How fast SSDs slow to a crawl: thermal throttling (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: How fast SSDs slow to a crawl: thermal throttling (2021)

#61

Post by wtallis » Wed, May 18, 2022, 8:05 PM UTC

MisterTea wrote: post #38

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…

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).

Re: How fast SSDs slow to a crawl: thermal throttling (2021)

#62

Post by touisteur » Thu, May 19, 2022, 7:51 AM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #39

zozbot234 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are reasons to assume that data retention might drop exponentially as temperature increases. So if you care about the data, you'll want to avoid overheating your storage media.

Power-off storage temperature is a problem for MLC NAND, but when powered on the NAND cells need to reach a high temperature to operate properly. If you are cooling the flash chips with a heatsink (rather than cooling the controller) you will be forcing the device to dump power into the cells to heat them to a temperature where they work properly. 3D NAND hits its best program time and raw bit error rate at about 70C…

That might be one of the most counterintuitive durability fact I've heard in a long time. Thanks a lot for sharing.

Re: How fast SSDs slow to a crawl: thermal throttling (2021)

#63

Post by kasabali » Fri, May 20, 2022, 11:30 AM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #61

MisterTea wrote: post #38

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…

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…

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 :)

Re: How fast SSDs slow to a crawl: thermal throttling (2021)

#64

Post by kasabali » Fri, May 20, 2022, 11:58 AM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #28

Nullabillity wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The marketing name still seems to be the same according to the article, so it would still fail any reasonable consumer confusion test.

Have you checked the performance difference or are you just venting based on click-bait articles? According to benchmarks, the difference in performance is negligible, in fact the new SKU is sometimes better than the old one in most benchmarks, so there's really nothing to worry about. You're grasping at straws here.

Doesn't sound negligible to me:

> In longer tests, both drives decrease sharply in performance as cache fills, which is expected. But while the older drive retains nearly two-thirds of its original performance, the newer version craters to less than a third. We can see this effect not only in artificial benchmarks, but also in large file copies [1]

While changing SKU is one step better than other manufacturers, it's still a shaddy behavior keeping the old name.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/samsung-seemingly-ca...