My ReadSpeed Results

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  • BootAble – FreeDOS boot testing freeware

    To obtain direct, low-level access to a system's mass storage drives, SpinRite runs under a GRC-customized version of FreeDOS which has been modified to add compatibility with all file systems. In order to run SpinRite it must first be possible to boot FreeDOS.

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crahen

Member
Oct 20, 2020
15
4
My NVMe attached drive is not listed (not yet supported), but here are my other 2 SSD's results:

Code: 
Driv Size  Drive Identity     Location:    0      25%     50%     75%     100
---- ----- ---------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
 81  500GB Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GB      12.2   103.8   161.7    28.6   135.1
 82  500GB WDC  WDS500G2B0A-00SM50       521.2   534.9   529.5   541.2   541.3

Very interesting results on the beginning of the EVO drive.
 
Hi @crahen I just googled the specs on the 840 EVO. It should be able to do something a lot closer to what the WDC is doing. Have you considered running SpinRite on it, if you have it available. If not, the following thread mentions some other ways of testing drives. Before doing anything that could write to the drive, I would run chkdisk (assuming you're running Windows) with the automatically fix and scan for bad sectors switches off to make sure all your files pass and don't report errors. It's possible you have a bad cable or connection or port, so you could try another cable and port. Good luck.


May your bits be stable and your interfaces be fast. :cool: Ron
 
Thanks Ron, I was hoping to run SpinRite as I do own that. I'm having an issue with SpinRite hanging on "Discovering System's Mass Storage Devices", so need to work through that. I'm using the same boot USB I created with ReadSpeed (just copied spinrite.exe to it), so maybe that is an issue. More to come.
 
No joy with my trusty SpinRite USB and the Win 98 DOS boot, still just says "Working . . ." when in SpinRite. I'll continue to troubleshoot that, in the meantime I'll go ahead and generate some reads with Chkdisk and re-run the speed test.
 
Your disk drive controller is probably in AHCI mode. ReadSpeed does not care. But SpinRite 6.0 does (SpinRite 6.1 will NOT care!).

You will need to go into your Bios setup and look for the controller mode. If there is an ATA or IDE or Legacy option, choose that, save and reboot the trusty USB stick. Now SpinRite 6.0 will be able to detect your drives as IDE drives and process them.

When done, you must go back into the Bios setup and flip the controller mode back to AHCI to boot the OS. It's a bit of a pita, but it all goes away with SpinRite 6.1! :)
 
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@DanR Depending on the age of his pc and how he updated over time, he may be able to run Windows with or without AHCI. I can do that on mine. I guess over time both drivers got installed. I currently have AHCI off but it seems to run fine either way.

May your bits be stable and your interfaces be fast. :cool: Ron
 
rfrazier said:
Depending on the age of his pc and how he updated over time, he may be able to run Windows with or without AHCI.
Click to expand...
My somewhat limited experience is that 32 bit windows will boot up in ATA/IDE/Legacy mode but 64 bit windows requires AHCI mode.
 
@DanR I'm not an expert and don't know how the magic works under the hood. But, I can confirm that the laptop I'm working on is Windows 7 64 bit and it's definitely working with AHCI off. I do believe that new installs of Windows install and turn on AHCI, and probably not IDE. And, I don't have experience with Windows 10. Maybe someone can clarify it.

May your bits be stable and your interfaces be fast. :cool: Ron
 
Hmmm . . . interesting.

I have a 64 bit LT that failed to boot when I inadvertently left it in ATA mode after testing AHCI-Rxx.exe in that mode. It booted just fine after flipping the Bios back to AHCI mode.

I also have a 32 bit DT that booted just fine in ATA mode when I inadvertently left it in ATA mode after testing AHCI-Rxx.exe in that mode.

My experience is somewhat limited. :)
 
It may relate to the fact that my PC is 10 years old and was patched and updated over and over. Maybe it started without AHCI and eventually got it. Don't know for sure. I can run with AHCI but had turned it off to troubleshoot some crashes.

