Readspeed Results for ~3 year old Samsung 840 EVO SSD

[wgk]

My desktop is a Linux system with 4 x i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz, 3946 MHz, 16GB RAM, with a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD about 75% full, and some spinning discs. It seems to be running fine. I ran readspeed and got the following results.

Driv Size  Drive Identity     Location:    0      25%     50%     75%     100
---- ----- ---------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
 81  500GB Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GB      30.3   253.9   104.0    29.7   367.1
 82  2.0TB ST2000DX002-2DV164            191.2   189.9   172.1   142.2    93.3
 83  500GB ST3500630AS                    75.4    72.7    65.5    55.3    39.0

                  Benchmarked: Friday, 2021-01-01 at 22:40

I ran a Spinrite level 3 pass on the SSD, and then ran readspeed again and got the following results:

Driv Size  Drive Identity     Location:    0      25%     50%     75%     100
---- ----- ---------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
 81  500GB Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GB     532.1   528.9   532.6   445.9   529.4
 82  2.0TB ST2000DX002-2DV164            191.2   189.9   172.1   142.2    92.9
 83  500GB ST3500630AS                    75.4    72.7    65.5    55.3    39.0

                  Benchmarked: Sunday, 2021-01-03 at 17:06

System seems a little zippier now. Thanks Steve!

 

[DarkwinX]

This is one massive improvement. How old is that 500gb spinner? Those numbers don't look great.

 

[miquelfire]

I saw a review for the 500gb spinner from July 2007. SATA 3gb/s

 

[DanR]

The 500 GB Seagate Barracuda does indeed look like an old slow Spinner.

 

[wgk]

I would have to pull it out to see the manufacture date, but it is at least 10 years old. It has been moved to new cases as I upgraded over the years and now gets mounted once a day for an rsync backup of my home drive. Performance is not an requirement for it.

 

[inspapadakis]

What firmware version do you have on 840 EVO ? They've released like 5+ years ago EXT0DB6Q which presumably refreshes the cells to improve performance over time, but I did notice higher SSD temperature since then, so I wouldn't recommend it.

After initially launching in 2013 to great fanfare as an excellent, strong-performing low-cost drive, over the long run performance regressions began to occur in deployed drives that saw the read performance of old data significantly drop. At the heart of the issue was the drive’s relatively uncommon 19nm TLC NAND, which given the combination of small feature size and tighter requirements of TLC, eventually resulted in the drive having to slow down and re-read cells to properly read the charge-decayed cells.

- from https://www.anandtech.com/show/9196/samsung-releases-second-840-evo-fix

or you can also look up: Samsung Magician 4.6 and 840 EVO EXT0DB6Q Firmware Review – Finally Fixed Posted by Allyn Malventano | Apr 14, 2015

 

[DanR]

I would have to pull it out to see the manufacture date, but it is at least 10 years old. It has been moved to new cases as I upgraded over the years and now gets mounted once a day for an rsync backup of my home drive. Performance is not an requirement for it.

Slow is not a problem in your situation. Your drive profile looks healthy. You might consider a SpinRite Level 3 on the spinner if you can tolerate the time required.