Magician says 795GB data written on 980 Pro after 2 days use

[jamieboo]

Hello folks

 

So I finished building my brand new system a couple of days ago and I'm just tentatively installing my various bits and pieces.

I have one 2TB 980 Pro installed at the moment. It's brand new. I installed Samsung Magician earlier today and it said the drive was in good condition, but had 512GB of data written!

Now a few hours later I look at Magician again and now it says 795GB data written!

How is this possible? What's going on?

All I've done is install Windows, a few basic drivers, and a few benchmarking programs. I have used 105GB on the drive. I understand that SSD benchmarking will involve the writing of data, but I really can't think of anything that would cause such a high amount of data written!

Is this normal for this timeframe and usage?

 

Thanks

 

*Ooh, and now it's up to 796GB.

 

[emosun]

thats data written not data stored , obviously a newer os will have a lot of written data happening if you just let the os do whatever it wants update wise

[flibberdipper]

The things I can immediately think of is excessive page file use OR ShadowPlay replays being turned on. My laptop has 32GB of RAM so I cut down the page file a LOT from what Windows defaulted to (screenshot of that below). If you leave ShadowPlay replays going that will abuse your drive as well. In just a hair under 1000 hours of being powered on, I've accumulated just under 2.2TB of writes on my drive (and it would be a lot more if I didn't use an external drive for ShadowPlay).

[jamieboo]

11 minutes ago, emosun said:

thats data written not data stored , obviously a newer os will have a lot of written data happening if you just let the os do whatever it wants update wise

Thanks emosun!

Yeah, I know this is data written not stored. But even with brand new PC/Windows setup shenanigans surely this volume of data written is rather high?

9 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

The things I can immediately think of is excessive page file use OR ShadowPlay replays being turned on. My laptop has 32GB of RAM so I cut down the page file a LOT from what Windows defaulted to (screenshot of that below). If you leave ShadowPlay replays going that will abuse your drive as well. In just a hair over 1000 hours of being powered on, I've accumulated just under 2.7TB of writes on my drive (and it would be a lot more if I didn't use an external drive for ShadowPlay).

Thanks flibberdipper!

I don't have Shadowplay installed. I have Windows, a few drivers, a few benchmarking apps, and Spotify. I know Spotify can use up a lot but surely not this much?

I have yet to tweak pagefile but even at its default it is not huge and I have done nothing that would've caused heavy use of the pagefile!

Could this be something to do with a Hibernation setting?

[emosun]

1 minute ago, jamieboo said:

But even with brand new PC/Windows setup shenanigans surely this volume of data written is rather high?

did you check before installing windows becuase directly out of the packaging i imagine the drive would have been written to several times in the QC testing phase before being sold

[RAS_3885]

Over six and a bit years of usage my OS drive has 18.8 TB written, which is under 10 GB per day. Almost 800 GB after just two days feels really high.

 

Hibernation writes the computer state to disk before doing a soft shutdown, so depending on how many times you've hibernated the machine over this time frame could contribute, but still seems high.

[jamieboo]

5 minutes ago, emosun said:

did you check before installing windows becuase directly out of the packaging i imagine the drive would have been written to several times in the QC testing phase before being sold

I didn't, no. But even so, going from 512GB written to 795GB written in about 3 hours is surely strange!

And I've installed a second 980 Pro but not yet formatted it etc but it shows up in Magician as having 0GB written.

I ran the benchmark in Magician, and I've run some Cinebench, Aida, and CrystalDisk Mark. But I haven't been running these things for hours.

 

[jamieboo]

1 minute ago, RAS_3885 said:

Over six and a bit years of usage my OS drive has 18.8 TB written, which is under 10 GB per day. Almost 800 GB after just two days feels really high.

 

Hibernation writes the computer state to disk before doing a soft shutdown, so depending on how many times you've hibernated the machine over this time frame could contribute, but still seems high.

That's what I thought.

I don't know what to do! I feel that the drive is tearing through it's lifespan at an impossible rate!

[RAS_3885]

Try checking with another program, such as CrystalDiskInfo, to make sure it isn't Samsung Magician reporting bogus numbers.

 

Does Task Manager or Resource Monitor show constant disk usage?

[jamieboo]

I suppose the benchmarking stuff could be responsible.

