD. Would it be bad to install games?

[steelo]

3 minutes ago, bungusboy81 said:

I'm planning on a 1TB SSD, with no HDD. Would it be bad to install games?

Not at all. 

[bungusboy81]

Just now, steelo said:

Not at all. 

Thank you!

[paddy-stone]

 

 

For what it's worth, I have a 64GB Samsung 830s (approx £80 Apr 2012) and used to be my main SSD way back.... it's since been used in other systems like laptops and now is a spare drive that I use for caching in one of my servers sometimes. At the moment it's unused so I thought I'd test it.

 

This is an 8 year old SSD and the oldest one I have. As you can see it's done approx 13.6TB TBW, mostly because it's etiher not used at all sometimes, or not used much as it's a low speed SSD compared to most cheap SSDs these days. It's only been used approx 1.78 years continuously in all that time too

 

 

Empty

 

 

 

 

Real world writes through my Gigabit network was around 75-93MB/s writing a 31.5GB file, mostly at the higher end.

 

This is at approx 50% full, no change really

 

 

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Writing from my internal NVME SSD to it, I got nearly the max writing speed of approx 158MB/s sustained, no drop off at all right up to ~80% full.

 

 

 

[paddy-stone]

I can test with a new Sata SSD too if you want, but it'll be about the same figures as the TBW for the newer drives are even higher and I won't have anything that's coming close to those figures. But at least it shows that even on an old drive the readswrites haven't even changed really on a drive that's had ~2 years continuous usage (or 8 years part usage, equivalent to 6 years at 8 hours a day approx). 

[Electronics Wizardy]

12 hours ago, shoutingsteve said:

It is worth noting that CAPACITY is not what is causing it to slow down.  Well, it is and isn't.  It is writes that slow it down.  Every time you write to your ssd, you pushing it towards it's slowing point.  If you had a brand new 1,000 Gb drive and you write 1,000 Gb to it as two giant 500 Gb files, it would write at full speed the entire time.  But then if you deleted one of those and put on another 500 Gb file, you will not get the same speed.  Even if you deleted them BOTH and rewrote files, you won't get the same speed.  Capacity doesn't play as much as "percentage of usage" along the lifetime of the drive.

 

That is why SSDs are not the best solution for storage, they are better for programs and OS's.
 

You can clean the drive to restore it's speed, though, But it totally reformats the drive (it is a different process than reformatting, BTW.  [all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares])

 

Command prompt:

"diskpart" <enter>

"list disk" <enter>

find your disk on the table

"select disk #" <enter>

"clean" <enter>

And you are done cleaning that disk, it'll be completely unformated and like new.

 

When you delete files, the os/filesystem will trim the free space, so deleting all the files will work basically the same as cleaning, the drive, or probably better, as I don't think the clean command trims the whole drive.

 

 

[Archer42]

diskpart "clean" command is kind of pointless. It just deletes partition table.

To completely restore ssd to factory state secure erase has to be used, which also destroys all the data. And what it does is more than just trim - it also clears translator data etc. In absolute majority of cases, if ssd is not physically broken, secure erase restores performance to "new ssd" state.

 

As for performance loss - it happens for various reasons and depends on specific ssd.

Write speeds can become lower when ssd is near full, or when slc cache is near full, or when ssd did not have enough time to perform trim/garbage collection.

Read speeds can become lower because charge leaking over time/read errors and because of translator-level fragmentation. This can be unnoticeable on some ssd-s, or it can be pretty dramatic on other ones.

No reason to bother about it too much though, if it gets bad enough to become noticeable backup-secure erase-resore cycle will return it to fresh state and can be performed in like ~30 minutes using something like clonezilla, assuming there is enough space on some other storage to temporarily store ssd image.

[Chiyawa]

2 hours ago, Archer42 said:

diskpart "clean" command is kind of pointless. It just deletes partition table.

Nope. It will delete the first few sectors and last few sectors of the storage.

 

However, when you 'clean all', then it will erase the entire storage by writing '0's to all memory storage.

[Kilrah]

But it's precisely not something you want to do to an SSD, you really want a secure erase so that it knows all blocks are free.

[Archer42]

9 hours ago, Chiyawa said:

Nope. It will delete the first few sectors and last few sectors of the storage.

Essentially overwriting areas containing partition table etc. Does really nothing to help restore ssd performance.

 

9 hours ago, Chiyawa said:

However, when you 'clean all', then it will erase the entire storage by writing '0's to all memory storage.

Which is counter-productive on ssd, it will not restore its performance and will, very likely, make matters even worse by completely filling it with data (zeros or not, from ssd controller point of view it does not really matter). And it will not even ensure that all the data is overwritten because of how ssd works.

Secure erase is really the only way to completely erase an ssd, either for the purpose of restoring performance or for the purpose of completely deleting data.

[Guest willies leg]

SSD's typically "slow down" when doing writes, not reads.

the slow down is caused by a lack of contiguous blocks to write. If you write a stripe, it's fast. If you write a block, it has to read the stripe, replace the block with the new one, then write the stripe. Having lots of free contiguous blocks means it can just write the stripe/block, since it doesn't have to replace data. SSD firmware typically deals with garbage collection so you don't have to. That needs space. Typically it's after around 85% full it slows to the point you notice it.