Intel 600p 256g inconsistent very slow writes

[AGunn1]

I purchased a 256g 600p for my MSI z170 gaming m7 motherboard in December 2016. I have had the drive up and running on a windows 10 install along with several other drives, a crucial mx300 m.2, a crucial m4 2.5" and a pair of WD black spinners in raid1 with a 64G portion of the M4 SSD acting as a caching front end of the raid1. The issue I am having which I noticed when some windows updates were taking WAY too long, the 600p which is my OS drive seems to be having very slow writes. I verified this with CrystalDiskMark and AS SSD Benchmark. The reads are always "normal" sequential in the 1500MB/s area with the rest falling in line with other samples I saw on the web. The writes sometimes slow to a crawl and seem to make the system hang at times. Sometimes the write tests start off at 550MB/s and then slow to a crawl at under 10MB/s by the end of the test. But sometimes they just start slow too. I had one instance where it almost looked normal through the whole test - but 9 times out of 10 it will start fast and slow to a crawl quickly with reads being pretty normal. It's very weird.

I have done the following to try and fix this:

Moved my swap partition to the other m.2 ssd in the system (which is acting 100% normal, but it is SATA based m,2)

Updated RST to the latest version 15.5.something.1051

Updated all z170 chipset drivers to the latest

Updated my motherboard bios to version 1.H (which required all bios settings to be set default and then re-configured to recover the system. that was, uh, fun)

I have not updated the firmware to 109c yet. I usually update a drive firmware with the OS on it as a last measure.

I installed the Intel SSD Tool Kit 3.4.5 but I can't run any of the tests or optimizations because the "ok" button is not press-able (grey) and there's a message in red on all of the test tabs: "cannot run as a member of a raid array". I have my controller set in RAID mode because of my raid1 storage but the 600p is not in any kind of raid configuration. So I don't know how to fix that.

I did find this while searching for a solution:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/memory-and-storage/000006282.html Improve Write Speed Performance to Avoid System Freezing

I know superfetch is off and I am pretty sure I disabled indexing but I will need to check. The other things I was going to try was this:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/memory-and-storage/000006381.html Troubleshooting Wizard for Intel® Solid State Drives

Beyond that I am running out of ideas. Any and all help here would be appreciated.

[idata · Accepted solution]

Hello adambgunn,

Please keep in mind that we don't recommend running benchmarking tests on an SSD while it's being actively used as a boot device. In doing so, OS processes, background tasks, and even the test itself will be sharing your drive's bandwidth, resulting in inaccurate results.For proper benchmarking we recommend having the drive connected as a secondary storage unit. The fuller the drive, the slower the test results. It's important to note that Windows* updates are not always the most efficient, and depending on the update size, some delay is expected.While we do usually recommend keeping your firmware updated, the latest firmware release for the Intel® SSD 600p Series (firmware version 109c) has no fixes relating to drive performance.- https://www.howtogeek.com/256859/dont-waste-time-optimizing-your-ssd-windows-knows-what-its-doing/ Don't Waste Time Optimizing Your SSD, Windows Knows What Its Doing.NOTE: Any links provided for third party tools or sites are offered for your convenience and should not be viewed as an endorsement by Intel® of the content, products, or services offered there.Best regards,Carlos A.

[AGunn1]

Carlos, all very good points. Maybe windows update was hammering the drive staging a new update or some process was writing to it also. The fact that it seemed to behaving normally /sometimes/ had me so curious though and I think my OCD got the best of me so I went on a bit of a witch hunt. That said, I have another machine, also Z170 with a SATA m.2 ssd which was managing the same windows updates in half the time this machine was so that's what got me going also. Thanks for that link too. I will disable my defrag schedule altogether now on both machines. All it does is run trim but it's unnecessary wear on the drive I guess.

One final question though, why does the Intel SSD toolbox think my 600p is in a raid config and block me from running the optimization? because my controller is set to raid mode and not ahci?

[idata]

Hello adambgunn,

You don't need to disable Trim altogether. There's just no need to manually trim your SSDs unless you regularly put them through an excessively heavy workload (think consumer drive in a data center environment).More than likely, yes, this could be why toolbox is unable to configure trim for your drive. But I suspect this is just an issue on toolbox, and your OS is still able to optimize the drive. We'll put in some lab time today and test a 600p using RAID instead of AHCI to see if we experience the same thing. Best regards,Carlos A.

[idata]

Hello adambgunn,

If your storage controller is set to RAID, the Intel® SSD Toolbox won't be able to optimize nor schedule trim for your 600p.

In order to perform this actions you will need to do so directly through your operating system tools:

1. Press the Windows* key + R.
2. Type in "dfrgui.exe" and press OK.
3. Select your Intel® SSD 600p Series and choose to Optimize or let Windows* perform this actions automatically. By default, this will be scheduled to happen on a weekly basis.

Best regards,

Carlos A.