2.5" SSD performing worse than USB 2.0 Flash Drive

[suraswami]

I pulled out drive from my son's system, this was running W10 OS and had few Steam Games. The system felt really sluggish, so checked the disk performance and Crystal reported poor write performance. So imaged and moved the contents to a different SSD.

Today I formatted the bad drive and this is what it shows,

I have formatted couple of times, both quick as well as full format. I even used Parted Magic to wipe and reset the disk.

Drive is made by PNY (XLR8).

Probably a crappy one.

Crystaldiskinfo shows the drive is 91% good.

What can I do with this drive? Use as Backup/Disk image Drive?

ATTO reports differently.

 

[DRDNA]

Your ATTO results look just fine and actually on the good side for that ssd. Why Crystal Disk gave a bad result I don't know. But one idea for use would be storage as long as it stays connected to a PC, or maybe a cache drive if it stays at ATTO's performance results.

 

[suraswami]

Your ATTO results look just fine and actually on the good side for that ssd. Why Crystal Disk gave a bad result I don't know. But one idea for use would be storage as long as it stays connected to a PC, or maybe a cache drive if it stays at ATTO's performance results.

I copied 2 GB video file, it started off well and then it crawled to 50 MB/s and then went to 20 MB/s towards the end of the copy. Similarly I copied 5GB pictures folder with RAW and JPEG files, started off well and slowly crawled to 20 MB/s and finished eventually.

I guess I can use this drive to do an image of OS drive on a monthly basis and keep it as backup.

why should the drive be connected to a PC?

 

[newtekie1]

I suspect the drive is getting old, likely running out of reserve sectors. I've had a few of these PNY XLR8 SSDs that I put in service a few years ago fail very recently, and acting sluggish was a symptom all of them had before they failed. So I'd just toss the drive and move on. After all, 120GB SSDs are a dime a dozen these days, so it isn't worth risking data.

why should the drive be connected to a PC?

It's really only necessary for early TLC drives, because they start to have data retention issues when they go unpowered for long periods of time. The PNY XLR9 is a MLC drive though, so it shouldn't really be too much of a problem. The data retention when unpowered issue affects all flash memory, but it isn't really an issue except in the early TLC flash memory(and maybe QLC). The early TLC degraded really fast for some reason, like in a month or less, but the "2nd gen" 3D NAND TLC pretty much fixed that issue.

 

[suraswami]

I suspect the drive is getting old, likely running out of reserve sectors. I've had a few of these PNY XLR8 SSDs that I put in service a few years ago fail very recently, and acting sluggish was a symptom all of them had before they failed. So I'd just toss the drive and move on. After all, 120GB SSDs are a dime a dozen these days, so it isn't worth risking data.



It's really only necessary for early TLC drives, because they start to have data retention issues when they go unpowered for long periods of time. The PNY XLR9 is a MLC drive though, so it shouldn't really be too much of a problem. The data retention when unpowered issue affects all flash memory, but it isn't really an issue except in the early TLC flash memory(and maybe QLC). The early TLC degraded really fast for some reason, like in a month or less, but the "2nd gen" 3D NAND TLC pretty much fixed that issue.

"The PNY XLR9 is a MLC drive though" - you mean XLR8 that I have?

Most of the small capacity drives I own are slowly showing bad write speeds when testing with Crystal. They are all from 2010/11, I suppose they are all MLC drives.

Samsung 830 64GB - Writes are down to 112 MB/s
Microcenter Brand 120GB - 98 MB/s
Kingston SSDNow 120GB - 90 MB/s
OCZ Vertex 3 120GB - 140 MB/s
Patriot 64GB - this one is a SATA 2 drive and it still shows around 200 MB/s

They all are still in service.

I ordered this AData XPG 128GB drive - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077ZK1FJF/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Got good reviews. Will be using this to replace one of the slower drives, may be eventually will replace others if this XPG drive performs well.

 

[DRDNA]

^^^ sounds like a good plan.

 

[newtekie1]

"The PNY XLR9 is a MLC drive though" - you mean XLR8 that I have?

Yes, I mean the XLR8. AFAIK, there is no XLR9.

I ordered this AData XPG 128GB drive - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077ZK1FJF/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

To me, buying a 120/128GB SSD today doesn't make much sense. 240GB drives aren't that much more expensive, and they generally perform better. We've gotten to the point where 128GB drives usually only have a single NAND chip. Their max read/write speeds are usually rated the same, but transferring large files burns the SLC cache up extremely quickly and the performance just tanks.

 

[suraswami]

Yes, I mean the XLR8. AFAIK, there is no XLR9.



To me, buying a 120/128GB SSD today doesn't make much sense. 240GB drives aren't that much more expensive, and they generally perform better. We've gotten to the point where 128GB drives usually only have a single NAND chip. Their max read/write speeds are usually rated the same, but transferring large files burns the SLC cache up extremely quickly and the performance just tanks.

These drives are going to be for OS on my Servers, should be OK. But future ones will invest in 240GB disks. Usually I keep the OS drives separate from other drives, so smaller ones are fine. If this goes into a desktop yeah 240 is minimum I use (if nothing else is laying around).

Now a days I actually pick up NVMe drives for desktops or laptops, the price is almost same as regular SATA SSD.