Strangely low data transfer speeds to new Samsung EVO 840 SSD?

[Otherhand]

I'm a newcomer to SSDs, having just got my first one earlier this year. I got a quarter-gig Samsung Evo 840 to use as my OS drive, and now I've added a half-gig one from the same range. I did this because I've got an immense music software package arriving soon which requires a 250GB install (yes, really) due to its immense libraries, so it seemed like a good move to get this half-gig drive to host all of my other virtual instruments' virtual libraries.

So, I just started moving these libraries to the SSD from their current home: a 1TB Seagate SSHD drive. These are the speeds I'm seeing:



I opened Samsung Magician for this screenshot so you could see that AHCI is on, the SATA reports that it's healthy, etc. Does this graph look as bad to you as it does to me? That's an early peak of roughly 150MB/s but most of the time it's in the 20/40MB/s area, even dipping to 2MB/s in the troughs.

The Samsung Magician's Performance Test shows an SSD in fine health: 534MB/s seq. write, 554MB/s seq. read, random read 93936 and write 85965 (IOPs). So am I being unreasonable expecting better transfer speeds from a hybrid drive to an SSD, or is something odd going on here?

Mobo:
ASUS Z87-M PLUS with i5 4440
RAM:
16GB 1600MHz DDR3
SSDs:
240GB Samsung EVO 840, running Windows 8.1 64bit
500GB Samsung Evo 840
HDDs:
1TB Seagate SSHD
3TB WD Caviar Green HDD

[Morthawt]

You may have a bad drive. My friend has a couple of 500GB versions and they are blazing fast.

Edit: On the other hand when transfering lots of small files speeds tend to go down (at least on spinny drives). Try and copy a big big file and see what the speed is.

[Otherhand]

Thanks for the post, Morthawt.

This is a 3.8GB zip archive:



Is that looking more like what you'd expect from a hybrid to an SSD?

[aidanjt]

Yeah, it just looks like seek delay from the Hybrid, the actuator arm has to fly about to get around to all the relevant clusters spanning the filesystem when opening lots of small files. If it were an 840 EVO to 840 EVO we'd be seeing much better performance.

[Jasp]

If memory serves are those hybrid drivers not 5400rpm? in which case the speed your seeing looks about right tbh.

[Bonebreaker777]

If memory serves are those hybrid drivers not 5400rpm? in which case the speed your seeing looks about right tbh.

Seagate Desktop SSHD are spinning @ 7200RPM.
Seagate Mobile SSHD are @ 5400RPM.

[DanceswithUnix]

Unplug from the network so you are not at risk, then try moving something with the virus scanner turned off.

When quad core CPUs first came out I remember someone making a joke along the lines of "Excellent, that's 3 cores to run Norton leaving one for my programs".

[unifex]

I have no idea how to test read/write speeds - Are there any tools that it would be advisable to run on a new SSD to check transfer speeds and whatnot? SSD newb here.

[Bonebreaker777]

AS-SSD. FC Test. h2benchw. HD Tune. PC Mark 05. Hell even SiSoft Sandra

[Agent]

MAke a RAM drive and copy to / from that. Better than synthetic benchmarks IMO for checking real world stats