very slow nvme speed compared to my friend who has the same drive

[Deleted member 67555]

I noticed a significant slowdown on my PC and have since reinstalled Windows 10... It did not help.
I ran the benchmark in Magician and shows my 960 Evo running at 1500/1000...

This started about 10 days ago.

 

[darthmauldog1125]

so your saying it's build 1903 (19H1) hmmmm weird I've not seen any major complaints for storage speed NVMe or otherwise under this build also weird that it works as it should under Win7

could be a firmware issue have you looked at whether or not there's a new firmware update for your 970 pro on Samsung's website

Yes, I checked with samsung magician and it says firmware is up to date. please see attached image.

New finding. Speeds are faster than before when disabling all but 1 core in my 7960x within bios. i don't think this is a motherboard issue as i've tried two different motherboards with the same speeds, so I have started the warranty repair process for the cpu. here are new benchmarks for 970 pro 512gb (boot drive) and 970 pro 1tb (connected via pcie-nvme x16 adapter in x16 slot) on asrock x299 extreme4 with 1 core enabled on core i9 7960x.

enabling two cores slows down the 4k benchmark considerably in as ssd as well as slows down some other tests in both as ssd and crystaldiskmark

 

[Vario]

Yes, I checked with samsung magician and it says firmware is up to date. please see attached image.

New finding. Speeds are faster than before when disabling all but 1 core in my 7960x within bios. i don't think this is a motherboard issue as i've tried two different motherboards with the same speeds, so I have started the warranty repair process for the cpu. here are new benchmarks for 970 pro 512gb (boot drive) and 970 pro 1tb (connected via pcie-nvme x16 adapter in x16 slot) on asrock x299 extreme4 with 1 core enabled on core i9 7960x.

enabling two cores slows down the 4k benchmark considerably in as ssd as well as slows down some other tests in both as ssd and crystaldiskmark

Just a thought, have you tried changing the Windows Power-Saving settings?

 

[The Egg]

Weird stuff, and LOL at the folks suggesting the original poster needs an NVMe source to hit 40MB/s reads. Mechanical PATA drives from 20'ish years ago could do 40MB/s. NVMe has been commonplace for about 1-2 years, and suddenly anything less than a PCIe x4 connection is incapable of 40MB/s.

Anyhow, I don't really have a good explanation for either of these cases. A good start would be to make sure you have any storage controller drivers installed, and probably the Samsung NVMe driver as well. Install Samsung Magician. Also go through the BIOS very thoroughly.

 

[darthmauldog1125]

Yes, I have tried changing windows power settings. But it didn't change anything. the only way i could get nvme speeds closer to spec were 1) changing OS from windows 10 to windows 7 or 2) booting into safe mode or 3) booting into windows PE from usb stick or 4) disabling all cores except one in bios.

Weird stuff, and LOL at the folks suggesting the original poster needs an NVMe source to hit 40MB/s reads. Mechanical PATA drives from 20'ish years ago could do 40MB/s. NVMe has been commonplace for about 1-2 years, and suddenly anything less than a PCIe x4 connection is incapable of 40MB/s.

Anyhow, I don't really have a good explanation for either of these cases. A good start would be to make sure you have any storage controller drivers installed, and probably the Samsung NVMe driver as well. Install Samsung Magician. Also go through the BIOS very thoroughly.

Yes, I made sure to check both the standard nvme driver, samsung's nvme driver, the previous version of samsung's nvme driver, checked for firmware updates using samsung magician, and went through my asrock's bios very thoroughly.

Weird stuff, and LOL at the folks suggesting the original poster needs an NVMe source to hit 40MB/s reads. Mechanical PATA drives from 20'ish years ago could do 40MB/s. NVMe has been commonplace for about 1-2 years, and suddenly anything less than a PCIe x4 connection is incapable of 40MB/s.

Anyhow, I don't really have a good explanation for either of these cases. A good start would be to make sure you have any storage controller drivers installed, and probably the Samsung NVMe driver as well. Install Samsung Magician. Also go through the BIOS very thoroughly.

Yes I tried changing power saving settings: changed power mode to high performance, and tried setting link state power management to Off, setting USB selective suspend setting to Disabled, setting "Allow hybrid sleep" to OFF, setting minimum and maximum processor state to 100%. nothing worked.

Weird stuff, and LOL at the folks suggesting the original poster needs an NVMe source to hit 40MB/s reads. Mechanical PATA drives from 20'ish years ago could do 40MB/s. NVMe has been commonplace for about 1-2 years, and suddenly anything less than a PCIe x4 connection is incapable of 40MB/s.

