Kingston SSD degradation

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chineolee

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#1  Edited By chineolee
Member since 2004 • 637 Posts

I re-ran the windows experience indexer today and the rating on my primary windows drive (a Kingston V300 SATA 3 240GB SSD) has gone down by 2 points from 7.9 to 5.9. I bought the drive when I built the rig in January this year.

Surprised by this I ran a benchmark on the drive and compared it to my other identical SSD which I bought much more recently and have been using as a secondary applications drive. The results are shown below - first picture is the new drive, second is the 3+ month old drive.

I realise that this isn't entirely scientific - a better comparison would be a benchmark from the same drive taken at the two time points, but I don't have this, and given that the primary drive was rated 7.9 when it was new I tend to assume that its performance at that time was similar to the newer drive's performance today.

I'm aware that enterprise SSD drives apply techniques such as write combining, over provisioning and TRIM to reduce performance degradation, and my Kingston drive may or may not have these features being a relatively cheap variety, however I'm still pretty surprised that performance can apparently degrade so much and so quickly.

This may be nothing new to people, so I apologise if this really is old news, but it surprised me.

I guess my question is, have others experienced this, and is there any way to reverse it?

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kraken2109

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#2 kraken2109
Member since 2009 • 13271 Posts

I would expect it's partly because the drive is 90% full. I'm not sure if it applies to SSDs, but I know that HDD performance degrades noticeably when they're almost full.

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GummiRaccoon

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#3 GummiRaccoon
Member since 2003 • 13799 Posts

@kraken2109: HDDs degrade in performance when they become full because you start putting data on the inside of the platter which actually, while spinning at the same rate, is slower than the outside of the platter. It's a physical limitation.

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osan0

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#4 osan0
Member since 2004 • 17779 Posts

what version of windows are you using? if its 8 then it should be set to trim the drive automatically from time to time. right click on you drive, go to tools and click optimise. see when it was last trimmed.

windows 7 also supports trim but it may need to be set up. worth a look.

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horgen

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#5 horgen  Moderator
Member since 2006 • 127492 Posts

@kraken2109 said:

I would expect it's partly because the drive is 90% full. I'm not sure if it applies to SSDs, but I know that HDD performance degrades noticeably when they're almost full.

Tested the two HDDs I got. The one that is 60% full has half the read/write speed of the one that is 25% full D=

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kraken2109

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#7 kraken2109
Member since 2009 • 13271 Posts

@horgen said:

@kraken2109 said:

I would expect it's partly because the drive is 90% full. I'm not sure if it applies to SSDs, but I know that HDD performance degrades noticeably when they're almost full.

Tested the two HDDs I got. The one that is 60% full has half the read/write speed of the one that is 25% full D=

Are they the same model?

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horgen

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#8  Edited By horgen  Moderator
Member since 2006 • 127492 Posts

@kraken2109 said:

@horgen said:

@kraken2109 said:

I would expect it's partly because the drive is 90% full. I'm not sure if it applies to SSDs, but I know that HDD performance degrades noticeably when they're almost full.

Tested the two HDDs I got. The one that is 60% full has half the read/write speed of the one that is 25% full D=

Are they the same model?

Different. WD black 1TB 60% full against SeaGate 3TB 25% full... Bought one year and three months apart or so.

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JigglyWiggly_

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#9  Edited By JigglyWiggly_
Member since 2009 • 24625 Posts

Your drive is nearly full. SSD performance starts to slow down after 50% full, and dramatically when only 20% free space is there.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6489/playing-with-op

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#10  Edited By nicecall
Member since 2013 • 528 Posts

I have an ancient Kingston 60gb SSD in an office computer, i also been wondering if its losing any speed... It was made before they put the TRIM command in their brand of SSDs so i'm thinking i may switch it out with an intel ssd i have laying around.

But i'd think that 240gb drive would be quite new and likely is doing TRIM who knows whats slowing it down...

In regards to reversing it, I've heard doing a full format can help with its speed... but i've also heard doing full formats on SSDs are bad also, so im not sure what to believe... I do know however whenever i have a USB stick acting bad or slow, I do a full format and it brings it back to life... don't do a full format until u check this somewhere else.

Also, to check if TRIM is enabling in your windows 7, type this in dos prompt:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

if it says DisableDeleteNotify = 0, then TRIM is enabled i think