May your bits be stable and your interfaces be fast. :cool: Ron
 
Ron, I suppose it could be a driver issue too. If both AHCI and IDE drivers are present, then it would not matter. But if only one set of drivers is present, then only that one mode would work.
 
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IIRC there is a Registry entry which decides at startup which drivers should be loaded by Windows.
It used to be said by Microsoft that the only way to change from one to the other was by a re-install, then someone found that you could flip the Registry keys and reboot, flipping the IDE/AHCI BIOS setting during startup.
 
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Well, no luck, I changed the "Storage Boot Option Control" from UEFI to Legacy, but no difference, gets stuck discovering devices. I could always pull the drive and run it on my old system that I know SpinRite runs on. I did also try running chkdsk under Windows 10 with different options, but it ran so fast that there is no way it was reading all files. I think I'll initiate a full scan inside of my SentinelOne EDR client then re-run ReadSpeed.
 
@crahen : It'll be so nice to finally put that annoying "Discovering System's Mass Storage Devices" hang behind us. The trouble is that we're making a call to DOS to determine whether it has involved itself with the drive — once upon a time, DOS device drivers were get involved with on-the-fly compression and support for non-standard hardware — but trusy old DOS is now often freaked out by what it finds on drives. (We're not in Kansas anymore.) To address this, I've already modified the FreeDOS kernel used by ReadSpeed to add a config.sys option "SKIPINIT=1" which instructs FreeDOS to just move along and not bother itself with the content of the drives. We learned during the ReadSpeed work that I still need to dig a bit further into FreeDOS to further enforce that change. :)
 
@Steve I'm sure that will be a nice issue to have behind you, look forward to it as well. I'm more curious than anything to see how it would improve the speed of the drive in question (or both I guess). If I find some free time I'll work on pulling that drive out and running SpinRite on another PC.

After running the SentinelOne full scan these are the new results, much improved, but still varied and slow:

Latest Run:
Code: 
Driv Size  Drive Identity     Location:    0      25%     50%     75%     100
---- ----- ---------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
 81  500GB Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GB      32.3   226.5   164.3    59.0   529.5
 82  500GB WDC  WDS500G2B0A-00SM50       502.4   519.0   530.1   541.2   541.2

Compared to First Run:
Code: 
Driv Size  Drive Identity     Location:    0      25%     50%     75%     100
---- ----- ---------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
 81  500GB Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GB      12.2   103.8   161.7    28.6   135.1
 82  500GB WDC  WDS500G2B0A-00SM50       521.2   534.9   529.5   541.2   541.2
 
@crahen You may have to do something that actually reads and rewrites each sector. A basic chkdisk and backup first wouldn't be a bad idea. Not sure how SentinelOne does its test.

May your bits be stable and your interfaces be fast. :cool: Ron
 
Thanks all. SentinelOne is an Enterprise EDR software, think next generation antivirus/malware protection. I was thinking a full scan with that would read every file on the drive.
 
PrivaZer and other utilities can overwrite unallocated sectors in multiple ways. I know PrivaZer reads them first and gives you the option to rewrite just the sectors containing non-blank data or a full overwrite of all regions marked as free.
 
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Ok, I pulled the SSD's (figured it was worth SpinRite'ing both) and placed them in another PC and ran them through Level 2. Here are the new ReadSpeed results:

After running SpinRite Level 2:
Code: 
Driv Size  Drive Identity     Location:    0      25%     50%     75%     100
---- ----- ---------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
 81  500GB Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GB      56.3   360.8   233.5    95.3   511.9
 82  500GB WDC  WDS500G2B0A-00SM50       473.4   518.9   518.5   541.1   541.2

First Run:
Code: 
Driv Size  Drive Identity     Location:    0      25%     50%     75%     100
---- ----- ---------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
 81  500GB Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GB      12.2   103.8   161.7    28.6   135.1
 82  500GB WDC  WDS500G2B0A-00SM50       521.2   534.9   529.5   541.2   541.3
 
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