# very slow nvme speed compared to my friend who has the same drive



## seccentral (May 8, 2019)

My specs: 
Ryzen 2700x
Asrock taichi x470 
Gskill 2x8Gb 3200 cl14 running at xmp profile
Adata 120GB sata ssd
Crucial 512GB sata ssd
Seagate 1TB Hdd
Intel 600p nvme 1TB ssd

My friend's specs:
Intel 9900K 
Gigabyte z390 aorus master
corsair 32gb 3000mhz
Kingston 128GB sata ssd
Intel 256Gb nvme ssd
Intel 600p nvme 1TB ssd
WD 2TB hdd

Both: Windows 10 64bit 

Problem : 
Copying from my crucial drive(which can read about 520MB/s sustained) with Ctrl-C Ctrl-V copy/paste to my intel nvme bursts with 200MB/s settles at 40MB/s. I am copying a big 40GB data file (the guildwars2 game folder which has about 10 files in it, so it's not zillions of small files but rather one huge and a few dlls and exes). I expected this to be MUCH MORE. as it is now it s on par with your average usb thumb drive. 

Comparison: 
My friend can copy from his 256gb nvme ssd to 600p 1TB ssd sustained 950MB/s. tried to copy rainbow six siege which has about 80GB - sustained 950MB/s, copy done in a minute and a half or so.

Others on other forums told me this is perfectly normal because the 600p is a shit qlc drive and its no wonder its so cheap and this is it take it or leave it and move on. 
So how come the very same drive performs so much better in my friend's rig ? 
Is this some sort of absolute intel shenanigans ? does it favor my friend's z390 chipset over my amd x470 ? 
Can i fix this ? in all honesty since in my rig the intel drive is the fastest i expected it's write speed to be the read speed of my other ssds when copying files from them to it.


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## Voluman (May 8, 2019)

What is your drive layout, which sata ports are in used with what drive?


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## Thefumigator (May 8, 2019)

It could be for several reasons:
My bets are:
-read speeds from the intel 256GB nvme is much faster than the crucial drive (nvme to nvme is really fast, can't compare sata to nvme)
-overheating? ssds throttles down if they overheat
-trim. Are your ssd optimized?


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## seccentral (May 8, 2019)

Voluman said:


> What is your drive layout, which sata ports are in used with what drive?


C: adata [ 1ntfs partition ] first sata port
D: crucial [ 1ntfs partition ] second sata port
E: seagate [ 1ntfs partition ] third
F: intel [ 1 ntfs partition ] closest to cpu m.2 slot



Thefumigator said:


> It could be for several reasons:
> My bets are:
> -read speeds from the intel 256GB nvme is much faster than the crucial drive (nvme to nvme is really fast, can't compare sata to nvme)
> -overheating? ssds throttles down if they overheat
> -trim. Are your ssd optimized?



-are you implying that my crucial drive's read speed is 60MB/s .... ? it's not.
- 40 degrees max on nvme drive as reported by hwinfo64, i have a monster case very well cooled 3 intake fans, 3 out, no temp issues. nvme is also shielded (shield came with the mobo)
- yes they are.


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## kastriot (May 8, 2019)

How much free space you  have on intel nvme?


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## Eskimonster (May 8, 2019)

the speeds you mention is Sata speeds and your friend got pcie 3.0 speeds

are you sure you even can use m.2 nvme or just M.2 ?


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## seccentral (May 8, 2019)

kastriot said:


> How much free space you  have on intel nvme?


about 200 GB. why ?



Eskimonster said:


> the speeds you mention is Sata speeds and your friend got pcie 3.0 speeds
> 
> are you sure you even can use m.2 nvme or just M.2 ?


I don't understand what you mean.
My sata ssds are connected via sata cables to the motherboard's sata ports. In the BIOS they show as sata drives .
my sata nvme drive is in the m.2 slot closest to the cpu that asrock claims is a m.2 socket with heatsink pcie gen 3 x4 & sata3
also, what do you mean by sata speeds ? these are garbage cheap ass usb thumb speeds. my HDD works much faster than that.

this is how the bios detects the drives


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## kastriot (May 8, 2019)

Download Intel ssd toolbox:






						Download Intel® Solid State Drive Toolbox
					

Intel® Solid State Drive Toolbox



					downloadcenter.intel.com
				




If possible see if you can free up at least 500GB on intel nvme then start application, select intel nvme and press "Intel SSD optimizer" button, wait until  it finishes it and then try copy procedure again,


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## vega22 (May 8, 2019)

Could be your ssd is just shit at transfering those file types. Game files are normally packed in compressed packages which could be the cause.

Unless you're both moving the same file/s then any comparison is bullshit anyway.


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## londiste (May 8, 2019)

seccentral said:


> this is how the bios detects the drives


Based on the model number it is a QLC Flash-based Intel 660p 1TB drive. The behaviour you are seeing is normal and expected - there is a limited amount of fast(er) cache and after that is exhausted it will fall back to rather slow native QLC Flash write speeds. With 200GB free the fast SLC cache is quite small.

Are you sure your friend has the exact same model?
Intel does have 600p model with TLC Flash but write speeds on that are usually in the 500-600MB/s range which does not match your description.
If he does also have a 660p, the drive is probably empty or close to empty, making the fast cache part considerably larger. This is a graph from Anandtech's 660p review:


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## seccentral (May 8, 2019)

kastriot said:


> Download Intel ssd toolbox:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I expected somebody to say this. 
I already did it. No change. 
And by the way, my friend didnt do shit: he's quite the newbie and doesnt even know what we're talking about here. unless his windows install is set to automatically optimize(defragment/trim) drives, then he has no clue. And it still works for him.



vega22 said:


> Could be your ssd is just shit at transfering those file types. Game files are normally packed in compressed packages which could be the cause.
> 
> Unless you're both moving the same file/s then any comparison is bullshit anyway.



umm... ok.. well it didnt seem to matter what. no matter what i copy on his rig - settles at 900MB+/s 
no matter what i copy on mine, it's always settling at about 50MB/s 
really, i tried games and random obs recordings (5gb+ files) 
it really doesnt change it. and it's the same damn drive.


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## vega22 (May 8, 2019)

That's a different kettle of fish dude 

Have you checked if your mobo has an issue with those drives, or if a bios update adds support for more nvme drives?

Have you tried reseating the drive?

Are you sure that slot is the one direct to the CPU and not from the chipset?


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## seccentral (May 8, 2019)

londiste said:


> Based on the model number it is a QLC Flash-based Intel 660p 1TB drive. The behaviour you are seeing is normal and expected - there is a limited amount of fast(er) cache and after that is exhausted it will fall back to rather slow native QLC Flash write speeds. With 200GB free the fast SLC cache is quite small.
> 
> Are you sure your friend has the exact same model?
> Intel does have 600p model with TLC Flash but write speeds on that are usually in the 500-600MB/s range which does not match your description.
> If he does also have a 660p, the drive is probably empty or close to empty, making the fast cache part considerably larger. This is a graph from Anandtech's 660p review:


I am 100% sure it is the exact same drive, i ordered them, they shipped to me, they are the absolute same model/specs. 
I know it's a cheap QLC drive.
I was told it's pretty garbage compared to the 970 evo for example. 
I abandoned the idea of even looking into it.
And then i paid my friend a visit, and big was my surprise when the same drive does 900mb/s sustained on his rig but is garbage in mine.


