SSD drive issue

[John Vere]

I just ordered 2 new Samsung 500 GB 870 EVO drives as my drives are getting older and now one is totally acting up. Before I do the swap I need to back everything up..but.. 

My computer is set up with the 2 SSD drives both 250GB EVO's. One is OS and the other is all my working DATA, mostly Cakewalk and Movie Maker files. I have a 3rd 1 TB drive as backup which I often copy folders from the working Data drive over to. I will also use an External drive so I'm pretty safe for back ups.  

First sign of something wrong was a brand new project with 1 audio track kept losing the audio engine?  I mucked about scratching my head and finally on a whim I started fresh and used the OS drive for the project. No more problems all that day. I finished the project and exported it. To the Data drive. The export took less than a minute.

But I went to copy the folder it was in to a external drive and it was taking forever? It was showing 0 a lot and only as high as 300KB/s. I tried copying to the internal drive, same thing? 

Copying  between all other drives, internal or external is fast and normal. Any attempt to copy ( Read)  files from this drive are real slow. as in almost zero speed?  

I have the Samsung Magician app installed so I ran that and you can see the results below.

The problem is there still might be some random stuff I didn't back up, I'm attempting that now as I write,  but at this rate it would take a month!  So this thread is to see if someone has any ideas on how I can get the transfer speed back? 

 I ran a full scan/ repair tool and it ran for 22 hours and was only 20% done so I gave up. I'm going to pull the drive and put it aside for now but eventually I want to try and retrieve all the data from it. I might run it as an external via my Laptop and let the repair tool run for the predicted 3 days.

 The main OS drive ( the 750)  shows good but interesting it shows a flag about SATA 3 being available ?  So I assume it's telling me I'm plugged into a SATA 2 port on the Mobo, good to know. But notice the read speed compared to the one that is not working. And that 10 TB has been written to it??  

The Data drive tosses different results every time I run the tests so defiantly some bad sectors ?? The test showed reading speeds of around 2 MB/s

 

 here's the first questions. why does it say this 807 GB Good? It that how much Data has been written over time? this is highly probable as I have to constantly move stuff from the drive to my back up to keep the disk half full. Is this what actually created the issue? this is only a 250 GB drive 

 

From that drive I can still open Cakewalk projects, they a re very slow to load,  but then if I try and save it to a different drive the blue wheel goes round and round and round. 

Edited May 28, 2023 by John Vere
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[mettelus]

I would recommend using a cloner set for "sector by sector" verification when the new drives come in (Samsung Magician, Macrium Reflect, etc.). Even if that does not let you properly size the data partition, you can do so afterwards with the "Disk Management" app in Windows (and probably need to start there to make a Simple Basic volume before starting the cloning process). That app comes up in the search bar as "Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions." Also afterwards you may need to rename the drive as it might match the cloned one at that point.

Heat degradation (primarily from writes rather than reads) will cause an SSD to lose speed/capacity over time. The damage done is not reversible, so getting speed back won't happen, but you may be able to recover 100% of its contents (just walk away while the cloner is working).

Edited May 28, 2023 by mettelus

[John Vere]

Thanks @mettelus  that clarifies a few thing. I did notice the Data Migration tool in the Magician and was considering that for the new C drive. For me it's a toss up as I do like a clean install of everything from time to time.  But man what a PITA. If I was keeping this machine for a few more years I would defiantly take the time to do that. But All I would like right now is to make it a bit more dependable. This is an old computer ( 13 years) and it defiantly needs replacing but I just don't have that kind of spare money right now. I'm hoping I can save gig money from the Summer and get something next fall. 

For now I ordered the 2 drives and 32 GB of RAM. A $150 upgrade which is not waisted. 

As today progresses I've been slowly transferring the files manually. The important files are all safe, so I'm just looking at some huge folders which have mostly video stuff in them. I have published all those videos and I doubt I'll ever re make them,  so if they get left behind no big deal.

