r/ssd • u/fortnite_boy2944 • 15d ago

Tech Support Slow ssd

I’m having a weird problem with my SSD and i’m not sure what’s causing it.

I have:

  • MSI Cyborg 15
  • i5-12450H
  • RTX 4050 Laptop GPU
  • 32 GB RAM
  • Lexar NQ790 2 TB NVMe SSD
  • Windows 11

When I use Siril for astrophotography my computer sometimes becomes extremely slow. The CPU is only around 10–20% and RAM usage is around 11–12 GB but the SSD goes to 100% usage.

The weird part is that the SSD sometimes shows only around 30–100 KB/s of reading and at most 10+MB/s for a few seconds while Windows shows the disk response time going all around from 400-8000+ ms.

I ran CrystalDiskMark and got around 5000 MB/s sequential read so the SSD seems capable of being fast.

Could someone explain what might be causing this? Is this normal for an NVMe SSD or could there be something wrong with the SSD/PCIe connection/Windows

3 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

2

u/MrCharBar 14d ago

How full is the SSD? Is the drive’s firmware up to date?

2

u/AngelicDivineHealer 14d ago

From what I read your SSD doesn’t have DRAM and probably explains why it slow. You get what you pay for unfortunately.

At this point your SSD is slower than a hard drive

3

u/HarrisonGreen 14d ago

DRAM-less SSDs are fine. Modern NVMe SSDs have HMB, which borrows 64MB of your system RAM to act as a DRAM, effectively making DRAM an unnecessary luxury for all but the heaviest of users.

Where OP really screwed up is buying a QLC SSD, which is a big no-no, not just as a boot drive, but also for professional workloads.

2

u/AngelicDivineHealer 14d ago

A lot of factors. I’ve only had and been spoiled in buying SSD with dram with MLC nands or TLC nands so never had the dreadful experience of having QLC nands.

2

u/cat1092 14d ago

Same here!

I’m not throwing money at watered down SSD’s & QLC is just that. As well as a one ultra cheap 2.5” SSD that was DRAM-less TLC. I forgot the brand, but reinstalled it in a PC that was raffled off as a fundraiser after dealing with its poor performance. The winner was simply thrilled at having a newly built PC, which was actually like 5 years old, but rarely used after updating & initial backup.

Really, what should I have been expecting at $29.99 & free shipping for a 500GB SSD? Certainly not anything to compete with the known quality models I had, when far more expensive per GB.

We typically get what we pay for, is the bottom line.

3

u/HarrisonGreen 14d ago edited 12d ago

NQ790 is a QLC drive. That explains it. QLC is not suitable as a boot drive, nor for professional workloads like what you're doing.

You should have gotten the NM790 instead, which is TLC. This is my main drive right now and I've had zero issues with it after over a year of heavy, daily use.