For example the Samsung Magician benchmark revealed a write speed of 5177MB/s. The whole benchmark test lasts, I suppose, nearly a minute. So if the test involves constantly writing for the duration of the test, then that would be about over 300GB written right there.

Could this be what's going on?

[jamieboo]

4 minutes ago, RAS_3885 said:

Try checking with another program, such as CrystalDiskInfo, to make sure it isn't Samsung Magician reporting bogus numbers.

 

Does Task Manager or Resource Monitor show constant disk usage?

CrystalDiskInfo shows...

Total Host Reads - 694GB

Total Host Writes - 796GB

... so it corroborates Magician's numbers.

 

There doesn't seem to be constant heavy usage of the drive at the moment. And it's still holding at 796.

[RAS_3885]

20 minutes ago, jamieboo said:

I suppose the benchmarking stuff could be responsible.

For example the Samsung Magician benchmark revealed a write speed of 5177MB/s. The whole benchmark test lasts, I suppose, nearly a minute. So if the test involves constantly writing for the duration of the test, then that would be about over 300GB written right there.

Could this be what's going on?

Depending on how many times you ran the benchmark I think you're on to something here. I just ran a benchmark on my NVMe drive (3270 MB/s read for reference) and it added around 100 GB to the total written amount.

[jamieboo]

11 minutes ago, RAS_3885 said:

Depending on how many times you ran the benchmark I think you're on to something here. I just ran a benchmark on my NVMe drive (3270 MB/s read for reference) and it added around 100 GB to the total written amount.

Thanks RAS_3885!

Yeah, that is beginning to make sense. But it's good to get a second opinion!

If this is indeed what's going on then Crikey it's something to be aware of! Or you could tear through the lifespan of a new SSD in just a couple of days!

[thewelshbrummie]

It's possible your install is writing error logs to one of the temp folders.

 

My laptop had a similar problem. On a 500GB SSD I'd go from 200GB free to zero in 2 hours as Windows was writing massive amounts of data to a temp folder due to errors (I didn't use it for around 18 months which messed things up somewhat). In my case I just created a new user account and that fixed the issue, switching back reintroduced the problem. The simple fix was to just delete the old account. That's worth a try but as your install is 2 days old, I'd suggest wiping the drive and starting over as the better (and more long term) solution.

 

I'd wipe and start over. No SSD should be writing that much data in such a short time unless you're either moving massive amounts of data around intentionally, or something is wrong with your system.

[jamieboo]

22 minutes ago, thewelshbrummie said:

It's possible your install is writing error logs to one of the temp folders.

 

My laptop had a similar problem. On a 500GB SSD I'd go from 200GB free to zero in 2 hours as Windows was writing massive amounts of data to a temp folder due to errors (I didn't use it for around 18 months which messed things up somewhat). In my case I just created a new user account and that fixed the issue, switching back reintroduced the problem. The simple fix was to just delete the old account. That's worth a try but as your install is 2 days old, I'd suggest wiping the drive and starting over as the better (and more long term) solution.

 

I'd wipe and start over. No SSD should be writing that much data in such a short time unless you're either moving massive amounts of data around intentionally, or something is wrong with your system.

Oh, dammit. Really?!

I don't think it's because of logging. Logging would persist, at least for a while, right? But as I said earlier I have only used 105GB of the drive. Whatever is making the majority of the 'Data written' figure given by Magician/Crystal, it is not persisting, it is being erased. That's why I thought it might be the benchmarking process. I just don't know!

Oohhhh! Why would it be doing this??

[jamieboo]

Can I please get some more help with this.

I'm reluctant to wipe and start over without knowing why this is happening. Especially because doing that will in itself involve another large amount of data being written.

 

What could be causing this?

Last night when I turned off my PC 802gb had been written. Turning it on this morning and the figure is up to 804gb. Not a massive increase - not as huge as the 400gb per day volumes of the pc's first two days - but even so.

Maybe it was the benchmarking?

Maybe benchmarking on a very fast ssd (capable of 7gb per second writes) will inevitably cause this kind of data written figure?

[lafrente]

Quote

Or you could tear through the lifespan of a new SSD in just a couple of days!

 

Calm down, you can't kill a decent SSD by writing data on it. You'd have to do that for years.

