The SSD Megathread - Be nice to Alereon you jerks

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The SSD Megathread - Be nice to Alereon you jerks

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Rexxed: May 1, 2010; Dis is amazing!
I gotta try dis!

atomicthumbs posted:

SSD question: three times now, my Windows 8.1 installation has bluescreened with various and sundry ("rare" or driver-related) stop errors, resulting in an unbootable system because of one or more corrupted Windows files. The SSD it's on, an Intel 530, shows fine in all health aspects and SMART and whatnot. When I could find the bad file, I fixed it by copying it from my laptop.

The last time it happened, I brought the computer out of suspend, started to play music, and a few seconds later it threw up the error and failed to reboot.

I'm assuming that this is a bad interaction with Windows 8.1 and my motherboard's SATA drivers, as it's an old ASRock M3A770DE Socket AM3 board, since I never had any problems like this with Windows 7. My RAM tests perfect according to a full run of memtest86.

There's no way this could be related to my SSD itself, is there?

I've seen older motherboards not handle suspend modes well with regard to keeping power to the drives. Maybe the SSD is expecting to stay powered and the motherboard is not handling it correctly. In addition to the other suggestions you may look for BIOS updates for the motherboard.

# ? Oct 2, 2014 21:02

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# ? May 2, 2024 15:02

BeastOfExmoor: Aug 19, 2003; I will be gone, but not forever.

Any reason to not go with an Intel 520 based drive for upgrading my oldish media center PC rather than waiting for a 530 based one? Motherboard is all SATA2 so I'm assuming I'm not going to be getting even close to full speed off it? Amazon has 120GB 520's for $65, which seems like a good price.

# ? Oct 2, 2014 22:40

LRADIKAL: Jun 10, 2001; Fun Shoe

I don't see why you would bother. Once it's on, is it slow to play videos or whatever else? Enough ram should mean that once it's ready, it's ready.

# ? Oct 2, 2014 23:19

atomicthumbs: Dec 26, 2010; We're in the business of extending man's senses.

Xenomorph posted:

Have you ran any diagnostic or stress-type applications on this system? Have you confirmed that other components are in fully-working order?

no, because I decided to upgrade to Haswell before reinstalling Windows yet again.

# ? Oct 3, 2014 01:25

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

BeastOfExmoor posted:

Any reason to not go with an Intel 520 based drive for upgrading my oldish media center PC rather than waiting for a 530 based one? Motherboard is all SATA2 so I'm assuming I'm not going to be getting even close to full speed off it? Amazon has 120GB 520's for $65, which seems like a good price.

Nope the SSD 520 is a fine choice, the 530 is just a newer model using current-generation flash memory. It's a bit faster on sustained operations and a bit slower on random ones, with slightly lower endurance. There's not a noticeable difference at all.

# ? Oct 3, 2014 03:51

Ryuga Death: May 14, 2008; There's gotta be one more bell to crack; Fun Shoe

Does the Samsung Magician Software need to be running all the time? Also, are there any downsides to enabling RAPID?

# ? Oct 3, 2014 16:13

The Lord Bude: May 23, 2007; ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE

Ryuga Death posted:

Does the Samsung Magician Software need to be running all the time? Also, are there any downsides to enabling RAPID?

The only downside to RAPID is potentially losing data that hasn't been written to the SSD yet in the event of a sudden power failure.

# ? Oct 3, 2014 16:21

WhiskeyJuvenile: Feb 15, 2002; by Nyc_Tattoo

So RAPID + a UPS is the way to go?

# ? Oct 3, 2014 16:22

Rexxed: May 1, 2010; Dis is amazing!
I gotta try dis!

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

So RAPID + a UPS is the way to go?

That's what I use!

# ? Oct 3, 2014 16:41

GreatGreen: Jul 3, 2007; That's not what gaslighting means you hyperbolic dipshit.

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

So RAPID + a UPS is the way to go?

Yep!

# ? Oct 3, 2014 16:43

Jose Cuervo: Aug 25, 2004

Disgustipated posted:

Good money says it is the pagefile/hibernation file. With that much RAM those will both probably be pretty huge. Disable hibernation if you aren't going to use it.

This is what it was. Thank you!

# ? Oct 3, 2014 18:13

Binary Badger: Oct 11, 2005; Trolling Link for a decade

Welp, looks like Crucial needs to clear its coffers:

http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/store-ssd-factory-recertified

512GB's for $169.99.. gee wonder how much data they'll already have written...