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## klh591 (May 8, 2019)

SATA transfer to NVMe is always going to be a lot slower than NVMe to NVMe!


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## seccentral (May 8, 2019)

vega22 said:


> That's a different kettle of fish dude
> 
> Have you checked if your mobo has an issue with those drives, or if a bios update adds support for more nvme drives?
> 
> ...


How would i know if the mobo has an issue with it ? it shows in the bios it's seen by windows. it works. just very slow. 
its not listed on asrock x470 taichi's storage qvl but then neither are 99% of the ssds out there....
i have the latest bios. v 3.20. no difference.
i have tried reseating the drive,
i tried both m.2 slots. no change.



klh591 said:


> SATA transfer to NVMe is always going to be a lot slower than NVMe to NVMe!


so ? does that imply that if i dont have the magic nvme to nvme setup my drives automagically downgrade to crap usb drive speeds ? 
on that note i have a kingston usb drive that works much faster lol.


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## kastriot (May 8, 2019)

Can you test your nvme in friends mobo and if performs same you will know that drive has issues if  not then it's rest of your PC.


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## oxrufiioxo (May 8, 2019)

Ask your buddy to let you borrow his Drive to see if it does the same thing in your system.

From everything I read even if the SLC cache fills up you should still be at HDD speeds around 100MBs.

You also should try copying over the exact same game to verify speeds last I checked guild wars 2 used 1000s of tiny files even some small patches being 12k files.


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## NdMk2o1o (May 8, 2019)

kastriot said:


> Can you test your nvme in friends mobo and if performs same you will know that drive has issues if  not then it's rest of your PC.


This. 

Have you got chipset drivers installed try the same game not just a "similar" sized game, both drives copying and writing to need to be the same for read/write speeds otherwise you may as well compare apples to oranges and scratch your head why you've ended up with a banana


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## newtekie1 (May 8, 2019)

So I'm confused, in your last thread you said 660p, now you say 600p. Which are we really talking about? Because they are different drives. 

And even if you ordered the two drives together, make sure where ever you bought them from didn't send you one 600p and one 660p.


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## oxrufiioxo (May 8, 2019)

newtekie1 said:


> So I'm confused, in your last thread you said 660p, now you say 600p. Which are we really talking about? Because they are different drives.
> 
> And even if you ordered the two drives together, make sure where ever you bought them from didn't send you one 600p and one 660p.




He has a thread open on the Asrock forums also saying its a 600P not the 660P but on there he claims both systems are his. 

Found the thread googling if the problem was widespread on his mobo.


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## Mussels (May 9, 2019)

I've got the 6000P which is the same drive plus encryption, and its effing terrible for sustained writes.

Your friend might have some sort of caching going on (or a different SSD entirely, as others mention), making it appear faster than it is,  the 600p/6000p drives simply cant write that fast


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## TheLostSwede (May 9, 2019)

A couple of maybe obvious questions. Are you running AHCI or IDE mode for your SATA drives? IDE mode would slow them down quite a lot.
Are you using GPT or MBR partitioning, as this makes a huge difference for NVMe drives.


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## Mussels (May 9, 2019)

TheLostSwede said:


> Are you using GPT or MBR partitioning, as this makes a huge difference for NVMe drives.



I'd never heard of this before, google tells me you are correct. might explains some oddities i had in the past.


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## eidairaman1 (May 9, 2019)

Apples to oranges, also ADATA makes good ram, unsure about SSDs, from looks of it it is old by capacity...


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## TheLostSwede (May 9, 2019)

Mussels said:


> I'd never heard of this before, google tells me you are correct. might explains some oddities i had in the past.



A good day then, I could share something I learnt from experience and you learnt something new.


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## seccentral (May 9, 2019)

kastriot said:


> Can you test your nvme in friends mobo and if performs same you will know that drive has issues if  not then it's rest of your PC.


doing that today


oxrufiioxo said:


> Ask your buddy to let you borrow his Drive to see if it does the same thing in your system.
> 
> From everything I read even if the SLC cache fills up you should still be at HDD speeds around 100MBs.
> 
> You also should try copying over the exact same game to verify speeds last I checked guild wars 2 used 1000s of tiny files even some small patches being 12k files.


doing that today, gw2 has one big file, maybe guildwars 1 had many small files, but i dont know that one.


NdMk2o1o said:


> This.
> 
> Have you got chipset drivers installed try the same game not just a "similar" sized game, both drives copying and writing to need to be the same for read/write speeds otherwise you may as well compare apples to oranges and scratch your head why you've ended up with a banana


I do have the drivers installed https://drivers.amd.com/drivers/amd-chipset-drivers_18.50.0422.exe they are the latest. will test that today since we both live 2 minutes away from each other. 


oxrufiioxo said:


> He has a thread open on the Asrock forums also saying its a 600P not the 660P but on there he claims both systems are his.
> 
> Found the thread googling if the problem was widespread on his mobo.


yes i do.  and we basically live across the street from each other, im the one who assembled his pc too so for simplicity's sake lets keep it at that. i'm familiar with both systems. 
its a 660p. i am sometimes tired and must've been a typo. we both have the same drive, here's some box pictures: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12IKIKOa9oY6OXWHzoVBAqsqPS3bZbcQA?usp=sharing


TheLostSwede said:


> A couple of maybe obvious questions. Are you running AHCI or IDE mode for your SATA drives? IDE mode would slow them down quite a lot.
> Are you using GPT or MBR partitioning, as this makes a huge difference for NVMe drives.


It's ahci. i dont even have the ide option in the bios. 
all drives are gpt 

```
DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online          931 GB  1024 KB        *
  Disk 1    Online          119 GB      0 B        *
  Disk 2    Online          489 GB  1024 KB        *
  Disk 3    Online          953 GB  1024 KB        *
```



eidairaman1 said:


> Apples to oranges, also ADATA makes good ram, unsure about SSDs, from looks of it it is old by capacity...


umm yea, i dont know about adata ram, but the ssd is fine. anyway it's the intel one i'm focused on, not the adata one.


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## cucker tarlson (May 9, 2019)

If this drive hits 75% full the transfers go to toilet.With 200gb free you may be over that line.


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## Valantar (May 9, 2019)

While in no way an exact or highly accurate form of troubleshooting, monitoring drive activity in Task manager could help pinpoint the bottleneck. If your Intel drive is at 100% activity when writing at 60 MB/s, then it is the bottleneck (and I would guess due to the SLC cache being minimal at that point, combined with QLC NAND's poor write speeds, along with possibly overactive garbage collection and cache flushing trying to maintain some free SLC cache despite it being very small). If the drive activity is lower than that, chances are that the bottleneck lies somewhere else or that you're looking at a confluence of several factors. 

Also, as someone mentioned, is the drive connected to a CPU or chipset-based slot? AMD chipsets only provide PCIe 2.0 ports, while the CPU-connected slots are 3.0. The 660p is AFAIK a 2x interface drive, and PCIe 2.0 x2 is not very fast (still faster than SATA, but very slow for NVMe).


