Advice Request SSD Fresh, anyone heard of this?

[bayasdev]

I used to have a cheap HGST NVME drive that came pre-installed in my laptop. It failed relatively quick, maybe due to the fact that I was a Windows Insider and this causes a frequent write of 40-50 GB of Data. Setup is first downloaded (about 4GB), then it is extracted and ran, old Windows directory is renamed to Windows.old and everything is copied/replaced to the current directory. New builds were available quite frequently.
It took only 3 years to die. I am no longer a Windows Insider.

Cheap drives always have the lower quality components, I never got to know how many TBs I wrote to the SATA M2 that came preinstalled with my laptop because its firmware hides most SMART data but its speed was clearly degraded after 3 years of usage.

 

[MacDefender]

Not always and just a month ago there was an issue, that the latest Windows performed a trim each time it booted, wearing down SSD unnecessarily.

Sure, bugs happen but in the time it takes for issues like this to be discovered and fixed, you aren't going to lose that much SSD capacity. TRIM calls on already-trimmed areas of SSDs generally incur no cost. (Again, I've worked on firmware for popular SSDs for 5+ years... I am well aware of what the SSD does in response to these commands)

Windows needs indexing, not SSD. Using third party tools, search result without indexing are instantaneous (less than a second).

Several GBs of space wasted (SSDs are still expensive) and several GBs of data written each time the PC reboots. Anyway, it is optional.


What makes you think that?

SuperFetch and Prefetch info is directly from Microsoft, an optimization they introduced in Windows 8 and carried to Windows 10 will benchmark your SSD for random access performance and use that to guide what aspects of prefetch/superfetch to enable: Don’t Waste Time Optimizing Your SSD, Windows Knows What Its Doing (howtogeek.com)

On the systems I own, most of them do not have any Superfetch activity but do maintain Prefetch for a small set of applications, which is usually the behavior you want. Prefetch isn't just about HDD/SSD latency, it's about applications that interleave IO with CPU activity, and being able to predict the future set of IOs.

If you have an old generation SATA SSD from like the days of OCZ Vertexes, sure, you might need to be careful if those SSDs are miraculously still alive. But if you have any reasonable SSD made in the last 5 years, trying to tune it this way is a total waste of time. We used to put on the data sheet the most prematurely failing numbers on our racks because of how ridiculously large those numbers already are. It wasn't at all unusual that drives we rate to a few hundred TBWs actually survive dozens of PBWs and still had not failed.

 

[MacDefender]

I used to have a cheap HGST NVME drive that came pre-installed in my laptop. It failed relatively quick, maybe due to the fact that I was a Windows Insider and this causes a frequent write of large amounts of data. Setup is first downloaded (about 4GB), then it is extracted and ran, old Windows directory is renamed to Windows.old and everything is copied/replaced to the current directory. New builds were available quite frequently.
It took only 3 years to die. I am no longer a Windows Insider.

FWIW a lot of SSDs actually die mostly because of crappy firmware. SSDs internally have a lot more structural metadata than HDDs and there are entire operating systems running on the SSD itself, managing all of that. It's not at all unusual for there to be design defects or have an abrupt power down damage the internal state of SSDs. Most of them don't even have a way to clear/reset/low-level-reformat them when they get into this state (by design).

 

[ForgottenSeer 89360]

FWIW a lot of SSDs actually die mostly because of crappy firmware. SSDs internally have a lot more structural metadata than HDDs and there are entire operating systems running on the SSD itself, managing all of that. It's not at all unusual for there to be design defects or have an abrupt power down damage the internal state of SSDs. Most of them don't even have a way to clear/reset/low-level-reformat them when they get into this state (by design).

I noticed HGST is very unreliable at work as well. Which brands or models do you consider most reliable?
I use Samsung at home mostly.

 

[MacDefender]

I noticed HGST is very unreliable at work as well. Which brands or models do you consider most reliable?
I use Samsung at home mostly.

Samsung, Intel, Apple (well you can’t buy them directly but if you have an Apple device it will have a great SSD) are my favorites. The HP EX series are quite good too.

 

[bayasdev]

Samsung, Intel, Apple (well you can’t buy them directly but if you have an Apple device it will have a great SSD) are my favorites. The HP EX series are quite good too.