# ? Oct 3, 2014 18:39

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Binary Badger posted:

Welp, looks like Crucial needs to clear its coffers:

http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/store-ssd-factory-recertified

512GB's for $169.99.. gee wonder how much data they'll already have written...

Refurbed M4? The MX100/M500 is almost the same price if you shop around...

# ? Oct 3, 2014 18:51

td4guy: Jun 13, 2005; I always hated that guy.

Ryuga Death posted:

Does the Samsung Magician Software need to be running all the time?

Nope. Note that you have to remove it from the Task Scheduler if you want to prevent it from loading on startup.

# ? Oct 4, 2014 01:02

Ryuga Death: May 14, 2008; There's gotta be one more bell to crack; Fun Shoe

td4guy posted:

Nope. Note that you have to remove it from the Task Scheduler if you want to prevent it from loading on startup.

Thanks!

The Lord Bude posted:

The only downside to RAPID is potentially losing data that hasn't been written to the SSD yet in the event of a sudden power failure.

What does this mean? When does it write the data to the SSD? Also, I noticed my ram usage went up a bit (in my task manager) after enabling rapid. Is that normal? Also, is 8gb enough ram for rapid?

# ? Oct 4, 2014 02:07

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Ryuga Death posted:

What does this mean? When does it write the data to the SSD? Also, I noticed my ram usage went up a bit (in my task manager) after enabling rapid. Is that normal? Also, is 8gb enough ram for rapid?

To oversimplify, RAPID improves performance by using system memory to bundle together write operations in a way that is faster for the drive to complete overall. For example, if your system issues eight 128KB writes, RAPID will bundle them together into a single 1MB write, which can finish in a fraction of the time. The risk of data loss comes because normally writes are only acknowledged as completed when they are actually written to disk. With RAPID they are acknowledged as completed when written to RAM, so there is a brief window between when the small writes have been absorbed by RAPID but before the bigger write has been completed by the drive, so if you lose power (or potentially if your system crashes) during this window, you may lose that data. RAPID does obey "flush" commands that tell it to immediately write everything outstanding to disk, such as when you tell the system to shut down, or tell windows you plan to disconnect a drive. RAPID also does use some RAM for this buffering and caching, but in general terms even if this causes increased paging it is worth it, because RAPID will significantly accelerate pagefile access along with everything else.

Anandtech's Samsung 850 Pro review has more detail about the latest version of RAPID and how it works. For what it's worth, I've had RAPID enabled during overclocking testing when my system bluescreened and haven't experienced any data loss or ill effects, though I would recommend only using RAPID when your system is stable. I don't think a UPS is necessary, but if you live in an area where the power is bad it may be a good idea. Make sure any UPS you consider has true sine wave output, trying to use a cheaper modified/quasi-sine wave UPS is not a good idea with modern power supplies.

# ? Oct 4, 2014 02:39

Aphrodite: Jun 27, 2006

Ryuga Death posted:

What does this mean? When does it write the data to the SSD? Also, I noticed my ram usage went up a bit (in my task manager) after enabling rapid. Is that normal? Also, is 8gb enough ram for rapid?

RAPID uses your ram for stuff. If your PC loses power while some data is still in ram, it's gone.

RAPID uses ram so yes your usage going up is normal. 8gb is fine.

# ? Oct 4, 2014 02:40

Diviance: Feb 11, 2004; Television rules the nation.

Ryuga Death posted:

Thanks!

What does this mean? When does it write the data to the SSD? Also, I noticed my ram usage went up a bit (in my task manager) after enabling rapid. Is that normal? Also, is 8gb enough ram for rapid?

RAPID essentially uses a portion of your RAM as a high speed cache before writing to your SSD.

Which is why your RAM usage went up and why you may potentially lose data if you lose power. Also, 8GB is just fine for RAPID. It will not use more than 25% or 4GB of your RAM, if I remember right.\

At least, this is how I understand it works.

# ? Oct 4, 2014 02:42

Shanakin: Mar 26, 2010; The whole point of stats are lost if you keep it a secret. Why Didn't you tell the world eh?

It's worth noting that RAPID's write-caching thing only stores up very small amounts of data before writing it out (4kb I think it was?) and it does frequent writes anyway. Bigger writes just go straight to disk from memory. So if it crashes during a save or something yeah it might get corrupted but that's not really much different than normal anyway. Otherwise the chance for loss of data that you care about is pretty negligible.

It makes much bigger use of it for READ performance, which obviously doesn't have dataloss risks.