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## seccentral (May 9, 2019)

Valantar said:


> While in no way an exact or highly accurate form of troubleshooting, monitoring drive activity in Task manager could help pinpoint the bottleneck. If your Intel drive is at 100% activity when writing at 60 MB/s, then it is the bottleneck (and I would guess due to the SLC cache being minimal at that point, combined with QLC NAND's poor write speeds, along with possibly overactive garbage collection and cache flushing trying to maintain some free SLC cache despite it being very small). If the drive activity is lower than that, chances are that the bottleneck lies somewhere else or that you're looking at a confluence of several factors.
> 
> Also, as someone mentioned, is the drive connected to a CPU or chipset-based slot? AMD chipsets only provide PCIe 2.0 ports, while the CPU-connected slots are 3.0. The 660p is AFAIK a 2x interface drive, and PCIe 2.0 x2 is not very fast (still faster than SATA, but very slow for NVMe).


very interesting observation. 
No, it's not 100%. it's actually barely hitting 5%. hmmm 
rearding slot position, i tried both with the same result.


cucker tarlson said:


> If this drive hits 75% full the transfers go to toilet.With 200gb free you may be over that line.


i'll keep that in mind. oh well


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## EarthDog (May 9, 2019)

seccentral said:


> my sata nvme drive


????

M.2 is the form factor. There are nvme and sata based m.2 drives with sata based drives still being limited to sata speeds....


Edit: that isnt the issue... I see now.


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## newtekie1 (May 9, 2019)

Mussels said:


> I've got the 6000P which is the same drive plus encryption, and its effing terrible for sustained writes.
> 
> Your friend might have some sort of caching going on (or a different SSD entirely, as others mention), making it appear faster than it is,  the 600p/6000p drives simply cant write that fast



I wonder if Intel's chipset driver automatically activates the write-flushing policy on NVMe drives and the AMD chipset driver doesn't?


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## Valantar (May 9, 2019)

seccentral said:


> very interesting observation.
> No, it's not 100%. it's actually barely hitting 5%. hmmm
> rearding slot position, i tried both with the same result.
> 
> i'll keep that in mind. oh well


Have you tried creating a temporary RAMdisk and using that as the source of your files? A quick search came up with this list of free RAMdisk software (can't vouch for the quality, of course). That would eliminate any source file bottleneck and let your SSD run free. 

As for the Task Manager results, this might indicate that the QLC NAND is the bottleneck, holding even the SSD controller back and leaving it mostly idle. If the SLC cache is skipped for some reason (which is down to how the SSD firmware handles things), the controller would only be doing the work required to write as much as the flash is able to handle, while otherwise waiting and essentially twiddling its thumbs. But as I said, it might also indicate a bottleneck elsewhere (the source SSD is the most likely culprit) or a combination of two or more factors.



newtekie1 said:


> I wonder if Intel's chipset driver automatically activates the write-flushing policy on NVMe drives and the AMD chipset driver doesn't?


Sounds possible, but shouldn't the drive firmware be handling this regardless of platform?


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## newtekie1 (May 9, 2019)

Valantar said:


> Sounds possible, but shouldn't the drive firmware be handling this regardless of platform?



No, it is a policy you can set in device manager in Windows.  It can be toggled on and off on the fly.  So I wouldn't be surprised if Intel's storage software doesn't enable it by default when it detects an Intel drive to make the drive seem faster on Intel platforms.

It is also very risky, because data isn't written directly to the drive.  When the policy is enabled(which disables write flushing actually) basically Windows writes data to RAM, so transfers seem fast, and the copy "finishes" quickly, but it still works in the background to write the data from RAM onto the SSD or HDD.  If the PC loses power before the data is flushed from RAM, the data still in RAM is lost.


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## EarthDog (May 9, 2019)

...and it is typically not an issue and some drives are 'supposed' to run this way IIRC.


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## newtekie1 (May 9, 2019)

EarthDog said:


> ...and it is typically not an issue and some drives are 'supposed' to run this way IIRC.



AFAIK, no drive is supposed to run with flushing disabled in Windows.  By default the policy should be off. Write caching is on by default, but not the policy to disable cache flushing.


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## EarthDog (May 9, 2019)

newtekie1 said:


> By default the policy should be off. Write caching is on by default, but not the policy to disable cache flushing.


Correct on all _quoted_ accounts. Again though, it is typically not an issue (unless you lose power while its clearing the cache as you stated) and some drives are 'supposed' to run this way for best results. I don't recall which drive I was reviewing, likely one that doesn't have DRAM and relies on HMB???


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## seccentral (May 9, 2019)

I got both drives. 
While the old one settles at around 50MB/s the other one bursts at 900 and settles at 600. (wrote over 200GB so i suppose it's safe to say the cache was saturated at some point)
I'm starting to suspect my drive may be faulty. Although it should still be very ok since it's total writes is barely 4TB.
will update as i do more testing

after some testing i decided to backup the data and nuke the drive dd style ( dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mydrive ) reboot in windows and let windows reinitialize it, i'm getting similar speeds on mine as well. 
... 
I can't say what fixed it, but i can say i am satisfied with how it performs.


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## darthmauldog1125 (Oct 4, 2019)

I found this thread while trying to troubleshoot a similar issue I have. After sluggish performance on my samsung 970 pro I did a benchmark test and found my read/write times were lower than published benchmarks and samsung's stated 3500/2700 read/write sequential. the largest differences compared to published benchmark are my 4k read/write and acc.time read/write, which are 25.19mb/s read, 36.15mb/s write with acc.time of 0.108ms read, 0.111ms write; these compare to an online published benchmark i saw using the same software of 58.24mb/s read, 185.79mb/s write with acc. times 0.022ms read, 0.020ms write.

The motherboard i'm using is an ASRock x299 extreme4. I tried 2 of the 3 m.2 ports, the third not having enough room for the 970 pro, and also purchased a PCIE x16 m.2 adapter to try using one of the x16 pcie lanes. same benchmark results. Since I have an older computer next to me I decided to put the PCIE m.2 adapter into that older board, an asus maximus iv gene-z, and while the sequential speeds were choked due to the x4 pcie 2.0 lane the 4k read/writes were much faster and the acc.time was better too: 60.56mb/s read, 188.90mb/s write, with acc.times of 0.032ms read, 0.018ms write. The older machine was running windows 7 pro x64 versus windows 10 pro x64 This confuses the heck out of me. I also decided to run a test from a wintogo win10 x64 usb boot drive so that the benchmark wasn't testing a drive that was also the OS boot drive, but I got the same cruddy benchmark results for my 4k read/writes and the same slow acc.times versus online published benchmarks. So to me this points to a motherboard issue, CPU issue, or memory issue.

I also decided to run memory tests on my 4 g.skill trident Z 4x 16GB DDR4-3200 using memtest86 usb boot drive. each test took a really long time, 4-5 hours to complete. I ran twice with all four connected: 1st run contained 1 error on test 8, 1 bit; 2nd run passed. I ran again on 3 combinations, first combo passed 2 runs. 2nd combo had 1 error (test 7, 1 bit) on the 1st run but passed the 2nd, 3rd and 4th runs, the third combo passed 2 runs. I then tested using only 1 memory stick. each one passed 2 runs without errors. So possibly a memory problem but more likely a motherboard memory controller problem? unfortunately i don't have the ability to test the memory on another motherboard yet.

any thoughts on what the problem(s) is(are)?


