I bought a Crucial BX500 240GB 3D NAND SATA SSD in January last year for installing games, since my C: drive was running out of space and these games perform poorly from a hard drive. It initially worked normally and loaded games much faster than my HDD, but recently game downloads to the SSD peak at only about 11 MB/s. My internet connection is around 700 Mbps, and my older six-year-old hard drive can still download at roughly the full connection speed. Game loading times on the SSD don't seem noticeably worse, but the download speed is frustrating. The SSD is about 50% empty and contains only two games. What could cause this slowdown, and what tools or tests can I use to check the drive's health and performance?
1 Answer
Check the SSD’s SMART health data with CrystalDiskInfo, then run a benchmark with CrystalDiskMark. Those can show whether the drive is reporting errors, excessive wear, temperature problems, or unusually low read/write performance. The slowdown may also be related to the BX500 being a DRAM-less, budget SSD. Its write speed can drop sharply once its small cache is exhausted, especially during large game downloads or updates. Keeping more free space available can help, although being 50% full by itself normally should not make it behave like a completely full drive.
It’s only using about half its capacity, so I wasn’t sure whether that counted as nearly full. What values or warnings should I pay attention to in the health report?