Last year I put together a new PC with a PNY XLR8 SSD (http://www.pny.com/XLR8_SSD?sku=SSD9SC240GMDA-RB)
Things have been great up until recently when I started noticing that network copies of large files would start fast but then become really slow.
At first I thought this was due to network issues but tested my network extensively and found it fast between other machines. Also, copying FROM this machine to another machine was fast.
This led me to look at the machine itself. I noticed in Resource Manager that during the copy, Disk Queue Length and Response Time would go up, especially when the copy started to drop.
So, I did what any sensible person would do. I searched online and found a few benchmarking tools to test out my SSD. Here is what I found from ATTO…
I did a similar test with AS SSD Benchmark to similar results…
So, with that information in mind, I checked online for possible errors and verified I have it in AHCI mode. You can see this in the AS SSD screenshot (iaStoreA OK ==> when I mouse over this it says "Intel(R) 8 Series/C220 Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller – OK).
Final thing I tried is running CrystalDiskInfo, which has these results.
This also confirms transfer mode and says the health is good. I'm a little concerned about some of the numbers like "Raw Read Error Rate" seems a lot higher than the threshold, but it comes up green so not sure how to interpret it.
I've reinstalled drivers, played with cache settings, turned on and off virus checkers. Nothing seems to help.
I'm at a loss now. Any ideas would be helpful. Is this drive on its last legs?
Best Answer
It seems your sequential write times are substantially lower (9.21) than your read times (502.88) Write times for SSD drives often dramatically drop after the drive is half full, and especially nearing filling the capacity of the drive.
Since this review from Tom's Hardware on the PNY 240GB XLR8 shows this drive usually gets around 128KB sequential write times of 375MB/s to 475MB/s, I'd say you have a serious issue here and should try wiping the drive to get performance back. Look on PNY's website for tools to restore the drive and clear TRIM (if needed) and get the drive back to the original performance it had.