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## cucker tarlson (Oct 4, 2019)

darthmauldog1125 said:


> I found this thread while trying to troubleshoot a similar issue I have. After sluggish performance on my samsung 970 pro I did a benchmark test and found my read/write times were lower than published benchmarks and samsung's stated 3500/2700 read/write sequential. the largest differences compared to published benchmark are my 4k read/write and acc.time read/write, which are 25.19mb/s read, 36.15mb/s write with acc.time of 0.108ms read, 0.111ms write; these compare to an online published benchmark i saw using the same software of 58.24mb/s read, 185.79mb/s write with acc. times 0.022ms read, 0.020ms write.
> 
> The motherboard i'm using is an ASRock x299 extreme4. I tried 2 of the 3 m.2 ports, the third not having enough room for the 970 pro, and also purchased a PCIE x16 m.2 adapter to try using one of the x16 pcie lanes. same benchmark results. Since I have an older computer next to me I decided to put the PCIE m.2 adapter into that older board, an asus maximus iv gene-z, and while the sequential speeds were choked due to the x4 pcie 2.0 lane the 4k read/writes were much faster and the acc.time was better too: 60.56mb/s read, 188.90mb/s write, with acc.times of 0.032ms read, 0.018ms write. The older machine was running windows 7 pro x64 versus windows 10 pro x64 This confuses the heck out of me. I also decided to run a test from a wintogo win10 x64 usb boot drive so that the benchmark wasn't testing a drive that was also the OS boot drive, but I got the same cruddy benchmark results for my 4k read/writes and the same slow acc.times versus online published benchmarks. So to me this points to a motherboard issue, CPU issue, or memory issue.
> 
> ...


try disabling vulnerability patches with inspectre (remember to restart the pc)
that did it in my case

check if trim is working (trimcheck)

check if intel rst is running properly

do you really mean 36mb/s 4k write or is it 136mb/s ?


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## darthmauldog1125 (Oct 4, 2019)

I really meant 36mb/s 4k write. super slow. I do not know how to disable vulnerability patches with inspectre, but i will try to google how to do that. How do I check if intel RST is running properly? what is strange is that I also ran the benchmark test from a new windows 10 OS build (a togo usb boot drive) and the results are basically the same as they are now. were those vulnerability patches with inspectre built into the latest windows 10 iso from microsoft?


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## londiste (Oct 4, 2019)

First, the majority of this thread is about Intel's 660p that has its own issues with speed in the long run and large amounts of data at once.
Second, Spectre vulnerability patches have pretty much zero effect on a simple benchmark like this. I have a 1TB 960 Pro that gives essentially identical results to 970 Pro and its review scores and I have all the vulnerability patches installed and active. This stuff has noticeable effect only on far more stressing loads than this.

Intel RST is not relevant. This is the motherboard/chipset driver for the NVMe device. In this case, secnvme on the screenshot shows you have Samsung's driver installed which is the optimal way. You may want to check if it is the latest version - Samsung NVMe Driver from Samsung's page (https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools/#ge_semi_anchor_stand4) but that is it.

As for the results themselves, I am not sure. Based on just benchmark results no slowdown should not be concerning or noticeable in actual usage.
The Gene-Z results are as expected - 4K matches the reviews and sequential is capped by PCI-e 2.0 speeds. That means the drive is definitely fine.

Is that a system drive? Is anything else that could use the drive closed when you are running the test?
Other drivers - especially chipset - are up to date?

On more generic troubleshooting side - is the drive overheating by any chance?


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## darthmauldog1125 (Oct 7, 2019)

Ok, so I tried eliminating spectre and meltdown, with restarts before each benchmark, but same results as before. I reinstalled intel RST, and also reinstalled the samsung nvme driver for the 970 pro, with restarts after installations, but both benchmarks showed the same. I downloaded the samsung magician software which showed TRIM was on. 

londiste, yes, it is a system drive, which is why I made a wintogo usb boot of win 10 x64 to run windows off of a usb stick and run the benchmark on the 970 pro while it wasn't being used as a system drive. when I did that benchmark I got the same results. The temperature is normal according to samsung magician software, and currently it is in the PCIE3 slot and has a bottom fan (intake) pointed right at it; the side of the case is also off for now while I troubleshoot, so I think the 970 pro temps are fine. Chipset is up to date, I tried updating bios versions 1 by 1 until I was on the latest bios (1.8). 

By chance I noticed when I run the test right after booting into windows, like a few seconds after booting, the numbers are a bit higher, not by  much but they are higher than when the system has settled for a minute. So I booted into safe mode and ran the benchmark with much better speeds, still not matching the reviews and samsung stated specs but miles better than in normal boot. 4k read/write is up to 39.39mb/s and 127.75mb/s while acc. time is down to 0.04ms/0.03ms read/write. so better, not great, but definitely better. So maybe there are some windows services causing some issues, but it still doesn't explain why the benchmarks were slow while using a wintogo usb as the system drive, right?


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## holyprof (Oct 7, 2019)

Looking at the two system's specs, the Intel PC has 32GB of RAM vs 16GB on the 2700X PC. Windows cache system will use RAM as a buffer (both as read and write) which speeds up things a lot - the 40GB data being copied fits alsost entirely in RAM + let's say 2GB SLC buffer of the target SSD. Also as already mentioned above, NVMe to NVMe drive will copy much faster than SATA to NVMe.


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## darthmauldog1125 (Oct 9, 2019)

Changed motherboards today, but same speeds. So instead of asrock x299 extreme4 I am using the evga x299 dark. So motherboard isn't the issue. I'm going to perform a clean install of windows to rule out the OS. In the attached image you'll see only sequential is checked and that's because i ran a sequential test after running all 4 tests due to read sequential showing 600-700mb/s on the first test; this test is the 970pro in m.2 slot 1 on the evga x299 dark.


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## darthmauldog1125 (Oct 13, 2019)

So I have performed a clean install of windows 10 x64 but same speeds. I also bought a 970 pro 512gb drive only to have the same exact issue with 4k and acc. time. I then installed the 1TB drive as a second drive to test it while my 512gb drive was being used as the OS boot, but the 1TB had the same slow 4k speeds and slow acc. times. So, I decided to install windows 7 x64 and wouldn't you know it, speeds were very fast. I'm not sure what windows 10 pro x64 OS is doing to my nvme speeds. the attached image is the benchmark on the 1tb drive while running windows 7 x64 from it.


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## Vario (Oct 13, 2019)

darthmauldog1125 said:


> So I have performed a clean install of windows 10 x64 but same speeds. I also bought a 970 pro 512gb drive only to have the same exact issue with 4k and acc. time. I then installed the 1TB drive as a second drive to test it while my 512gb drive was being used as the OS boot, but the 1TB had the same slow 4k speeds and slow acc. times. So, I decided to install windows 7 x64 and wouldn't you know it, speeds were very fast. I'm not sure what windows 10 pro x64 OS is doing to my nvme speeds. the attached image is the benchmark on the 1tb drive while running windows 7 x64 from it.


