Running 6.1 on a NvME drive in a USB enclosure?

[Meppy]

USB is only supported by your BIOS. If your BIOS can detect the device, SpinRite should be able to recognize it. It may not potentially recognize that it is a flash device, so may not warn you away from rewriting activities that would decrease the drive endurance (for little or no practical gain.)

I need to go back and look for what is recommended for solid start memory with Spinrite. I thought that the big revelation a while back was that people were getting performance and reliability back from their drives by doing the rewrites (Level 3 I think?), but perhaps it's just the read (Level 1 or 2) that is needed (although then surely other methods would also work so that doesn't sound right to me).

 

[Meppy]

So I found this: https://forums.grc.com/threads/srs-handling-and-behavior-with-solid-state-drives.1433/post-10776 Where Steve and others appear to say that a Level 3 is beneficial to run on SSD occasionally or when performance appears to be suffering. Do you disagree?

 

[PHolder]

Do you disagree?

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. So while it may TECHNICALLY be the case the drive will be faster... the question remains if you will notice the improvement in every day life (and my guess is you probably will not, but everyone's case is different.) What *I* would do is run a level 1 (full drive read) first. Then see if just reading every part of the drive changed the speed behaviour. (It could also reveal any problems that had gone undetected until that point.) Then if you think it is warranted, try a level 3. This will read and rewrite every sector. (You could try to note if your drive has a lot of data on it in one area, and restrict the activity to only that area using the options available from the [TAB] key just before you start the scanning. There is little to be gained by rewriting areas of the drive that are not actually in use.)

 

[PHolder]

(You could try to note if your drive has a lot of data on it in one area, and restrict the activity to only that area using the options available from the [TAB] key just before you start the scanning. There is little to be gained by rewriting areas of the drive that are not actually in use.)

@Steve:

This is a suggestion for you to add an option in SpinRite (7?) to not attempt a rewrite of "blank sectors". (All zeroes at the minimum, but maybe also sectors that are all of anything, in case some drive returns something other than all zeros for empty sectors.)

 

[Meppy]

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. So while it may TECHNICALLY be the case the drive will be faster... the question remains if you will notice the improvement in every day life (and my guess is you probably will not, but everyone's case is different.) What *I* would do is run a level 1 (full drive read) first. Then see if just reading every part of the drive changed the speed behaviour. (It could also reveal any problems that had gone undetected until that point.) Then if you think it is warranted, try a level 3. This will read and rewrite every sector. (You could try to note if your drive has a lot of data on it in one area, and restrict the activity to only that area using the options available from the [TAB] key just before you start the scanning. There is little to be gained by rewriting areas of the drive that are not actually in use.)

Sounds like the way I would approach it, thanks. The drive is definitely having some performance issues, and I am replacing it with a new 2TB, so figured it was worth giving it a go before I retask it.

 

[DanR]

So I found this: https://forums.grc.com/threads/srs-handling-and-behavior-with-solid-state-drives.1433/post-10776 Where Steve and others appear to say that a Level 3 is beneficial to run on SSD occasionally or when performance appears to be suffering. Do you disagree?

I agree! But with qualifications.

Please see this article: https://forums.grc.com/threads/results-samsung-840-series-250-gb.923/

I know from this experience that Level 3 can speed up a slow (healthy) SSD.

It should be used judiciously though. Excessive/unnecessary use of level 3 will be detrimental to an SSD.

SpinRite 6.1 will do a three point benchmark to check drive read performance. GRC's free ReadSpeed will do a 5 point benchmark speed check.

In the link above, the SSD drive was slow overall. So I ran level 3 on the entire drive with the results shown.

With known benchmark results it may be possible to confine a level 3 scan to just the areas of the SSD drive that need it.

Steve has said that a future version of SpinRite 7.x will do a much higher resolution benchmark of an SSD drive for a more surgical application of level 3 scanning.
The future awaits!