WHY? Corsair says to disable Fast Boot to make your SSDs faster

[Sawtaytoes]

Can someone explain why Corsair recommends disabling Fast Boot to make your SSDs run faster? This sounds insane, and they give absolutely no reason:

https://help.corsair.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052822291-Ensuring-peak-performance-for-your-MP600-M-2-SSD

 

Corsair is the same company that wrote a whitepaper 15 years ago about some DDR2 or DDR3 RAM speeds being 40,000% faster (when it was only calculated as 400%). So I don't have much trust in what they're advocating.

 

[Sawtaytoes]

I saw this posted as a response to a post about degraded SSD performance: https://forum.corsair.com/forums/topic/181999-mp600-pro-xt-2tb-extremely-slow-reads-on-old-files/.

 

I was experiencing slow speeds on these drives myself and am trying to figure out a way to fix it.

 

If I write those files to the drive right now, it writes and reads really fast. It's only the ones that were written in the past when the drive was nearly full that have this slow read speed issue.

 

The Corsair SSD Toolbox doesn't seem to have a way to fix it either; although, I would expect this to be a feature. Either tell me which files are written as QLC or give me a button I can click to fix it.

[kokosnh]

No it’s pretty reasonable, first thing I do is disable the fastboot in windows.

As fastboot in windows just put your PC to form of a hybrid hibernation mode, instead of shutting it down, and then starting fresh next day. 
 

do not mix the fastboot in uefi, with the windows one. 
the uefi is just skiping POST procedure ( if you don’t OC, or change hardware, it ok, but it’s safer and slower for motherboard, to check if everything is OK on evry PC power on )

as for your problems, it seems just like typical data retention problem, and looks like the SSD just isn't refreshing the old data.

SSD have to use error correction algorithm, like LDPC, to read the old data, so it’s slower. The problem was known from the first commercial use of TLC NAND in Samsung 840, when the SSD would slow down to like 1MBps reading couple months old data

what model is it? And how old is the data? 

 

 

[Eigenvektor]

Not sure how fast boot would be detrimental to the SSDs performance.

 

However, it provides little benefit on a fast drive (i.e. cold boot will be just as quick), so the additional writes unnecessarily shorten its lifespan.

[Sawtaytoes]

On 12/4/2023 at 1:45 AM, kokosnh said:

No it’s pretty reasonable, first thing I do is disable the fastboot in windows.

As fastboot in windows just put your PC to form of a hybrid hibernation mode, instead of shutting it down, and then starting fresh next day. 
 

do not mix the fastboot in uefi, with the windows one. 
the uefi is just skiping POST procedure ( if you don’t OC, or change hardware, it ok, but it’s safer and slower for motherboard, to check if everything is OK on evry PC power on )

as for your problems, it seems just like typical data retention problem, and looks like the SSD just isn't refreshing the old data.

SSD have to use error correction algorithm, like LDPC, to read the old data, so it’s slower. The problem was known from the first commercial use of TLC NAND in Samsung 840, when the SSD would slow down to like 1MBps reading couple months old data

what model is it? And how old is the data? 

 

 

Mine is the 4TB Corsair MP600 XT Pro.

 

I have two of them that I bought in 2021, and both are having this issue. The files were written a year ago. I'm assuming `chkdsk` also leaves files alone? Because I've run that multiple times since last year on at least my C: drive.

 

I have a bunch of Crucial MX500 drives I used before this including a 512GB Samsung 980. I don't remember seeing this issue before, and I had those parts for a lot longer.

[kokosnh]

3 hours ago, Sawtaytoes said:

4TB Corsair MP600 XT Pro

That is a Phison E18 (3-core, 8-channels) + DDR4 + 176l TLC MICRON NAND.

 

it’s top tire PCIe 4.0  SSD.
Good CTF TLC NAND.

 

Hmm, can you explain your problem in more detail? 
what type of data, is it in folders, is navigating slow?  or opening, or copying them?

 

did you contact Corsair ? 

[Sawtaytoes]

Some of the files were large videos like YouTube videos I was doing which I'd downloaded from my editor and forgotten to move to my NAS.

 

Last year, I was experimenting with emulating Wii U games I'd ripped. I was working on my NAS at the time, so they were still in my Downloads folder waiting to go.