What are your thoughts on Western Digital?

 

[MacDefender]

What are your thoughts on Western Digital?

I don't have experience with their SSDs, so I'm not sure. They entered this industry after I left. FWIW it's worth noting that the Samsung and Intel designs internally were really similar. Enough engineers jumped ship between those companies and their SSD divisions that they largely ended up with similar mindsets and approaches.

 

[ForgottenSeer 89360]

I don't have experience with their SSDs, so I'm not sure. They entered this industry after I left. FWIW it's worth noting that the Samsung and Intel designs internally were really similar. Enough engineers jumped ship between those companies and their SSD divisions that they largely ended up with similar mindsets and approaches.

What about the cheaper ones, such as Crucial and Adata?

 

[MacDefender]

What about the cheaper ones, such as Crucial and Adata?

I don't know about their reliability either, though looking at SSD benchmarks they usually have worse characteristics for small random reads and writes. I would probably be okay with using them to store my video games and bulk content but I would strongly recommend a brand name SSD for a system drive.

(As an aside: It's worth noting that filesystem fragmentation happens on SSDs too. I have a database server on an Intel SSD and over the course of a year the MSSQL database file has about 2 million fragments.... Not even joking, TWO MILLION! When I nuked the DB and created it again from backup, server performance went up about 20-30% across the board. It's not as devastating as on a HDD but fragmentation does result in performance loss on SSDs too. It's usually not worth the strain on the SSD to defragment it as often as a HDD since HDD defrag is often more about grouping related files together more than it is about defragmenting specific files.... but it might be worth analyzing the fragmentation of SSDs of systems you've had running for years and deciding if it's worth either running a SSD-aware defragger or just restoring the system from a backup)

 

[bayasdev]

My new disks after 2 months of usage

My $28 Kingston A400 has suffered the consequences of distrohopping , by the way, it looks like I spend more time using Linux.

 

[ForgottenSeer 85179]

Which brands or models do you consider most reliable?

SanDisk and Crucial (I only own a old 64Gb Samsung SSD so that isn't comparable).
WD should be good too.

 

[Tutman]

I don't know about their reliability either, though looking at SSD benchmarks they usually have worse characteristics for small random reads and writes. I would probably be okay with using them to store my video games and bulk content but I would strongly recommend a brand name SSD for a system drive.

What about PNY? I bought some of those cheap last month. And one more question, does it make a difference using SSD for your system C: drive, should i change my downloads to a different HDD or it is ok to use the default c: drive for downloads on the SSD?

 

[MacDefender]

What about PNY? I bought some of those cheap last month. And one more question, does it make a difference using SSD for your system C: drive, should i change my downloads to a different HDD or it is ok to use the default c: drive for downloads on the SSD?

I would really say that of the SSDs you can buy, the Intel, Samsung, and HP Enterprise ones are the ones you should prefer for your system drive. Other ones can still be great for bulk storage or easily replaceable content like games, but I don't recommend taking any chances with your system drive. Software updates and your My Documents / browser cache and so on represent really challenging and specific disk IO workloads -- aligned, unaligned, lots of small overwrites, etc etc etc. And you don't immediately notice subtle incorrectness or corruption until it's so late that it's going to be a pain to recover even if you take regular backups.

These tend to be more expensive so I think it's perfectly sensible to get like a 256GB or 512GB system drive and then a much larger separate drive for storing games and other content you can easily replace from the Internet.

And reliability aside, there's a lot of strange performance issues that lower end / low cost SSDs have when dealing with some of these workloads that can lead to visible performance loss or even hangs/hiccups.

 

[Cortex]

I did a new build back in May/June & fitted a decent Samsung Ultra + (I think) M.2 type that cost almost double of a Crucial/Sandisk quality, so far Sentinel has shown no degradation in percentage ways - I found the Sandisk's using SMART tended to degrade quickly, assuming the SMART can be trusted, but I'd buy another Samsung.

