SSD - SSD - Watch out! You may be being tricked, check this out before it's too late!

A damaged SSD disk can look a lot like a very useful and vivid SSD, but the reality is that many of them are sold around as if they were ordinary SSDs, but they deceive many users, because their durability is very low, and for presenting good transfer rates when little used.

Solid state disks, based on the SATA connection, are based on a scheme of several chips soldered on one board, controlled by an embedded RAID type chip, which emulates a single disk for the operating system, but the reality is that it is well different from this.

An SSD disk has several "disks" and even above the visible layer, each chip also has several stacks of NAND Flash cells, which is where the data is stored.

As time passes, the inputs start to be oxidized, and a deterioration as the use happens in the cells that store the data, which is nothing more than an electron cell.

However, there are units that are sold on the market in general, that are already sold damaged, but no one realizes that it is really damaged or not.

This is because in general, most users install the operating system and use it for some other activities, but never actually test whether the unit is delivering the actual speed determined by the manufacturer.

A simple test of copying and pasting files makes it clear to detect whether the unit has any type of defect or not.

The damaged SSD, or damaged flash drive, usually starts recording information at a much higher speed in general, and as the copy takes place, the recording speed drops dramatically, to a measly 5 MB / s.

The effect occurs because many cells where the data are stored, need to go through a normal process called recovery, which is when the cell has few electrons and needs to be recharged to keep the information intact over time.

This is also the case with SSD drives that have been turned off for a long time or stopped inside unused notebooks, because the solid state drive was made to work constantly at high speed, and to stand still, is not of its engineering.

However, the ability of solid state drives to hold information, and cells do not need a "refresh" as the computer's RAM memory constantly needs, each manufacturer has techniques that can keep the data for longer than others, and despite some do not inform how much this time is, we see on the internet many people with this difficulty, seeing that the disc is not working at the speed they expected.

It should be noted that these discs have been damaged, and there is an intensive use of the disc even if it is not in use, as the SSD controller is actively trying to recover the cells, to keep the information recorded, but no matter how much it strain, the cells continue to oxidize and lose the ability to retain data, and an infestation of internal bad-blocks begins to occur in the unit, but these are never delivered to the operating system.

The disk tested was from the manufacturer PNY, it only wins from hard disk in sequential reading, but loses a lot of some hard drives in all other aspects, such as recording, reading and recording with 4K.

There are also rumors that manufacturers put different types of NAND chips inside, sending only those with better chips to benchmark sites, as they receive units for free to display the results to users. See the source here.

It is common to see good benchmarks of solid state drives all over the internet on hardware sites, but all these big sites, do not pay for the drives, are provided free by the manufacturers in exchange for disclosure, but that can be manipulation in exchange for a increased sales.

According to the rumors, these 2 discs below, one of them has synchronous NAND modules, of better quality, while the second, manufactured after the beginning of the first wave, uses low quality asynchronous NAND chips.

Disk drive with serial starting with: 505A

Disk drive with serial starting with: 506A, found on websites as a product with operating speed well below the first.

Even though the 505A version is the fastest, a test of a user on the internet, it shows that it is still much slower than the benchmarks of some famous sites out there:

But although the values are well below expectations, it does not come close to the PNY that we found defective, being sold as a common disk, and possibly, there are several users with the same problem, taking a cat in a poke.

There are some items to consider, first of all, let's go to the main details:

1. Connection to the disk - Sata III

Check if the SATA cable of the solid state drive is damaged, or with oxidized ends, when in doubt, replace the cables and make sure to connect it to a SATA III port so that there are no speed problems.

2. Check the AHCI support in the BIOS

Enter the computer's SETUP, and verify that the disk is configured to use the IDE or AHCI communication standard. Prefer the AHCI mode which is much faster than the previous standard.

AHCI mode ensures that all SATA speed potential is used, avoiding communication bottlenecks due to the protocol used.

3. Sector size / partition alignment

In Windows XP, the hard drive is considered its smallest allocation unit at 512 bytes in size, which is the same size as the MBR. With this, the formatted disk physically has the 512 bytes of the MBR and soon after, the beginning of the partition containing the NTFS. If it has the standard of 4 Kb per sector, the first 512 physical bytes move the partition forward, staying out of place.

As much as you have seen these steps, and are still suffering from the very low speed of the SSD, bordering on the speed of a simple pen drive, very well, it is quite possible that your SSD is damaged, or with really bad quality NAND chips , and this is what manufacturers are hiding from you, today, now, at this moment.

This disc above, was tested by our team, we acquired an equal product, to perform some performance tests. We bought a disc already used, with a "friendly" price in Mercado Livre from someone wanting to dispose of the product.

His benchmarks are shown here:

His performance is really bad, bordering on collapse, but the same model, on review and benchmark sites, shows a much higher performance:

According to this site, the benchmark was sensational:

The same disk achieved writing speeds 38x higher than the disk we performed in our tests, not bad, is not it?

In this another site, a user reports that his SSD of the same model has a write rate of around 2 MB / s, while the sequential reading is 400 MB / s, according to this test:

What we suggest in these cases, is that you do the test as soon as possible, and if it is still under warranty, use it to recover your investment as soon as possible, do not keep a defective unit thinking it is a problem from beyond, or your SATA bus, or your processor, yes, the problem is with NAND chips, and you don’t need to be a super expert to know that such low speeds smell like deceit with users.

Do not trust benchmark sites that are funded by companies and manufacturers themselves in exchange for advertisements. The Tutorial TI website has no link with any company and / or hardware manufacturer, and does not earn a penny with indications or percentage of sale of products from manufacturer X or Y, we are totally independent, with a commitment only to our readers. site.

Comment here if you also have a slow SSD, if possible with the make and model, and the speed rates obtained.

I hope I have helped anyone who has these same problems.