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by MisterTea 1493 days ago
I wonder if this is what permanently effected a 256GB Adata SATA SSD I had in my Linux box. I was running updates and noticed it was very slow once it started unpacking everything. At first I let it go and went about my business surfing the web which wasn't hitting the disk. Finished updating, decided to reboot as new kernel was pulled and the issue was now obvious as it was dragging its feet booting. Worried, I ran a backup of my home dir upon login and every file transfer topped out at 4 or 5 MB/sec. SMART was enabled but reported nothing.

I wound up dumping the ssd to ensure I had a full image and that entire operation topped out at 5 MB/s. And I had the SSD out of the case in a cradle when ripping so it wasn't getting cooked in the case. I did not notice it feeling abnormally warm or hot. I later tried to mess with the disk in a cradle but as soon as I powered it on it topped out at 4-5 MB/sec so either there is some sort of defect causing an immediate thermal issue or something in the controller went awry.
1 comments
wtallis 1493 days ago
5MB/s even for sequential transfers sounds too severe for thermal throttling, unless a temperature sensor failed in just the right way to convince the drive to activate its last-ditch throttling mechanism before simply shutting down.

More likely, you were experiencing repeated ECC failures and read retries on every access. Since you ruled out a bad cable by also running it in a dock, I'm guessing you had a premature failure of a large chunk of flash, possibly an entire die (though a lot of drives especially at lower capacities don't have enough over-provisioning to do erasure coding to protect against a full die failure).

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kasabali 1491 days ago
It sounds like a regular day.

Probably combination of:

- Constructed with fewest number of nand chips possible, and using bottom of the barrel shit like 64L Intel QLC

- Easily overheating DRAMless controller (eg. SM225*XT hitting 70+C at the slightest load)

- Tucked in a heat trap plastic case

- pSLC cache is always almost-full (because for some reason entry level controllers always choose to do that), which is quickly filled after a not-so-long run of Windows update

Combine all these in a single product (like ADATA often does in its entry level SATA), and 5 MB/s sounds actually fast :)

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