Anyhow, I don't really have a good explanation for either of these cases. A good start would be to make sure you have any storage controller drivers installed, and probably the Samsung NVMe driver as well. Install Samsung Magician. Also go through the BIOS very thoroughly.

So, you got me thinking, while I changed power saving settings within windows i didn't try changing any power saving settings on the CPU itself within bios. I disabled the CPU C states (in asrock x299 extreme4 bios set CPU C states support to manual, set enhanced halt state (C1E) to disabled, set CPU C6 state support to disabled, set Package C state support to disabled, set CFG lock to disabled) and the speeds increased. not as fast as they should be nor as fast as they were in windows 7 or the windows PE usb boot, but faster. this still seems a bit weird, i don't think it should take this much tinkering with CPU settings in bios in order to get nvme speeds closer to where they should be on windows 10. So i'm still going to send this 7960x CPU in for repair/exchange, and tomorrow I'll try a different x299 CPU. please see attached image for as ssd benchmark with CPU C states support settings disabled.

 

[Athlonite]

Hmmm did you try the enterprise version of Intel Rapid Storage Technology enterprise driver and utility ver:5.5.0.1367 available from the download page for your Asrock x299 extreme4 mobo

 

[darthmauldog1125]

Hmmm did you try the enterprise version of Intel Rapid Storage Technology enterprise driver and utility ver:5.5.0.1367 available from the download page for your Asrock x299 extreme4 mobo

I didn't try installing RST enterprise version, but would that even matter if i'm only using nvme, have samsung's drivers installed, and i'm not running any other hard drives nor a raid array?

I submitted my 7960x today for repair or replacement and I installed another processor in the same asrock x299 extreme4 motherboard, same nvme's installed (one in m.2_1 and one in the second x16 PCIE... The CPU is an Intel® Core™ i5-7640X X-series Processor, so it only has 16 lanes. I reset to UEFI defaults, so that the CPU C state support options were back at auto default settings, and then booted up the system and ran a benchmark. right away, on default UEFI settings, the benchmarks seem decent. Not as fast as when I ran benchmarks on windows 7 OS with the 7960x, but it is nice to see decent speeds without messing with my motherboard's bios.

Out of curiosity I also ran a benchmark after disabling the C state options in the UEFI CPU configuration options. The speeds are about the same, with marginal improvement on sequential write, 4k read/write, and 4k-64thrd read while sequential read and 4k-64thrd write were marginally slower on as ssd benchmark test. on the crystaldiskmark benchmark seq Q32T1 read/write and 4KiB Q8T8 write were marginally faster but 4KiB Q8T8 read, 4KiB Q32T1 read/write, and 4KiB Q1T1 were all marginally slower.

 

[Mussels]

Thats very interesting that the CPU itself caused the problems

Did you ever test the PCI-E levels the drive was running at? (got something in my eye and reading the whole thread to check sounds unpleasant atm)

 

[darthmauldog1125]

Thats very interesting that the CPU itself caused the problems

Did you ever test the PCI-E levels the drive was running at? (got something in my eye and reading the whole thread to check sounds unpleasant atm)

I did make sure to use the first M.2 port (both connect via PCH according to ASRock, not directly to cpu), and for my pcie m.2 adapter I tried all different settings available for the pcie lanes in bios. But I also was able to try a different evga board where the m.2 port connects directly to the cpu, and the speeds were the same on that and the asrock board.

HWINFO says it is currently running at 4x bandwidth

 

[Mussels]

i was wondering if it was capped at x2 or PCI-E 2.0 or something on the CPU that gave it slow speed results, since a CPU change sped it up

 

[darthmauldog1125]

unforutnately i didn't think of checking this while i still had the 7960x (already sent out). so that hwinfo is with the loaner corei5 cpu.

 

[The Egg]

i was wondering if it was capped at x2 or PCI-E 2.0 or something on the CPU that gave it slow speed results, since a CPU change sped it up

Even if that were the case, a PCIe 2.0 x4 connection is still rated at 2.0GB/s (minus some for overhead), and that should only affect the top end.

 

[Deleted member 67555]

Uhm my issue was magically gone today...
The only update I got was A-Volute and that is an update for my audio...so ~
And yes it was very noticeable which is why I checked again.