Looks quite fast, the speed is right where it should be for the 970 Pro, I have the same drive 970 pro 512 and win 7 and similar results.  I don't know what would make it slower under 10, sorry that isn't helpful.


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## darthmauldog1125 (Oct 14, 2019)

Vario said:


> Looks quite fast, the speed is right where it should be for the 970 Pro, I have the same drive 970 pro 512 and win 7 and similar results.  I don't know what would make it slower under 10, sorry that isn't helpful.


 I agree, in windows 7 the benchmark is where it should be. something in windows 10 is causing things to slow down. in windows 10 safe mode boot the speeds are faster than in normal mode boot. i tried disabling antivirus, firewalls, and also tried disabling/enabling running services one by one but nothing would increase the benchmark speeds.


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## Athlonite (Oct 14, 2019)

darthmauldog1125 said:


> I agree, in windows 7 the benchmark is where it should be. something in windows 10 is causing things to slow down. in windows 10 safe mode boot the speeds are faster than in normal mode boot. i tried disabling antivirus, firewalls, and also tried disabling/enabling running services one by one but nothing would increase the benchmark speeds.



Just out of curiosity what build version of Windows 10 X64 pro are you using


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## darthmauldog1125 (Oct 14, 2019)

I used the latest windows media creation tool from Microsoft’s website to install windows 10 x64 from usb. It is Microsoft Windows 10 Pro version 10.0.18362 build 18362


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## Athlonite (Oct 14, 2019)

so your saying it's build 1903 (19H1) hmmmm weird I've not seen any major complaints for storage speed NVMe or otherwise under this build also weird that it works as it should under Win7

could be a firmware issue  have you looked at whether or not there's a new firmware update for your 970 pro on Samsung's website


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## Deleted member 67555 (Oct 14, 2019)

I noticed a significant slowdown on my PC and have since reinstalled Windows 10... It did not help.
I ran the benchmark in Magician and shows my 960 Evo running at 1500/1000...

This started about 10 days ago.


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## darthmauldog1125 (Oct 14, 2019)

Athlonite said:


> so your saying it's build 1903 (19H1) hmmmm weird I've not seen any major complaints for storage speed NVMe or otherwise under this build also weird that it works as it should under Win7
> 
> could be a firmware issue  have you looked at whether or not there's a new firmware update for your 970 pro on Samsung's website



Yes, I checked with samsung magician and it says firmware is up to date. please see attached image. 

New finding. Speeds are faster than before when disabling all but 1 core in my 7960x within bios. i don't think this is a motherboard issue as i've tried two different motherboards with the same speeds, so I have started the warranty repair process for the cpu. here are new benchmarks for 970 pro 512gb (boot drive) and 970 pro 1tb (connected via pcie-nvme x16 adapter in x16 slot) on asrock x299 extreme4 with 1 core enabled on core i9 7960x.

enabling two cores slows down the 4k benchmark considerably in as ssd as well as slows down some other tests in both as ssd and crystaldiskmark


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## Vario (Oct 14, 2019)

darthmauldog1125 said:


> Yes, I checked with samsung magician and it says firmware is up to date. please see attached image.
> 
> New finding. Speeds are faster than before when disabling all but 1 core in my 7960x within bios. i don't think this is a motherboard issue as i've tried two different motherboards with the same speeds, so I have started the warranty repair process for the cpu. here are new benchmarks for 970 pro 512gb (boot drive) and 970 pro 1tb (connected via pcie-nvme x16 adapter in x16 slot) on asrock x299 extreme4 with 1 core enabled on core i9 7960x.
> 
> enabling two cores slows down the 4k benchmark considerably in as ssd as well as slows down some other tests in both as ssd and crystaldiskmark


Just a thought, have you tried changing the Windows Power-Saving settings?


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## The Egg (Oct 14, 2019)

Weird stuff, and LOL at the folks suggesting the original poster needs an NVMe source to hit 40MB/s reads.  Mechanical PATA drives from 20'ish years ago could do 40MB/s.  NVMe has been commonplace for about 1-2 years, and suddenly anything less than a PCIe x4 connection is incapable of 40MB/s.  

Anyhow, I don't really have a good explanation for either of these cases.  A good start would be to make sure you have any storage controller drivers installed, and probably the Samsung NVMe driver as well.  Install Samsung Magician.  Also go through the BIOS very thoroughly.


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## darthmauldog1125 (Oct 14, 2019)

Yes, I have tried changing windows power settings. But it didn't change anything. the only way i could get nvme speeds closer to spec were 1) changing OS from windows 10 to windows 7 or 2) booting into safe mode or 3) booting into windows PE from usb stick or 4) disabling all cores except one in bios.



The Egg said:


> Weird stuff, and LOL at the folks suggesting the original poster needs an NVMe source to hit 40MB/s reads.  Mechanical PATA drives from 20'ish years ago could do 40MB/s.  NVMe has been commonplace for about 1-2 years, and suddenly anything less than a PCIe x4 connection is incapable of 40MB/s.
> 
> Anyhow, I don't really have a good explanation for either of these cases.  A good start would be to make sure you have any storage controller drivers installed, and probably the Samsung NVMe driver as well.  Install Samsung Magician.  Also go through the BIOS very thoroughly.



Yes, I made sure to check both the standard nvme driver, samsung's nvme driver, the previous version of samsung's nvme driver, checked for firmware updates using samsung magician, and went through my asrock's bios very thoroughly.



The Egg said:


> Weird stuff, and LOL at the folks suggesting the original poster needs an NVMe source to hit 40MB/s reads.  Mechanical PATA drives from 20'ish years ago could do 40MB/s.  NVMe has been commonplace for about 1-2 years, and suddenly anything less than a PCIe x4 connection is incapable of 40MB/s.
> 
> Anyhow, I don't really have a good explanation for either of these cases.  A good start would be to make sure you have any storage controller drivers installed, and probably the Samsung NVMe driver as well.  Install Samsung Magician.  Also go through the BIOS very thoroughly.



Yes I tried changing power saving settings: changed power mode to high performance, and tried setting link state power management to Off, setting USB selective suspend setting to Disabled, setting "Allow hybrid sleep" to OFF, setting minimum and maximum processor state to 100%. nothing worked.



The Egg said:


> Weird stuff, and LOL at the folks suggesting the original poster needs an NVMe source to hit 40MB/s reads.  Mechanical PATA drives from 20'ish years ago could do 40MB/s.  NVMe has been commonplace for about 1-2 years, and suddenly anything less than a PCIe x4 connection is incapable of 40MB/s.
> 
> Anyhow, I don't really have a good explanation for either of these cases.  A good start would be to make sure you have any storage controller drivers installed, and probably the Samsung NVMe driver as well.  Install Samsung Magician.  Also go through the BIOS very thoroughly.