 

[Tutman]

What about the new Ashampoo WinOptimzer 18 that says new defrag engine will do this:

Other notable improvements include the new defrag tool which not only defrags disks but actively works to optimize any free space and maximize system performance. Ashampoo now claim this defrag tool will also address issues with TRIM and in turn simultaneously work to maximise the available space on any SSD drives as a result

21st century defrag tool​

WinOptimizer 18 marks the end of the old Defrag module and the beginning of a new era! No more system slowdowns, thanks to smart background processing! The new Defrag builds on the already available Windows algorithm and takes it to the max! Merge free space to shorten access times, automate drive analysis and defragmentation and have the process run in the background at low priority for uninterrupted use of your PC. The new Defrag is SSD-ready: Retrim makes sure your drive is used to its full capacity while ensuring high performance and long life!

Ashampoo® WinOptimizer 18

System optimization that takes your PC to the next level

www.ashampoo.com

 

[bayasdev]

What about the new Ashampoo WinOptimzer 18 that says new defrag engine will do this:

Other notable improvements include the new defrag tool which not only defrags disks but actively works to optimize any free space and maximize system performance. Ashampoo now claim this defrag tool will also address issues with TRIM and in turn simultaneously work to maximise the available space on any SSD drives as a result

21st century defrag tool​

WinOptimizer 18 marks the end of the old Defrag module and the beginning of a new era! No more system slowdowns, thanks to smart background processing! The new Defrag builds on the already available Windows algorithm and takes it to the max! Merge free space to shorten access times, automate drive analysis and defragmentation and have the process run in the background at low priority for uninterrupted use of your PC. The new Defrag is SSD-ready: Retrim makes sure your drive is used to its full capacity while ensuring high performance and long life!

Ashampoo® WinOptimizer 18

System optimization that takes your PC to the next level

www.ashampoo.com

TRIM is everything you need on a personal computer

 

[Local Host]

@MacDefender Windows does not turn OFF neither PreFetch nor SuperFetch on machines with SSDs, both settings are enabled by default.

I noticed HGST is very unreliable at work as well. Which brands or models do you consider most reliable?
I use Samsung at home mostly.

Crucial are the most reliable and reputable SSDs in the market, Samsung is right behind them (I don't know why @MacDefender mentioned Apple SSDs, Apple does not fabricate SSDs they mostly use Samsung SSDs in their devices).

HGST pretty much belong to Western Digital (2.5) and Samsung (3.5) nowadays, both them and Seagate are at the front for the Enterprise.

 

[MacDefender]

Crucial are the most reliable and reputable SSDs in the market, Samsung is right behind them (I don't know why @MacDefender mentioned Apple SSDs, Apple does not fabricate SSDs they mostly use Samsung SSDs in their devices).

Not at all true. Apple has been using in house SSD designs for several years now. They buy NAND chips from toshiba, Hynix, and others, but if you look at the software stack they are using iPhone style storage firmware on the T2 bridge side. It was many years ago when they just rebranded off the shelf SATA drives.

 

[MacDefender]

@MacDefender Windows does not turn OFF neither PreFetch nor SuperFetch on machines with SSDs, both settings are enabled by default.

SuperFetch information is directly from Microsoft engineers in the video I posted earlier. They said that since Windows 10 they benchmark the SSDs random read performance and only activate SuperFetch if it would be helpful. The setting in the registry does not force the feature to be active on SSDs.

 

[Local Host]

Not at all true. Apple has been using in house SSD designs for several years now. They buy NAND chips from toshiba, Hynix, and others, but if you look at the software stack they are using iPhone style storage firmware on the T2 bridge side. It was many years ago when they just rebranded off the shelf SATA drives.

You clearly confusing mobile storage with desktop storage, Apple does not fabricate SSDs.

At max all that Apple has done is SSHD, not SSDs (which are hybrids) they call Fusion Drives, and this are not used in their laptops for obvious reasons, those pack Samsung SSDs as I already stated.

SuperFetch information is directly from Microsoft engineers in the video I posted earlier. They said that since Windows 10 they benchmark the SSDs random read performance and only activate SuperFetch if it would be helpful. The setting in the registry does not force the feature to be active on SSDs.

Is clear you keep confusing tech, Hybrid Superfetch Speed Test

Those tests are not run by default, and are entirely unrelated to what you claim, Superfetch itself as I already stated is enabled by Default on Windows regardless if you have SSD or HDD.