All my Cakewalk files are very safe. Just  Exported files I just completed needed to be copied.  That is happening right now. 22 Songs  are transferring slowly. The screen shot was taken after about 20 minutes. Normally that would take less than a minute.   So far everything I transferred seems 100% OK. 

Your mention of heat was worth looking into. The Magician is showing  31 C for the C drive and 35 C for the broken drive.  Looking this up that seems in the low end of operational range.  

 

Edited May 28, 2023 by John Vere

[mettelus]

Roger that. It will just take longer to get things off, but you should get notifications of errors if they occur. Heat is also related to read/write speed, so with that tapering off, heat will as well. I have seen some drives do that as a safety measure. Most drives also keep track of bad sectors/cells, so is highly likely you will get everything with a little patience. Samsungs are very highly rated.

[John Vere]

Update: I pulled the drive and installed one of the new drives. I copied my Cakewalk files back to the new drive.. Wow. I didn't realize how slow that other drive had been. Cakewalk projects are loading in seconds.  SSD drives definatly slow down over time. 

So this will now be an annual routine. For a lousy $50 for a new drive. I'm going to by a 3rd drive to use for those stupid video files and this one is only for Cakewalk. 

Anyone else reading this who uses SSD drives as data storage would be wise to do the same. DON'T go by the amount of room on the disk, go by the write size. Obviously deleting files does not 100% remove them and slowly the drive is a scattered mess of data. In my case this is probably all the videos I was working on. Example you run the screen capture and re do takes over and over deleting the files. Nope, they are going to be adding to that quota the disk has. 

Example after I installed the drive I ran the Samsung Magician and it showed zero writing to the drive. I had to initialize the drive and when I looked at the write amount after that it showed 1.5 GB even though the drive had not been used yet. I transferred 36 GB of Cakewalk files so far. Haven't done anything else and the stats show that 49 GB of Data has been written.  Either the Magician is full of S_it or 13 GB of extra data is hidden away somehow. 

Now to tackle the OS drive.   

Edited May 29, 2023 by John Vere

[mettelus]

+1, something to consider is that the drives will noticeably slow (but they can just go belly up, so back up data regularly). Samsung Magician can benchmark to see the loss (10% or more is worth noting when the time comes). The only SSD I considered "dead" was an NVMe used as the C drive and that took 4+ years to occur. The C drive is also the most abused drive in the system (temp files galore, indexing default, pagefile,  etc. will all default to it).... the C drive I image monthly, or after massive software changes, and is also riddled with junctions to keep those images small. That drive is the most likely to degrade sooner due to the excessive writes it sees over time, but again the only one that bothered me took over 4 years (so far).

[John Vere]

The odd thing is the C drive has a Label I put on it that says 2018. The one that died was from 2021.  Go figure. My 1 TB spinning data drive is from 2015. But it doesn't get used much and when it does you can hear it spin up, so I guess that's what saves it. I have a bunch of those 1 TB drives some are in drive enclosures. I think over time this is only the second HD that has failed on me. I still have 20 GB Hard drives from my old XP days that I think still spin up. They are all in a shoe box.  At least the SSD drive take up less space on the shelf. 

[John Vere]

Just an update for the benefit of future reading. 
I used Samsung Magician to Migrate C drive to the other new drive. Took about 30 minutes. Done. 
Only XLN had an issue with the change which was something I already new how to fix by going to the web site etc. 

So the old girl now has 32 GB of ram and 2 x 500 GB SSD drives which I will now be swapping out on a more regular basis. 

Cakewalk is now running better that it ever did all for around $150.

I will now see how it goes with my other issues in Movie Maker. It has been freezing up when editing. I can now see why this might happen. 
 

I’m going to purchase a 3 drive for Video editing and storage as well as using it for Cakewalk internal backup.  

[Francois Greeff]

Yes I myself was quite disgusted to see how quickly the life expectance of SSD decrease when you use their diagnostic tools. Not good to set your download folder and temp files on the system drive. Rather use alternative drive for these.

Solid state not quite that Solid if it only allows you a certain amount of writes.