So, you got me thinking, while I changed power saving settings within windows i didn't try changing any power saving settings on the CPU itself within bios. I disabled the CPU C states (in asrock x299 extreme4 bios set CPU C states support to manual, set enhanced halt state (C1E) to disabled, set CPU C6 state support to disabled, set Package C state support to disabled, set CFG lock to disabled) and the speeds increased. not as fast as they should be nor as fast as they were in windows 7 or the windows PE usb boot, but faster. this still seems a bit weird, i don't think it should take this much tinkering with CPU settings in bios in order to get nvme speeds closer to where they should be on windows 10. So i'm still going to send this 7960x CPU in for repair/exchange, and tomorrow I'll try a different x299 CPU. please see attached image for as ssd benchmark with CPU C states support settings disabled.


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## Athlonite (Oct 14, 2019)

Hmmm did you try the enterprise version of Intel Rapid Storage Technology enterprise driver and utility ver:5.5.0.1367 available from the download page for your Asrock x299 extreme4 mobo


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## darthmauldog1125 (Oct 15, 2019)

Athlonite said:


> Hmmm did you try the enterprise version of Intel Rapid Storage Technology enterprise driver and utility ver:5.5.0.1367 available from the download page for your Asrock x299 extreme4 mobo



I didn't try installing RST enterprise version, but would that even matter if i'm only using nvme, have samsung's drivers installed, and i'm not running any other hard drives nor a raid array?

I submitted my 7960x today for repair or replacement and I installed another processor in the same asrock x299 extreme4 motherboard, same nvme's installed (one in m.2_1 and one in the second x16 PCIE... The CPU is an Intel® Core™ i5-7640X X-series Processor, so it only has 16 lanes. I reset to UEFI defaults, so that the CPU C state support options were back at auto default settings, and then booted up the system and ran a benchmark. right away, on default UEFI settings, the benchmarks seem decent. Not as fast as when I ran benchmarks on windows 7 OS with the 7960x, but it is nice to see decent speeds without messing with my motherboard's bios. 

Out of curiosity I also ran a benchmark after disabling the C state options in the UEFI CPU configuration options. The speeds are about the same, with marginal improvement on sequential write, 4k read/write, and 4k-64thrd read while sequential read and 4k-64thrd write were marginally slower on as ssd benchmark test. on the crystaldiskmark benchmark seq Q32T1 read/write and 4KiB Q8T8 write were marginally faster but 4KiB Q8T8 read, 4KiB Q32T1 read/write, and 4KiB Q1T1 were all marginally slower.


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## Mussels (Oct 15, 2019)

Thats very interesting that the CPU itself caused the problems

Did you ever test the PCI-E levels the drive was running at? (got something in my eye and reading the whole thread to check sounds unpleasant atm)


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## darthmauldog1125 (Oct 16, 2019)

Mussels said:


> Thats very interesting that the CPU itself caused the problems
> 
> Did you ever test the PCI-E levels the drive was running at? (got something in my eye and reading the whole thread to check sounds unpleasant atm)



I did make sure to use the first M.2 port (both connect via PCH according to ASRock, not directly to cpu), and for my pcie m.2 adapter I tried all different settings available for the pcie lanes in bios. But I also was able to try a different evga board where the m.2 port connects directly to the cpu, and the speeds were the same on that and the asrock board.

HWINFO says it is currently running at 4x bandwidth


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## Mussels (Oct 16, 2019)

i was wondering if it was capped at x2 or PCI-E 2.0 or something on the CPU that gave it slow speed results, since a CPU change sped it up


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## darthmauldog1125 (Oct 16, 2019)

unforutnately i didn't think of checking this while i still had the 7960x (already sent out). so that hwinfo is with the loaner corei5 cpu.


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## The Egg (Oct 16, 2019)

Mussels said:


> i was wondering if it was capped at x2 or PCI-E 2.0 or something on the CPU that gave it slow speed results, since a CPU change sped it up


Even if that were the case, a PCIe 2.0 x4 connection is still rated at 2.0GB/s (minus some for overhead), and that should only affect the top end.


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## Deleted member 67555 (Oct 16, 2019)

Uhm my issue was magically gone today...
The only update I got was A-Volute and that is an update for my audio...so ~
And yes it was very noticeable which is why I checked again.


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## Lumpitor (May 19, 2020)

Valantar said:


> Have you tried creating a temporary RAMdisk and using that as the source of your files? A quick search came up with this list of free RAMdisk software (can't vouch for the quality, of course). That would eliminate any source file bottleneck and let your SSD run free.
> 
> As for the Task Manager results, this might indicate that the QLC NAND is the bottleneck, holding even the SSD controller back and leaving it mostly idle. If the SLC cache is skipped for some reason (which is down to how the SSD firmware handles things), the controller would only be doing the work required to write as much as the flash is able to handle, while otherwise waiting and essentially twiddling its thumbs. But as I said, it might also indicate a bottleneck elsewhere (the source SSD is the most likely culprit) or a combination of two or more factors.
> 
> ...




*I have Samsung SM951 NVMe PCIe M.2 512GB MZVPV512HDGL

Also created RAM drive.
Copying small or large files between them is around 500MB/s.
Diskmark pictures attached.
When copying game folder to external 256gb samsung evo pro, speed from 350MB/s drops to 40-50MB/s.
The same happens when copying to WD black HDD. From 150MB/s drops to 40MB/s.*

Why the heck are speeds from or to RAM drive slow??


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## Valantar (May 20, 2020)

Lumpitor said:


> *I have Samsung SM951 NVMe PCIe M.2 512GB MZVPV512HDGL
> 
> Also created RAM drive.
> Copying small or large files between them is around 500MB/s.
> ...


Numbers in both your screenshots look perfectly reasonable given that you're not testing anything at QD32. You won't hit peak performance at anything lower than that on an SSD. Beyond that your speeds sound ok for anything that fills the write cache or if the drive is getting hot. Remember, peak speeds from tests like CrystalDiskMark are completely unrealistic for normal workloads, as normal end-user drive loads rarely exceed QD1 and typically deal with lots of files of varying sizes rather than pure large-file sequential transfers. File size, access patterns and the like have a _huge_ impact on actual drive performance, and PC SSDs typically have firmware tuned to look good in benchmarks and on spec sheets rather than optimizing for realistic use cases. That external drive is likely bottlenecked by the USB controller - does it support UASP? Is it a reasonably modern design? Does it get very hot? Does it support TRIM? If not, you're likely running out of pSLC cache and forcing the drive to write directly to slow TLC or QLC. Also, is it a Pro or Evo? There's no such thing as a "Samsung Evo Pro".


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## EarthDog (May 20, 2020)

Valantar said:


> You won't hit peak performance at anything lower than that on an SSD.


Run ATTO. 

Default, IIRC is QD1 and goes up to QD10?


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## kapone32 (May 20, 2020)

I think the mitigating factor is he is looking at a PCIe to PCIe vs PCIe to SATA interface. The situation he described should work perfectly with the Intel 600 series drives. I do not see them running out of psuedo SLC cache with a 256 NVME drive that is probably U2.


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## THU31 (Dec 8, 2021)

Yesterday I was doing a file verification for a game on Steam and it took forever. Task Manager was showing mostly 10-30 MB/s read speeds, sometimes a little bit higher.

