Inquiry before purchasing SSD to avoid another mistake

[JohnCoool]

I bought cheap SSDs two times as per recommendations from shop owners for my two systems but in all cases the SSD write speed was very bad.

The write speed would drop off on one model down to 30 and the other model down to 8MB/s.

One is 25% full and the other has 80% full drive.

I saw several videos for Samsung SSDs that did not seem to face this issue at all.

The computers that I am using do not have NVME interface. So they are the standard 2.5 disks.

Can I get confirmation that I won't face this issue if I purchase the Samsung EVO 860 SSD?

[N0Y0U2114]

I hace used the 860 evo for both a PC and as an external drive for a ps5 and have not faced any issues regarding write speed.

[KennewickMan]

In the world of technology and gadgets, you get what you paid for.

[Biggus]

What brand were the drives and what are the systems?

Also, NVMe drives are compatible with everything using a $10 PCIe x4 M.2 adapter (you just can't boot from them in the old systems and old operating systems might need drivers...) and will be much faster than SATA no matter what version the interface is. Even PCIe 1.0 is double the speed of SATA3 for an x4 link and has major advantages in operations it can handle per second. SATA SSDs like you're talking about tend to tank in speed when multiple random writes are performed vs. large sequential, especially if you have your SATA controller in SATA mode instead of AHCI. Basic SATA is missing a couple of features that make it perform poorly with solid state. This should be a BIOS option and you can usually switch between the two without issues as long as your operating system has generic AHCI drivers. Very old operating systems might need them installed.

Since manufacturers are pulling a ripoff and charging the same for NVMe and SATA, you might want to consider the add-in adapter option. There are only a couple of other considerations but that's why I asked the types of systems. 🙂

Brand-wise Samsung is fine, I use Teamgroup which is lesser known but great... Corsair, Crucial, and Sandisk are all well known good brands. I avoid Western Digital like the plague for consumer stuff and use Seagate NAS HDDs but I don't think Seagate makes consumer flash drives.

[JohnCoool]

They are old upgraded laptops, so no chance for PCI cards. Every once in a while I upgrade a part of them. It is more like a hobby.

One of them is working on SATA II interface. Both are on AHCI interface.

The newer one has an added internal drive that is a Seagate 7200RPM and there is no drop off in speed at all. It is the only good one that I have but it is suppose to be slower than the SSD write speed.

The 1st batch SSD was a Transcend and the 2nd one is TEAMGroup.

Both work perfectly fast until I reach about 50% storage space. Then the drop off starts to occur.

That is the only thing that i want. It is that the speed remains the same. Not at full speed but no huge drop offs either. Because that makes it completely worthless to me.

[Biggus]

What operating systems? I haven't used transcend but they're not supposed to be bad either. Does the slowdown at 50% occur when copying a bunch of items at once, or is it just around 50% full and the speed doesn't return? The second option might indicate that the OS doesn't support TRIM. You'll need to search for a hotfix or generic drivers which do, but basically the OS never tells the drive to do garbage collection on free blocks when the drive isn't being used heavily, so it has to do it while the writes are happening and speed tanks. It seems like I remember this being added as a built in feature in one of the later Win7 updates. Linux fixed it at some point too, I couldn't say when.

If it's happening when you're copying over 50% of the drive worth of data to the drive it might just be overheating, especially in a laptop.

Neither of those brands is bad (I haven't used transcend but between my machines I've got 2x2TB teamgroup nvmes and 128GB of their ram, the only bad product i have from them was a thumb drive that had an issue with its cache controller, but that was $12 junk anyway and still worked) so I'd search for trim support for your OS and try to figure things out from that side before buying another. It sounds like you'll probably hit it with a samsung model too unless samsung does automatic drive-based TRIM.

[JohnCoool]

Thanks for the details.

This disks performed the same on the PC of the shop that I tested them at. All the devices support trim. I have HD Sentinel and it is all fine. Win 8.1 and 10 all 64bit.

Maybe SATA and NVME don't perform the same.

My only inquiry is if Samsung is known to always keep the same speed or not. 

I saw in several videos that it does but it was not clear if they are SATA or NVME.

If anyone has the "Samsung EVO 860 SSD" SATA then please let me know if it works the same while it is the main drive and full.

I just do not want a drive that will drop off to 10-30MB/s after it is 50% full or at all. It should still work even if it is 90% full.

A drive that does not only performs well until it runs out of cache is pointless.

[JohnCoool]

Based on the feedback and the new research that I did. I place an order for 2 Samsung EVO SSD.

Will update with the results soon.

[Biggus]

I hope it works out for you, let us know. If you're stuck with them check for firmware updates on the other brands too. I had a Crucial years ago that would suddenly black screen the computer after 2 days of uptime after I had it for a couple of years, turned out to be a bug in the firmware where after around 2 years of power-on time some counter messed up and they'd just flat out crash the machine unless updated... My old Intel M.2 drives had roughly 10 firmware updates while I owned them for various reasons. If there's a fix you can use them in cheap external USB enclosures if nothing else. Since you're using modern operating systems the TRIM thing really shouldn't be an issue (Windows 10 does it instead of defrag as auto weekly maintenance and on deletes) and it doesn't sound like you've owned them long enough to cause performance degradation, even the cheapest flash can write hundreds of terabytes before it's considered degraded.

[JohnCoool]

Thank you for the tips on the sometimes required firmware update.

Two of the drives are only 1 year old and the other 2 were tested by a computer at the shop and two at home and failed. I got rid of them as soon as I could and will sell the two 1 year old SSds for a big loss to just to get rid of them because I hate having H/W that I thought is great but did not meet the expiations.

The final results will confirm that quality matters in performance.

I will post them in about 2-3 weeks time. Depending the arrival of the disks.