Don’t Fall for the Deals: Negative News Surrounding NVMe SSDs Raises Red Flags
A number of consumer NVMe SSDs, most notably from Samsung, Seagate, SK Hynix, and Kingston will see up to a 64% performance drop.
Is Your NVMe SSD Affected?
If you are in the market for an SSD, you may have already enjoyed the recent wave of enticing prices and deals. However, there has been a lot of negative news surrounding Samsung’s premium tier SSD products, the 980 Pro and the newer 990 Pro, which have been under fire lately due to some serious issues.
Now, there is even more bad news, as a recent test conducted by PCPartPicker has revealed an alarming 64% slowdown in sequential read performance for the Samsung 970 Evo Plus. Although some of the other tested Samsung drives, such as the 990 Pro and the 980 Pro, weren’t as terrible, they still exhibited significant drops of up to 48% and 38% respectively. Other vendors’ products were also showing similar performance degradation issues, except for the WD SN850X, which was the only one that showed just a 7% fall. In total, eight 1TB drives were tested.
- Samsung 970 Evo Plus (64% Drop)
- Seagate Firecuda 530 (53% Drop)
- Samsung 990 Pro (48% Drop)
- SK Hynix Platinum P41 (48% Drop)
- Kingston KC3000 (43% Drop)
- Samsung 980 Pro (38% Drop)
- Crucial P5 Plus (25% Drop)
- Western Digital Black SN850X (7% Drop)
PCPartPicker used a specific methodology to carry out the evaluation. The tests were run on Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS, and a ~200GB file was used for assessment. The test methodology involved initializing the SSD, creating a single EXT4 partition spanning the entire drive, creating and sequentially writing a single file that is 20% of the drive’s capacity, and then running 20 tests of sequential writing of 256 MB chunks to the file. The percentage drop from the highest throughput run to the lowest was then computed.
According to the test results, each SSD that exhibited sequential write degradation appeared to lose some ability to use the high-performance region. Although the reason for this behavior is unknown, it is clear that rest or system restarts did not undo the degradations, even after 2 hours.
It is important to note that TRIM was not enabled in the tests, which has led some Reddit users to question the credibility of the results. TRIM is a command that tells the SSD that specific areas in the SSD contain data that is no longer in use and can be wiped. The use of TRIM could have produced more accurate results that could have been vastly different from the ones produced in the test. Further testing may be necessary to verify these findings.
Pokdepinion: If you are considering purchasing an SSD, it is essential to research the products thoroughly and be aware of the potential performance degradation issues. Although Samsung has been in the spotlight lately, it is clear that other vendors’ products are showing similar symptoms. Therefore, it is critical to stay informed and make informed decisions when buying.