When I try to copy that folder to a different drive (does not matter if it is another SSD or HDD), speed immediately settles at 5-10 MB/s. So that process takes even longer than the verification.

Why is it that bad? I know those are random reads, but they are insanely slow.

Benchmarks are fine, loading times in games are fine, but actual Windows operations are awfully slow. I feel like a defragmented HDD is much faster at this type of tasks.


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## Athlonite (Dec 9, 2021)

THU31 said:


> Yesterday I was doing a file verification for a game on Steam and it took forever. Task Manager was showing mostly 10-30 MB/s read speeds, sometimes a little bit higher.
> 
> When I try to copy that folder to a different drive (does not matter if it is another SSD or HDD), speed immediately settles at 5-10 MB/s. So that process takes even longer than the verification.
> 
> ...


small files take much longer and are slower to transfer because they require more read/write ops than a single large file


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## Mussels (Dec 9, 2021)

THU31 said:


> Yesterday I was doing a file verification for a game on Steam and it took forever. Task Manager was showing mostly 10-30 MB/s read speeds, sometimes a little bit higher.
> 
> When I try to copy that folder to a different drive (does not matter if it is another SSD or HDD), speed immediately settles at 5-10 MB/s. So that process takes even longer than the verification.
> 
> ...


You didnt state what drive this was on, so we cant really tell you if its normal or not

Look at AS SSD benchmarks for 4K random - even my top tier SN850 is under 100MB/s there
Steam is not fast at what it does because it verifies the content as it moves it, checking for corruption slowing it down further


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## THU31 (Dec 9, 2021)

My drives are in my specs. This particular game folder is on the Corsair MP510 960 GB.

I could understand the file verification being slow, because it has to compare stuff or whatever, but simply copying a folder at just 5-10 MB/s?
Yes, the folder has 2400 files, most of which are under 1 MB, almost no files bigger than 50 MB, but that still seems crazy to me.

When I copied a 7 GB mp3 folder from HDD to SSD, the speeds were pretty normal, limited by the HDD performance (screenshot attached). Then when I copied the same folder from the SSD to another SSD, it was almost instant at 2 GB/s.


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## Mussels (Dec 9, 2021)

Yeah your drives are in your specs, but unless you say the source and destination drive you leave us guessing

Look at your 4K random write result of 65MB/s on the SSD - that's your best case in this sort of situation. Not worst, BEST. If those files are even smaller than 4K? It'll get worse.

Small files are slow to write. Very slow.
MLC and TLC SSD's are very slow with multiple writes when they run out of cache.
Mech drives can be even worse, when fragmented.

Heres a screencap from a quickly googled answer on that:


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## Valantar (Dec 9, 2021)

Mussels said:


> Yeah your drives are in your specs, but unless you say the source and destination drive you leave us guessing
> 
> Look at your 4K random write result of 65MB/s on the SSD - that's your best case in this sort of situation. Not worst, BEST. If those files are even smaller than 4K? It'll get worse.
> 
> ...


This. I was copying a few hundred GB of games over to an external SSD a couple of weeks ago - the big files chugged along nicely at 650-700MB/s,but in a couple of folders things slowed to single digit or even sub-MB/s speeds due to the sheer amount of files.

Also, all SSDs perform worse the more they fill up, as there is less free space to allow for parallelism, and the controller spends more time ensuring the data gets placed somewhere in an efficient manner. The effects of this are very variable between brands and even different firmwares, but can be significant. Anandtech tests both empty and full drive performance in their reviews.


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## THU31 (Dec 9, 2021)

You guys are talking about writing, when I am talking about reading.

I just copied the game folder from the SSD to the first HDD. Then I copied the folder from the first HDD to the second HDD.

Look at the graphs below. I do not understand it.
Copying from the SSD to the HDD is so variable, most of the time sitting between 20-50 MB/s, and often going down to 5-10 MB/s.
Copying from the HDD to another HDD is basically constant ~65 MB/s, never dropping below 50. And I have slow 5940 RPM eco drives, it would probably be much faster with 7200 RPM performance drives.


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## Mussels (Dec 10, 2021)

THU31 said:


> You guys are talking about writing, when I am talking about reading.
> 
> I just copied the game folder from the SSD to the first HDD. Then I copied the folder from the first HDD to the second HDD.
> 
> ...


Yeah? reading is slow too. Did you read the information i pasted?
"You spend more time finding opening and closing the file, than you do reading or writing"

Small files will be slow. Always will be, always have been. To fix that we need entirely new file systems. TLC and QLC SSD's, and hard drives with slow recording techniques like SMR are going to make an existing bad problem, even worse.

As the drives get full (SSD and mech) they get slower. SSD's run out of SLC cache or pseudo SLC cache, and performance tanks. Mech drives are slower the further out from the center of the platter they get, and fragmentation can make it a thousand times worse with small files.

There is no magical fix here, small files read, open, and copy slow and certain conditions (type of drives, how full they are, how fragmented they are) can make a bad situation even worse.
My drives can copy at 5GB/s between them, and i'll see KB/s if a game uses thousands of small files.


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## THU31 (Dec 10, 2021)

But you find, open and close the files on an HDD too, right? If this is a file system problem, why are my HDDs faster than my SSD when copying this particular folder with thousands of small files?

What makes the SSDs worse than HDDs at handling small files?


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## Mussels (Dec 10, 2021)

THU31 said:


> But you find, open and close the files on an HDD too, right? If this is a file system problem, why are my HDDs faster than my SSD when copying this particular folder with thousands of small files?
> 
> What makes the SSDs worse than HDDs at handling small files?


Running out of cache. your SSD is not full performance across the entire SSD.

You'll have to research your SSD on its own, and find out if its SLC, TLC, MLC, QLC, if it has DRAM cache or not, how full it is, and so on

The screenshots you posted show the SSD at roughly twice the speed of the mech drive, btw


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## THU31 (Dec 10, 2021)

Mussels said:


> The screenshots you posted show the SSD at roughly twice the speed of the mech drive, btw



Either you are not seeing what I am posting, or you do not understand it.

5-10 MB/s is not twice as fast as ~65 MB/s. And 20-50 MB/s is not twice as fast either. It is *SLOWER*.

These are the transfer speeds I was seeing for most of the time. The 104 MB/s number is not the average, it was the current speed at the time of the screenshot.
The copy process from the SSD to HDD took longer than from HDD to HDD.

The HDD *NEVER* dropped below 50 MB/s, yet the SSD did *MOST *of the time.


Running out of cache, drive being full, those are all general things that explain why SSDs are not always at their full speeds. But it does not explain why an SSD can be much slower than an HDD at a specific workload with lots of small files.
I want to learn why an SSD reads a tiny file at 5 MB/s, while an HDD reads the same file at 50 MB/s.


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## Valantar (Dec 10, 2021)

THU31 said:


> Either you are not seeing what I am posting, or you do not understand it.
> 
> 5-10 MB/s is not twice as fast as ~65 MB/s. And 20-50 MB/s is not twice as fast either. It is *SLOWER*.
> 
> ...


It might be as simple as Windows caching a lot of the copied data - that happens when you repeatedly copy or move the same data, windows' copier keeps the data cached for a short while which can artificially inflate performance - though that typically means higher performance than this, and in shrorter bursts.

