How do you know if a SSD is bad?

[Destroy]

Recently I've noticed my Crucial 2T SSD not reacting properly.

A quick AS-SSD test shows read speeds normal 300mb/s but the write speeds are an abysmal 3 mb/s.

The Crucial Storage Executive self test gives a very non-descriptive "Device Self Test Completed" in green denoting, I assume, no issue found.

Tech support says I need enable Garbage Collection by letting the computer sit in the bios for 8 hours.

Anyone ever seen or heard of a SSD behaving like mine currently does?

[Munkus]

Yeah, time to back that puppy up and replace it ASAP.

[Greasy]

In my experience they give no warning. They just die. They won't even show up in the bios when they do.

I would backup anything you need ASAP though.

[Jay20016]

Had my laptops Intel Nvme drive go bad earlier this year (about a year old.... ) while on vacation. Windows did spinning circle on boot, if it would try at all. Thought it might have been a bad update so tried to use a media creation tool for a full reinstall and could only find parts of the drive. There were a few partitions that if you tried to access it would lock up. Trying to use check disk and other dos commands would halt at various points. It also reported varying sizes of the main disk.

[Destroy]

[Solved] Turns out it was simply a cable connection problem.

I tried the SSD on a different controller card and my write speeds were good (for that card anyway).

Connected back to my normal motherboard SATA connection and the drive was blazing fast again.

Lesson learned; try the simple stuff first.

[koralis]

Originally Posted by Destroy

Recently I've noticed my Crucial 2T SSD not reacting properly.

A quick AS-SSD test shows read speeds normal 300mb/s but the write speeds are an abysmal 3 mb/s.

The Crucial Storage Executive self test gives a very non-descriptive "Device Self Test Completed" in green denoting, I assume, no issue found.

Tech support says I need enable Garbage Collection by letting the computer sit in the bios for 8 hours.

Anyone ever seen or heard of a SSD behaving like mine currently does?

Probably your drive needs to issue a TRIM command to do the garbage collection on the written blocks. What you're probably seeing is that you're out of available "clean" spares, so before it can write the new block it first needs to zero out the old one... that takes time (which is why SSDs don't work that way all the time.)

SO I think the tech is probably accurate. The windows driver may not issue TRIM, so you eventually ran out of clean blocks. The bios may have a mechanism to do it automatically?

[Babel-17]

I have that drive, I bought it during an Amazon flash sale a while back. Anyway, afaik all SSD that are capable of trim can be optimized using Windows built-in "defragger" (It's under Administrative Tools). Just make sure it sees your drive as a SSD. As it runs it shows the percentage that has been trimmed. I have the Raxco PerfectDisk utility, and it claims to be able to do further SSD drive optimizations that are safe. It doesn't try to defrag them like it would a spinner. https://download.raxco.com/perfectdisk-ssd-optimization

Free 30 day fully functional trial version here: https://www.raxco.com/products/perfectdisk-pro