 

[Lumpitor]

Have you tried creating a temporary RAMdisk and using that as the source of your files? A quick search came up with this list of free RAMdisk software (can't vouch for the quality, of course). That would eliminate any source file bottleneck and let your SSD run free.

As for the Task Manager results, this might indicate that the QLC NAND is the bottleneck, holding even the SSD controller back and leaving it mostly idle. If the SLC cache is skipped for some reason (which is down to how the SSD firmware handles things), the controller would only be doing the work required to write as much as the flash is able to handle, while otherwise waiting and essentially twiddling its thumbs. But as I said, it might also indicate a bottleneck elsewhere (the source SSD is the most likely culprit) or a combination of two or more factors.


Sounds possible, but shouldn't the drive firmware be handling this regardless of platform?

I have Samsung SM951 NVMe PCIe M.2 512GB MZVPV512HDGL

Also created RAM drive.
Copying small or large files between them is around 500MB/s.
Diskmark pictures attached.
When copying game folder to external 256gb samsung evo pro, speed from 350MB/s drops to 40-50MB/s.
The same happens when copying to WD black HDD. From 150MB/s drops to 40MB/s.

Why the heck are speeds from or to RAM drive slow??

 

[Valantar]

I have Samsung SM951 NVMe PCIe M.2 512GB MZVPV512HDGL

Also created RAM drive.
Copying small or large files between them is around 500MB/s.
Diskmark pictures attached.
When copying game folder to external 256gb samsung evo pro, speed from 350MB/s drops to 40-50MB/s.
The same happens when copying to WD black HDD. From 150MB/s drops to 40MB/s.

Why the heck are speeds from or to RAM drive slow??

Numbers in both your screenshots look perfectly reasonable given that you're not testing anything at QD32. You won't hit peak performance at anything lower than that on an SSD. Beyond that your speeds sound ok for anything that fills the write cache or if the drive is getting hot. Remember, peak speeds from tests like CrystalDiskMark are completely unrealistic for normal workloads, as normal end-user drive loads rarely exceed QD1 and typically deal with lots of files of varying sizes rather than pure large-file sequential transfers. File size, access patterns and the like have a huge impact on actual drive performance, and PC SSDs typically have firmware tuned to look good in benchmarks and on spec sheets rather than optimizing for realistic use cases. That external drive is likely bottlenecked by the USB controller - does it support UASP? Is it a reasonably modern design? Does it get very hot? Does it support TRIM? If not, you're likely running out of pSLC cache and forcing the drive to write directly to slow TLC or QLC. Also, is it a Pro or Evo? There's no such thing as a "Samsung Evo Pro".

 

[EarthDog]

You won't hit peak performance at anything lower than that on an SSD.

Run ATTO.

Default, IIRC is QD1 and goes up to QD10?

 

[kapone32]

I think the mitigating factor is he is looking at a PCIe to PCIe vs PCIe to SATA interface. The situation he described should work perfectly with the Intel 600 series drives. I do not see them running out of psuedo SLC cache with a 256 NVME drive that is probably U2.

 

[THU31]

Yesterday I was doing a file verification for a game on Steam and it took forever. Task Manager was showing mostly 10-30 MB/s read speeds, sometimes a little bit higher.

When I try to copy that folder to a different drive (does not matter if it is another SSD or HDD), speed immediately settles at 5-10 MB/s. So that process takes even longer than the verification.

Why is it that bad? I know those are random reads, but they are insanely slow.

Benchmarks are fine, loading times in games are fine, but actual Windows operations are awfully slow. I feel like a defragmented HDD is much faster at this type of tasks.

 

[Athlonite]

Yesterday I was doing a file verification for a game on Steam and it took forever. Task Manager was showing mostly 10-30 MB/s read speeds, sometimes a little bit higher.

When I try to copy that folder to a different drive (does not matter if it is another SSD or HDD), speed immediately settles at 5-10 MB/s. So that process takes even longer than the verification.

Why is it that bad? I know those are random reads, but they are insanely slow.

Benchmarks are fine, loading times in games are fine, but actual Windows operations are awfully slow. I feel like a defragmented HDD is much faster at this type of tasks.

small files take much longer and are slower to transfer because they require more read/write ops than a single large file

 

[Mussels]

Yesterday I was doing a file verification for a game on Steam and it took forever. Task Manager was showing mostly 10-30 MB/s read speeds, sometimes a little bit higher.

When I try to copy that folder to a different drive (does not matter if it is another SSD or HDD), speed immediately settles at 5-10 MB/s. So that process takes even longer than the verification.