Shanakin fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Oct 4, 2014

# ? Oct 4, 2014 02:43

BeastOfExmoor: Aug 19, 2003; I will be gone, but not forever.

Jago posted:

I don't see why you would bother. Once it's on, is it slow to play videos or whatever else? Enough ram should mean that once it's ready, it's ready.

Yes, it loving crawls. Once you load a video it's not bad, but navigating windows, etc. it's very slow. This may be due to several factors (2GB of RAM, old install of windows, etc.). It's possible that RAM would be a better option to speed it up, but it uses DDR2 which is pretty expensive these days, for some reason.

# ? Oct 4, 2014 04:01

Ryuga Death: May 14, 2008; There's gotta be one more bell to crack; Fun Shoe

Thanks for the explanations, guys. I see there's no reason to ever have it off.

# ? Oct 4, 2014 06:58

LRADIKAL: Jun 10, 2001; Fun Shoe

BeastOfExmoor posted:

Yes, it loving crawls. Once you load a video it's not bad, but navigating windows, etc. it's very slow. This may be due to several factors (2GB of RAM, old install of windows, etc.). It's possible that RAM would be a better option to speed it up, but it uses DDR2 which is pretty expensive these days, for some reason.

I can't say for sure based on the info given (none), but this sounds more like a software or processor issue than disk speed. Why don't you tell us what software you are using and what your system specs are. Also what exactly do you use the system for.

# ? Oct 4, 2014 07:58

Orcs and Ostriches: Aug 26, 2010; The Great Twist

So my Mushkin Enhanced Chronos made my computer hard lock today, and after rebooting it no longer appears in the BIOS. Died just after 2 years, so it's still under warranty. I put in a ticket with Mushkin, but I can't imagine I'll get a new drive in my hands in less than two weeks - probably longer.

I thought I remember a minor discussion of Mushkin Enhanced Chronos problems in the old thread, but I can't remember the details. Is there something I can do to revive it (sit in BIOS for a day, comes back to life, firmware) or is it probably just a random failure?

Should I just buy a new Samsung, and use the replacement Mushkin for whatever? I imagine the Samsungs blow the Mushkin ones out of the water in performance, since I bought the old one because I got it cheap. My impatience weighs far heavier than the cost of a new drive, so that's not an issue.

# ? Oct 5, 2014 02:32

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Orcs and Ostriches posted:

You can try leaving it at the BIOS for like 30 minutes and then exiting, but it isn't likely to make a difference. There's no reason leaving it for more than 30 minutes would help, the idea is just to allow the drive time to recover if it's having issues that are causing it to initialize slower than the rest of the system, thus not detecting within the time limit. That wasn't a typical problem with Sandforce SSDs like your Chronos, however.

# ? Oct 5, 2014 07:17

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

I think I once saw a disk being undetectable by BIOS and Windows, but a Linux was able to detect and access it. It might be worth a shot.

# ? Oct 5, 2014 07:49

blackjack: May 22, 2004; The World's Mightiest Puppet!

I have an HP Envy with a recovery partition and I'd like to move everything on my hard drive over to the shiny new 512 GB Samsung SSD I've got. What's the best way to do that with a minimum of hassle? Samsung's walk-through specifically says they can't copy OEM / partition drives.

# ? Oct 5, 2014 18:26

JnnyThndrs: May 29, 2001; HERE ARE THE FUCKING TOWELS

blackjack posted:

I have an HP Envy with a recovery partition and I'd like to move everything on my hard drive over to the shiny new 512 GB Samsung SSD I've got. What's the best way to do that with a minimum of hassle? Samsung's walk-through specifically says they can't copy OEM / partition drives.

Clonezilla. It's scary for non - 'nix people, it's bare-bones to the extreme , but it will copy weird-rear end partioning layouts without blinking an eye. OEM restore partitions, Hackintosh bootloaders, oddball file systems - no problem. And it's free!

# ? Oct 5, 2014 19:05

GreatGreen: Jul 3, 2007; That's not what gaslighting means you hyperbolic dipshit.

So Clonezilla can 1:1 copy an entire physical drive, not just a single partition? Awesome! Didn't know that.

