dean701
Roadie
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SSD slowness over time - I learned my lesson
Some of my SSD drives are starting to feel the effects of capacitive charge loss. They are just a capactive technology after all.
Have you had parts of your SSD drives seem unbearingly slow?
Back years ago with the inception of SSD drives, I was all in after noticing the speed benefits with transfers and load times. However, as we know, these drives are based on capacitive charge and I'm now starting to feel the impacts of this especially for those drives with databases that seldom get re-written or even accessed.
I went to backup a 5 year old 1TB SSD and it took over 42 hours. This drive was now very slow. Over time, the capacitors lose their charge and become difficult to read, relying on error correction mechanisms to determine the data. This is painstaking slow for data retrieval. The backup did finally complete successfully but it did make me more aware of the up keep for SSDs and the need for programs like Spinrite and Hard Drive Sentinel which have the capability of reading and re-writing the data to help recharge the drive blocks/cell memory.
For spots on the drives that are/were written to more frequently the speed was still pretty good for but for those regions where files are seldomly accessed I could get very slow read figures.
I ran HD Sentinel in surface read only mode and wow, the figures were mostly awful, hitting speeds as low as 0.3MB/s
After running HDSentinel via its r/w/r option, which is advertised as a non-destructive re-write, (It reads data from the disk at every memory cell location, re-writes the same data, and then re-reads it for verification.) I then performed a 2nd surface read and the numbers were so much better.
Finally, I ran the full backup again to compare completion times and it finished in about 4 hours as opposed to the original 42+ hours.
Now I just have to stay on top of things. Unfortunately I have about 20 SSDs to track.
I'm not going to get into the finer details of SSD build topologies or terms like 3D nand, tlc, mlc, ECC, DIF, cell bit depth or trash the names of certain manufacturers. The technology will hopefully evolve to a point where stability and longevity meet performance but it's certainly a case of me jumping in way too quickly and not knowing the capacitance factors
I wrote this simply for awareness as I found very little on this site that spoke to the subject and as many of us are now dependent on SSD drives and their speed I thought it would be useful to some. It was an eye opening experience for me to say the least. Some don't believe that this happens to SSD drives and/or think that by having drives simply powered up all of the time is enough. This is a real world example that shows otherwise as this particular drive is an internal secondary drive and was powered up continuously for the past 4+ years.
Some of my SSD drives are starting to feel the effects of capacitive charge loss. They are just a capactive technology after all.
Have you had parts of your SSD drives seem unbearingly slow?
Back years ago with the inception of SSD drives, I was all in after noticing the speed benefits with transfers and load times. However, as we know, these drives are based on capacitive charge and I'm now starting to feel the impacts of this especially for those drives with databases that seldom get re-written or even accessed.
I went to backup a 5 year old 1TB SSD and it took over 42 hours. This drive was now very slow. Over time, the capacitors lose their charge and become difficult to read, relying on error correction mechanisms to determine the data. This is painstaking slow for data retrieval. The backup did finally complete successfully but it did make me more aware of the up keep for SSDs and the need for programs like Spinrite and Hard Drive Sentinel which have the capability of reading and re-writing the data to help recharge the drive blocks/cell memory.
For spots on the drives that are/were written to more frequently the speed was still pretty good for but for those regions where files are seldomly accessed I could get very slow read figures.
I ran HD Sentinel in surface read only mode and wow, the figures were mostly awful, hitting speeds as low as 0.3MB/s
After running HDSentinel via its r/w/r option, which is advertised as a non-destructive re-write, (It reads data from the disk at every memory cell location, re-writes the same data, and then re-reads it for verification.) I then performed a 2nd surface read and the numbers were so much better.
Finally, I ran the full backup again to compare completion times and it finished in about 4 hours as opposed to the original 42+ hours.
Now I just have to stay on top of things. Unfortunately I have about 20 SSDs to track.
I'm not going to get into the finer details of SSD build topologies or terms like 3D nand, tlc, mlc, ECC, DIF, cell bit depth or trash the names of certain manufacturers. The technology will hopefully evolve to a point where stability and longevity meet performance but it's certainly a case of me jumping in way too quickly and not knowing the capacitance factors
I wrote this simply for awareness as I found very little on this site that spoke to the subject and as many of us are now dependent on SSD drives and their speed I thought it would be useful to some. It was an eye opening experience for me to say the least. Some don't believe that this happens to SSD drives and/or think that by having drives simply powered up all of the time is enough. This is a real world example that shows otherwise as this particular drive is an internal secondary drive and was powered up continuously for the past 4+ years.
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