Why is it that bad? I know those are random reads, but they are insanely slow.

Benchmarks are fine, loading times in games are fine, but actual Windows operations are awfully slow. I feel like a defragmented HDD is much faster at this type of tasks.

You didnt state what drive this was on, so we cant really tell you if its normal or not

Look at AS SSD benchmarks for 4K random - even my top tier SN850 is under 100MB/s there
Steam is not fast at what it does because it verifies the content as it moves it, checking for corruption slowing it down further

 

[THU31]

My drives are in my specs. This particular game folder is on the Corsair MP510 960 GB.

I could understand the file verification being slow, because it has to compare stuff or whatever, but simply copying a folder at just 5-10 MB/s?
Yes, the folder has 2400 files, most of which are under 1 MB, almost no files bigger than 50 MB, but that still seems crazy to me.

When I copied a 7 GB mp3 folder from HDD to SSD, the speeds were pretty normal, limited by the HDD performance (screenshot attached). Then when I copied the same folder from the SSD to another SSD, it was almost instant at 2 GB/s.

 

[Mussels]

Yeah your drives are in your specs, but unless you say the source and destination drive you leave us guessing

Look at your 4K random write result of 65MB/s on the SSD - that's your best case in this sort of situation. Not worst, BEST. If those files are even smaller than 4K? It'll get worse.

Small files are slow to write. Very slow.
MLC and TLC SSD's are very slow with multiple writes when they run out of cache.
Mech drives can be even worse, when fragmented.

Heres a screencap from a quickly googled answer on that:

 

[Valantar]

Yeah your drives are in your specs, but unless you say the source and destination drive you leave us guessing

Look at your 4K random write result of 65MB/s on the SSD - that's your best case in this sort of situation. Not worst, BEST. If those files are even smaller than 4K? It'll get worse.

Small files are slow to write. Very slow.
MLC and TLC SSD's are very slow with multiple writes when they run out of cache.
Mech drives can be even worse, when fragmented.

Heres a screencap from a quickly googled answer on that:
View attachment 228289

This. I was copying a few hundred GB of games over to an external SSD a couple of weeks ago - the big files chugged along nicely at 650-700MB/s,but in a couple of folders things slowed to single digit or even sub-MB/s speeds due to the sheer amount of files.

Also, all SSDs perform worse the more they fill up, as there is less free space to allow for parallelism, and the controller spends more time ensuring the data gets placed somewhere in an efficient manner. The effects of this are very variable between brands and even different firmwares, but can be significant. Anandtech tests both empty and full drive performance in their reviews.

 

[THU31]

You guys are talking about writing, when I am talking about reading.

I just copied the game folder from the SSD to the first HDD. Then I copied the folder from the first HDD to the second HDD.

Look at the graphs below. I do not understand it.
Copying from the SSD to the HDD is so variable, most of the time sitting between 20-50 MB/s, and often going down to 5-10 MB/s.
Copying from the HDD to another HDD is basically constant ~65 MB/s, never dropping below 50. And I have slow 5940 RPM eco drives, it would probably be much faster with 7200 RPM performance drives.

 

[Mussels]

You guys are talking about writing, when I am talking about reading.

I just copied the game folder from the SSD to the first HDD. Then I copied the folder from the first HDD to the second HDD.

Look at the graphs below. I do not understand it.
Copying from the SSD to the HDD is so variable, most of the time sitting between 20-50 MB/s, and often going down to 5-10 MB/s.
Copying from the HDD to another HDD is basically constant ~65 MB/s, never dropping below 50. And I have slow 5940 RPM eco drives, it would probably be much faster with 7200 RPM performance drives.

Yeah? reading is slow too. Did you read the information i pasted?
"You spend more time finding opening and closing the file, than you do reading or writing"

Small files will be slow. Always will be, always have been. To fix that we need entirely new file systems. TLC and QLC SSD's, and hard drives with slow recording techniques like SMR are going to make an existing bad problem, even worse.

As the drives get full (SSD and mech) they get slower. SSD's run out of SLC cache or pseudo SLC cache, and performance tanks. Mech drives are slower the further out from the center of the platter they get, and fragmentation can make it a thousand times worse with small files.

There is no magical fix here, small files read, open, and copy slow and certain conditions (type of drives, how full they are, how fragmented they are) can make a bad situation even worse.
My drives can copy at 5GB/s between them, and i'll see KB/s if a game uses thousands of small files.