It was like 400GB of stuff on my C: drive that had to be moved at a ridiculously slow 20MB/s. This is not what I expected from an NVMe SSD. I have a bunch of Crucial MX500 SATA SSDs and never had this happen before.

 

On my D: drive (same SSD), where I store my games, one of them was The Lab (VR) by Valve. It was taking FOREVER to load a level. I ended up deleting the game and re-downloading it. After doing that, it was able to load into a level. All the time it took to delete, download, and load up the game was much faster than before.

 

There are more files, but these are some I can remember off the top of my head. 

 

I wonder if many of my games are suffering longer load times because of this issue.

 

These transfers should occur at 3-7GB/s, but they were 20MB/s. It's not because the files were small. Some were 13GB. But this slow speed makes it impossible to move them off the drive.

[Sawtaytoes]

9 hours ago, kokosnh said:

That is a Phison E18 (3-core, 8-channels) + DDR4 + 176l TLC MICRON NAND.

 

it’s top tire PCIe 4.0  SSD.
Good CTF TLC NAND.

 

Hmm, can you explain your problem in more detail? 
what type of data, is it in folders, is navigating slow?  or opening, or copying them?

 

did you contact Corsair ? 

I did contact them. No response 4 days later.

[kokosnh]

Can you post a crystaldiskinfo screen of it?

any firmware updates for it? ( remember to always do a backup before one ) 

[Sawtaytoes]

No firmware updates, and still no response from Corsair.

 

I recently emailed about some products on their website and got a response, so I dunno what's going on.

[Ryker Robb]

On 12/7/2023 at 11:28 AM, Sawtaytoes said:

Some of the files were large videos like YouTube videos I was doing which I'd downloaded from my editor and forgotten to move to my NAS.

 

Last year, I was experimenting with emulating Wii U games I'd ripped. I was working on my NAS at the time, so they were still in my Downloads folder waiting to go.

It was like 400GB of stuff on my C: drive that had to be moved at a ridiculously slow 20MB/s. This is not what I expected from an NVMe SSD. I have a bunch of Crucial MX500 SATA SSDs and never had this happen before.

 

On my D: drive (same SSD), where I store my games, one of them was The Lab (VR) by Valve. It was taking FOREVER to load a level. I ended up deleting the game and re-downloading it. After doing that, it was able to load into a level. All the time it took to delete, download, and load up the game was much faster than before.

 

There are more files, but these are some I can remember off the top of my head. 

 

I wonder if many of my games are suffering longer load times because of this issue.

 

These transfers should occur at 3-7GB/s, but they were 20MB/s. It's not because the files were small. Some were 13GB. But this slow speed makes it impossible to move them off the drive.

Did you check drive temps when this was happening? It could simply be thermal throttling.

[Sawtaytoes]

Both drive temps are pretty different. I'm not at my PC, so this is all from memory.

 

One was 37C and the other was ~50C+ (sitting above the GPU). Both drives have the same issue though.

 

I even had to delete a game (Valve's The Lab) and reinstall it (on the cooler drive) to fix never-loading load times. I couldn't see the transfer speed, but I assume it was the same.

 

Also, Windows Task Manager shows the latency shoot up and 100% load (the drive) when reading these files even at ~20MB/s.

[Alex Atkin UK]

On 12/4/2023 at 1:31 PM, Eigenvektor said:

Not sure how fast boot would be detrimental to the SSDs performance.

 

However, it provides little benefit on a fast drive (i.e. cold boot will be just as quick), so the additional writes unnecessarily shorten its lifespan.

Its always slowed boot for me since my first SATA SSD.

 

Fast boot is semi-hibernation, it saves the kernel state to the drive to combat HDDs slow random IO when loading the OS from loads of small files that could be scattered across the drive.  This loads quicker than a normal boot from a HDD as its a single contiguous file, what HDDs are fastest at.

 

However from an SSD that random IO is fast and something about how fast boot works results in a slower boot.

 

Also fast boot means if your OS is in an unstable state, it will still be in that state when you boot.

Its also going to cause ever so slightly more SSD wear, but considering the pagefile will do that anyway in normal use its irrelevant.  Its purely about boot speed.

 

Worth noting, fast boot only applies to power up / power down, a slow boot is performed when rebooting.