It might also be a bad NVMe driver, iffy firmware on your drive (I see reviews of it point out "poor application performance", which indicates a firmware tuned for benchmarks and sequential transfers, not real-world use, though how big those detrimental effects are can vary a lot), or a bunch of other factors. It's still pretty weird though.


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## THU31 (Dec 10, 2021)

I guess it is a mystery, then.

I feel like random reads/writes should be the main focus of engineers, both hardware and software. SSD progress is basically dead when it comes to that aspect. What is the point of introducing more bandwidth (Gen4) at almost double the price, when those drives have the same garbage random access performance as slower and cheaper drives.


By the way, what does the 4K-64Thrd benchmark represent? Accessing 64 different random 4K blocks at the same time? So in theory software (including Windows) could be programmed to access data in that way? Is that what is needed to get the max out of SSDs?


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## Valantar (Dec 10, 2021)

THU31 said:


> I guess it is a mystery, then.
> 
> I feel like random reads/writes should be the main focus of engineers, both hardware and software. SSD progress is basically dead when it comes to that aspect. What is the point of introducing more bandwidth (Gen4) at almost double the price, when those drives have the same garbage random access performance as slower and cheaper drives.


It should be, but it doesn't look good on marketing slides, so it rarely is. Also, increasing random performance is a lot harder than increasing sequential performance, both due to the aforementioned OS bottlenecks as well as how flash memory functions physically. That's also why good SSD testing relies on real-world applications rather than canned benchmarks, as those benchmarks have little to do with real-world use and drives are often tuned to perform well in them (their access patterns and performance requirements are well known and relatively simple).


THU31 said:


> By the way, what does the 4K-64Thrd benchmark represent? Accessing 64 different random 4K blocks at the same time? So in theory software (including Windows) could be programmed to access data in that way? Is that what is needed to get the max out of SSDs?


Both increasing thread counts and queue depths are ways of increasing the amount of work an SSD is asked to do simultaneously/in rapid succession, which increases performance in random workloads. After all, if a single thread is asking for a single 4k read at a time, especially with processing or other stuff in between but even just waiting for that read to finish and the data to arrive before asking for another, the SSD is sitting idle for the _vast_ majority of the time. The problem is that you can't just change how software is programmed - while programming is full of hacks and poorly optimized code, at the end of the day any application only needs the data it needs, and only needs it when it's needed. Making your app capable of accessing data with tons of threads doesn't matter if none of those threads are actually needed for accessing data.

Of course, this quickly gets complicated: games, for example, have historically been developed with an expectation of HDD storage, as supposing an SSD (for example, near-instant seek times) can lead anyone using an HDD to experience severe performance issues - stuttering, data failing to load, major pop-in, etc. So a lot of things are developed for a lowest common denominator of performance. This also means stuff like how data is packaged together in files (things likely to be used together are put together to avoid random reads on HDDs; a lot is done to avoid fragmentation, etc.) is sub-optimal for SSD use. If the data structures, software behavior, and access patterns of these applications were tuned with the expectation of an SSD instead, this could lead to significant performance improvements. But AFAIK we're still not quite at the point where the industry has shifted over - SSD storage as a system requirement has started showing up, but it's not ubiquitous yet.


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## xrobwx71 (Dec 10, 2021)

Mussels said:


> I'd never heard of this before, google tells me you are correct. might explains some oddities i had in the past.


I'll add: Converting to GPT from MBR on the fly: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/mbr-to-gpt


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## THU31 (Dec 10, 2021)

Valantar said:


> Both increasing thread counts and queue depths are ways of increasing the amount of work an SSD is asked to do simultaneously/in rapid succession, which increases performance in random workloads. After all, if a single thread is asking for a single 4k read at a time, especially with processing or other stuff in between but even just waiting for that read to finish and the data to arrive before asking for another, the SSD is sitting idle for the _vast_ majority of the time. The problem is that you can't just change how software is programmed - while programming is full of hacks and poorly optimized code, at the end of the day any application only needs the data it needs, and only needs it when it's needed. Making your app capable of accessing data with tons of threads doesn't matter if none of those threads are actually needed for accessing data.


But would it not be possible to program Windows to copy multiple files at a time when copying a folder? Would that not increase performance drastically?

Copying them one at a time seems like a leftover from the HDD era.


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## Valantar (Dec 10, 2021)

THU31 said:


> But would it not be possible to program Windows to copy multiple files at a time when copying a folder? Would that not increase performance drastically?
> 
> Copying them one at a time seems like a leftover from the HDD era.


The windows file copy application is notoriously terrible in terms of performance - it's made to be simple to use and preserve file integrity, and performance is quite low on its list of priorities. Try something like TeraCopy, it can be quite a lot faster.

There's also something to be said for a copy operation not bogging down your system entirely with interrupts and CPU load from tons of concurrent operations. Settings some hard limits on resource usage can be a pretty good idea still.


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## 1100R (Dec 10, 2021)

Microsoft Fixes SSD and HDD Write Speed Bug in Windows 11​Microsoft is finally addressing major performance issues with SSDs and hard drives in a new Windows Preview Update KB5007262 for Windows 11. The update fixes severe write speed issues caused only on the C drive due to the enabling of the NTFS USN journal.

November 22, 2021—KB5007262 (OS Build 22000.348) Preview (microsoft.com)


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## Mussels (Dec 11, 2021)

THU31 said:


> Either you are not seeing what I am posting, or you do not understand it.
> 
> 5-10 MB/s is not twice as fast as ~65 MB/s. And 20-50 MB/s is not twice as fast either. It is *SLOWER*.
> 
> ...


You do realise thats a meaningless way to look at the data, as the SSD can read/write faster so it's going to idle the rest of the time waiting on the other end to catch up?
"Microsoft time" has been around since... well, microsoft. Those are estimates and they're often wrong, you can pause a file transfer and hit resume and see zero activity for 5 minutes and then BRRRRRRRRRR it's done at impossible speeds.

You're using an unreliable source of information in an incorrect way, to agree with a pre-deteremined view.



THU31 said:


> I guess it is a mystery, then.
> 
> I feel like random reads/writes should be the main focus of engineers, both hardware and software. SSD progress is basically dead when it comes to that aspect. What is the point of introducing more bandwidth (Gen4) at almost double the price, when those drives have the same garbage random access performance as slower and cheaper drives.
> 
> ...


Yes, it's making 64 reqeusts at at time


The problem is you cant just tell an SSD to do 64 separate writes, unless you want it to write to 64 separate locations and wear out 64 times faster - the data gets sent, and the drive has to decide based on its internal firmware how to write them as fast as possible, without burning out the drive like early flash memory did


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## mechtech (Dec 30, 2021)

Interesting stuff.  I don't think I have ever bothered transferring from drive to drive.  Haven't had to.
NVMe - OS/programs
Sata SSD - Steam/games
hdd replaced to SSD - for storage - that transfer wasn't fast, but that was to be expected with all the different types and sizes of files and a regular HDD

ok, just copied windows iso from WD blue 2TB sata drive to my NVMe - held steady at 465MB/s


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