SSD read speeds <1MB/s but still has fast writes, is it dying?

[chriswills]

I have a cheap 2tb SATA based SSD that i never should have bought, its about 2 years old with daily use. Today the sequential read speeds on the drive plummeted from ~500MB/s to <1MB/s but nothing has changed in write speeds. Below are some consecutive crystaldiskmark results. I've tried pushing the SATA cable back into place on both ends.

 

Is the drive dying? what can i do? 

[porina]

Can you use CrystalDiskInfo and post what it shows?

 

Absent that info, I have to wonder if it is having problems with reading. I'd try doing a full surface read of it. If you don't have software, I'd suggest HDDScan.

 

Edit: to expand on that, I've had some cheap SSDs from big brands suffer data rot. This results in slow reads if you hit it. I don't know if that is the case here.

[chriswills]

Forgot to mention i did a crystal disk info check and everything was good, for now I've had to pull the SSD just to get some work done since it was making the system really unstable (boot and shutdown times were easily 10x longer). I'll try the full surface read on it later, thanks. 

[bezza...]

35 minutes ago, chriswills said:

Forgot to mention i did a crystal disk info check and everything was good, for now I've had to pull the SSD just to get some work done since it was making the system really unstable (boot and shutdown times were easily 10x longer). I'll try the full surface read on it later, thanks. 

before you do anytinge else if there is anything worth anything 2 u on the ssd move it to a different drive....

[chriswills]

So i spent 2 days (very slowly!) rescuing data from it before checking for bad blocks in HDDScan, thousands of them had >500ms timing before it even reached 1% scanned. I gave it a quick format and everything seems to be back to normal, crystaldiskmark is reporting >500MB/s reads and no more bad blocks. Anything i can do in future to avoid this happening again? 

[NewMaxx]

On 5/25/2023 at 11:48 AM, chriswills said:

So i spent 2 days (very slowly!) rescuing data from it before checking for bad blocks in HDDScan, thousands of them had >500ms timing before it even reached 1% scanned. I gave it a quick format and everything seems to be back to normal, crystaldiskmark is reporting >500MB/s reads and no more bad blocks. Anything i can do in future to avoid this happening again? 

If you have very slow reads it's because the cells have degraded and the controller is forced to use soft error correction, read retries, and even parity to reconstruct the data. This can happen with a very worn drive, or simply if the data is stale and never refreshed. Without knowing how the drive was used and more about the setup I can't pinpoint the issue but I will say it's extremely rare unless you had the drive sitting in a closet for two years. Alternatively there's something wrong with the firmware. The drive is supposed to refresh on its own and a full drive of reads (scan) will induce this, too. However, manually reimaging the drive - that is, making an image, secure erasing, then reapplying the image, or something equivalent - twice a year will do the trick.

[chriswills]

29 minutes ago, NewMaxx said:

If you have very slow reads it's because the cells have degraded and the controller is forced to use soft error correction, read retries, and even parity to reconstruct the data. This can happen with a very worn drive, or simply if the data is stale and never refreshed. Without knowing how the drive was used and more about the setup I can't pinpoint the issue but I will say it's extremely rare unless you had the drive sitting in a closet for two years. Alternatively there's something wrong with the firmware. The drive is supposed to refresh on its own and a full drive of reads (scan) will induce this, too. However, manually reimaging the drive - that is, making an image, secure erasing, then reapplying the image, or something equivalent - twice a year will do the trick.

So there is a risk of this happening again unless i reimage the disk every so often? hhmm maybe not worth the risk keeping it in use

[NewMaxx]

On 5/26/2023 at 3:24 PM, chriswills said:

So there is a risk of this happening again unless i reimage the disk every so often? hhmm maybe not worth the risk keeping it in use

It should never happen. Not using it, that is just storing it, is effectively the same thing. The data wasn't being refreshed. Cells lose data over time. A full scan/read should trigger the controller to refresh any data that is degraded sufficiently, but if for some reason it's not doing that then you can just do a rewrite yourself. Probably a firmware issue or a firmware-flash issue.

[chriswills]

20 hours ago, NewMaxx said:

It should never happen. Not using it, that is just storing it, is effectively the same thing. The data wasn't being refreshed. Cells lose data over time. A full scan/read should trigger the controller to refresh any data that is degraded sufficiently, but if for some reason it's not doing that then you can just do a rewrite yourself. Probably a firmware issue or a firmware-flash issue.

Thank you for all the help but i just checked it after the format since it started being weird again and uuuuhhh....

 

 

 

I'm just pulling the drive.

 

 

[NewMaxx]

19 hours ago, chriswills said:

Thank you for all the help but i just checked it after the format since it started being weird again and uuuuhhh....

 

 

 

I'm just pulling the drive.

 

 

Yeah, seems that cheap drive is not doing too well.