Old Intel SSD + 5400RPM HDD

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WoodGuy578

Member
Dec 26, 2020
8
3
Code: 
Drv Size  Drive Identity  Location:    0      25%     50%     75%     100
--- ----- ------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
81   80GB INTEL SSDSA2CW080G3        272.4   218.1   196.0   175.3   128.1
82  1.0TB Hitachi HDT721010SLA360    111.5   103.6   91.9     78.5    56.3

The intel has published spec of 270MB/s...surprised to see it tail off at the back half of the drive!

I also have an M.2 NVME boot drive, not supported yet.
 
@DarkwinX - the intel SSD there is just used for steam games, nothing major. It's an older drive, it was once the boot drive in this computer before I rebuilt it with an NVME drive. I've run spinrite on it annually at lvl 2 since I've owned it. I bought it back in May 2011.
 
  • Wow
Reactions: Barry Wallis
I've run spinrite on it annually at lvl 2 since I've owned it.
Click to expand...

@Steve this could be the culprit for the slow reads at the end of the drive. If the front was being written to due to general usage but the back was just being read by SpinRite level 2 ongoing, this then gives further evidence to Allyn's 'cell drift'. The back cells would be constantly discharge without ever being recharged.

@WoodGuy578 can I assume that the drive is not full and you don't usually fill it with your steam games?
 
DarkwinX said:
@Steve this could be the culprit for the slow reads at the end of the drive. If the front was being written to due to general usage but the back was just being read by SpinRite level 2 ongoing, this then gives further evidence to Allyn's 'cell drift'. The back cells would be constantly discharge without ever being recharged.

@WoodGuy578 can I assume that the drive is not full and you don't usually fill it with your steam games?
Click to expand...
Yes, exactly. Drive was only ever at most 2/3 full. And now that it's just used for steam games it's like 20% full.

Am I crazy or isn't the entire point of the SSD firmware to level out the usage amongst cells for the life of the drive? I.e. if I only ever kept this drive 10% full for the life of the drive wouldn't all the cells get used equally? Maybe I'm ignorantly optimistic about how it works...
 
This is most likely the effects of on-the-fly error correction being required to recover the SSD's data. We are seeing multiple examples of running a SpinRite L3 (refresh) on an SSD restoring most of its original factory performance. This is not generally recommended, since writing does fatigue SSD working memory. But a future SpinRite will be able to detect and selectively refresh SSD mass storage.
 
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There was some delving into SSD firmware and wear levelling during the development of ReadSpeed but I can't recall the theories/explanations at the time. It's doing.. something.

Steve gave a great explanation of the physics behind reading from a drive as I posted something similar in the newsgroups, I'll link it here for further reading.

 
Well...I can't figure out a way to run Spinrite 6.0 on this PC I rebuilt a few months ago. It has an NVME as it's primary drive, and everytime I try to boot Spinrite from a CD/DVD drive, it gets to Initdisk_ and then reboots after 30 sec or so. Kind of weird since I can get ReadSpeed to work no problem.

It's an MSI B450 Tomahawk Max motherboard w/ AMD Ryzen 3600X processor if that provides any meaningful information. It has a CSM mode in the BIOS, which is what I have to enable to get ReadSpeed to run, but it just won't work for SpinRite.
 
@WoodGuy578 : Try simply placing your spinrite.exe onto the ReadSpeed stick. Boot that, then run SpinRite from there. The trouble you're reporting is from FreeDOS attempting to “understand” that system's drives. The ReadSpeed version of FreeDOS includes an OS kernel that I have tweaked and it includes a new config.sys option "SKIPINIT=1" which is designed to help us get past these problems that have plagued SpinRite.
 
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Here are the results after running Spinrite v6.0 at lvl 3 on both drives.

Appears the Intel SSD is running at nominal speed now, made no difference on the HDD. Awesome results on the SSD!

Code: 
Drv Size  Drive Identity  Location:    0      25%     50%     75%     100%
--- ----- ------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
81   80GB INTEL SSDSA2CW080G3        274.1   274.1   274.1   274.1   274.0
82  1.0TB Hitachi HDT721010SLA360    111.5   103.6   91.9     78.5    56.4
 
@WoodGuy578 : So, to summarize. Your BEFORE looked like this:
Code: 
Drv Size  Drive Identity  Location:    0      25%     50%     75%     100
--- ----- ------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
81   80GB INTEL SSDSA2CW080G3        272.4   218.1   196.0   175.3   128.1
82  1.0TB Hitachi HDT721010SLA360    111.5   103.6   91.9     78.5    56.3

And your AFTER running SpinRite at Level3 (Refresh) looked like this:
Code: 
Drv Size  Drive Identity  Location:    0      25%     50%     75%     100%
--- ----- ------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
81   80GB INTEL SSDSA2CW080G3        274.1   274.1   274.1   274.1   274.0
82  1.0TB Hitachi HDT721010SLA360    111.5   103.6   91.9     78.5    56.4

Pretty compelling, huh?? It seems clear that SpinRite is going to have a bright future in maintaining the performance and reliability of solid state drives! Thanks for sharing your results!
 
  • Wow
Reactions: PHXdNelson
Yea I'll admit I was pleasantly surprised.

Thanks again for the help getting Spinrite going by running it from the USB w/ ReadSpeed...now I can keep running it periodically.

Good luck with the new Spinrite development work!
 
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