 

Just find out what is doing it. Virtual memory disabled? Hibernation disabled? Did you do any benchmarks? Did you watch a lot of videos while virtual memory was on?

 

And go to event viewer and see if there's anything going on. Check task manager and see which apps are writing on the disk. 

[jamieboo]

32 minutes ago, lafrente said:

 

Calm down, you can't kill a decent SSD by writing data on it. You'd have to do that for years.

 

Just find out what is doing it. Virtual memory disabled? Hibernation disabled? Did you do any benchmarks? Did you watch a lot of videos while virtual memory was on?

 

And go to event viewer and see if there's anything going on. Check task manager and see which apps are writing on the disk. 

I haven't tweaked Pagefile yet, but it's usage doesn't seem to be crazy. I'll turn of hibernation as soon as I'm back.

I did do some benchmarking: Cinebench, a bit of AIDA, CrystalDiskMark, and the bench built into Samsung Magician. But I didn't leave these things running for hours. Even so, do you think, as I mentioned before, it might be the benchmarking? If a SSD which can write at 5GB per second runs a benchmark for a minute, that's around 300GB right there, right?

[lafrente]

6 minutes ago, jamieboo said:

I haven't tweaked Pagefile yet, but it's usage doesn't seem to be crazy. I'll turn of hibernation as soon as I'm back.

I did do some benchmarking: Cinebench, a bit of AIDA, CrystalDiskMark, and the bench built into Samsung Magician. But I didn't leave these things running for hours. Even so, do you think, as I mentioned before, it might be the benchmarking? If a SSD which can write at 5GB per second runs a benchmark for a minute, that's around 300GB right there, right?

Not sure what exactly the benchmark does. At least some of it should be reading operations, and random write which is slower. Turn off the suspected stuff and see if the problem continues. 

[flibberdipper]

20 hours ago, jamieboo said:

Thanks flibberdipper!

I don't have Shadowplay installed. I have Windows, a few drivers, a few benchmarking apps, and Spotify. I know Spotify can use up a lot but surely not this much?

I have yet to tweak pagefile but even at its default it is not huge and I have done nothing that would've caused heavy use of the pagefile!

Could this be something to do with a Hibernation setting?

Now that you mention it, hibernation could very well be playing at least a little role in this. If you have the fast startup option turned on, it more or less puts Windows into a partial hibernation state when you hit shutdown. I don't think it would cause this many writes unless you're shutting your PC down every minute or two, but it's not like PCs with SSDs really need that option enabled anyways.

[starlight starbright]

On 4/1/2022 at 1:37 AM, jamieboo said:

Hello folks

 

So I finished building my brand new system a couple of days ago and I'm just tentatively installing my various bits and pieces.

I have one 2TB 980 Pro installed at the moment. It's brand new. I installed Samsung Magician earlier today and it said the drive was in good condition, but had 512GB of data written!

Now a few hours later I look at Magician again and now it says 795GB data written!

How is this possible? What's going on?

All I've done is install Windows, a few basic drivers, and a few benchmarking programs. I have used 105GB on the drive. I understand that SSD benchmarking will involve the writing of data, but I really can't think of anything that would cause such a high amount of data written!

Is this normal for this timeframe and usage?

 

Thanks

 

*Ooh, and now it's up to 796GB.

 

Have you found any effective solution to this?

Just built my new pc a week ago, and magician is reporting 910gb data write, with bulk of it was in the first 3 days when it could write 1gb of data every few minutes. yesterday data write was down to 25gb+.
just to share my own findings.
- every bootup does increase the samsung magician data write stats by 1-2gb.
- magician does report the similar stats to other software e.g. HWinfo.
- magician benchmark does instantly push the 'data write' to jump 100-200gb for each test.
- moving browser's (FX and chrome) cache to another HDD drive does help to avoid more data write - but probably only temporarily. FX seems to work but not sure will it work if updating the program. Chrome seems to be able to reverted back to its default folder after restart. MSedge would need to change registry data to change the cache location. However, ultimately depends on usage too, example streaming youtube/fb videos will increase data write faster.
- move virtual memory to HDD seem to help too.

another suspicious but unconfirmed culprit was antivirus.
- initially was using avast one, but looking at the 1gb every few minutes, i had removed it temp. and it seems to stop constant data write. will try to reinstall antivirus to see if it bring the issue back