# ? Oct 5, 2014 19:22

Jippa: Feb 13, 2009

Changing, moving, or otherwise re-writing the data (including the wear-leveling the drive does in the background) restores full performance

Regarding the samsung ssd situation. Is there an idiots guide to doing this that doesn't involve reinstalling?

e- I saw this in the anadtech comments, would you guys recommend?

http://download.cnet.com/DiskFresh/3000-18512_4-75937078.html

Jippa fucked around with this message at 08:21 on Oct 6, 2014

# ? Oct 6, 2014 08:09

JnnyThndrs: May 29, 2001; HERE ARE THE FUCKING TOWELS

GreatGreen posted:

So Clonezilla can 1:1 copy an entire physical drive, not just a single partition? Awesome! Didn't know that.

Yep! I'll usually do a 1:1 copy with Clonezilla, then expand the OS partition(if I'm moving to a larger HD) with Windows' or OSX's built-in tools.

# ? Oct 6, 2014 08:11

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Jippa posted:

Changing, moving, or otherwise re-writing the data (including the wear-leveling the drive does in the background) restores full performance

Regarding the samsung ssd situation. Is there an idiots guide to doing this that doesn't involve reinstalling?

e- I saw this in the anadtech comments, would you guys recommend?

http://download.cnet.com/DiskFresh/3000-18512_4-75937078.html

Two pages ago:

Xenomorph posted:

I ran DiskFresh on my 500GB 840 EVO, then ran HD Tach again. All those weird sub-100MB/sec spots are gone.

The program is supposed to read every byte of data and re-write it back to the SSD. It's like running a defrag to freshen the data, except this program will re-write everything, not just fragmented files.

Yes, it uses up a write cycle. So my drive's lifetime writes went up by 0.5TB, which may not be a whole lot, in the grand scheme of things. I'll probably run DiskFresh again after updating the SSD's firmware in October.

# ? Oct 6, 2014 08:26

Jippa: Feb 13, 2009

Thanks. Should I "just refresh" or "refresh range"? Does it matter if I have other programmes open?

# ? Oct 6, 2014 08:36

The Lord Bude: May 23, 2007; ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE

Jippa posted:

Thanks. Should I "just refresh" or "refresh range"? Does it matter if I have other programmes open?

At this point why aren't you just waiting till the 15th for the firmware update?

# ? Oct 6, 2014 08:38

Jippa: Feb 13, 2009

The Lord Bude posted:

At this point why aren't you just waiting till the 15th for the firmware update?

I don't know? I'm just here asking for advice. I thought my computer had died this morning. So you wouldn't recommend using disk refresh? Are most people just waiting for the firmware update?

# ? Oct 6, 2014 08:49

The Lord Bude: May 23, 2007; ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE

Jippa posted:

I don't know? I'm just here asking for advice. I thought my computer had died this morning. So you wouldn't recommend using disk refresh? Are most people just waiting for the firmware update?

I don't think it's worth wasting the lifespan of the SSD by moving data around when there's been an official fix announcement. People were doing that before Samsung put out a statement, but I would just be waiting for the update.

# ? Oct 6, 2014 08:57

Jippa: Feb 13, 2009

It's so weird that it just happened over night. It wasn't some sort of slow decrease it was like some one flipped a switch.

The performance difference to me is huge. How badly will disk refresh affect the life span of the drive?

# ? Oct 6, 2014 09:09

BurritoJustice: Oct 9, 2012

Jippa posted:

It's so weird that it just happened over night. It wasn't some sort of slow decrease it was like some one flipped a switch.

The performance difference to me is huge. How badly will disk refresh affect the life span of the drive?

If you refresh the whole drive, exactly one drive cycle (as every cell is written to once).

# ? Oct 6, 2014 10:04

The Lord Bude: May 23, 2007; ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE

Jippa posted:

It's so weird that it just happened over night. It wasn't some sort of slow decrease it was like some one flipped a switch.

The performance difference to me is huge. How badly will disk refresh affect the life span of the drive?

Do you have rapid mode on? that significantly masks the issue, I had no idea I was even suffering from it till I read about it here and decided to test it out. even without the issue it's a massive performance bump and it should always be on. The symptoms you describe sound kinda weird though. Are you sure it isn't some other issue?

# ? Oct 6, 2014 12:37

Jippa: Feb 13, 2009

I have just downloaded the samsung magician to turn rapid mode on. Should I update the firmware or leave it until the new one comes out next week?

# ? Oct 6, 2014 13:24

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# ? May 2, 2024 15:02

The Lord Bude: May 23, 2007; ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE

Jippa posted:

I have just downloaded the samsung magician to turn rapid mode on. Should I update the firmware or leave it until the new one comes out next week?

Update, there have been improvements to rapid mode since the drive came out.

# ? Oct 6, 2014 13:35

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