I bought a Crucial BX500 240GB 3D NAND SATA SSD last January for games that take up a lot of storage space. When it was new, downloads ran at normal speeds and games loaded noticeably faster than they did from my hard drive. Recently, though, downloads to the SSD peak at only around 11 MB/s, even though my internet connection is about 700 Mbps. My older six-year-old hard drive still downloads at speeds much closer to my connection's limit. Game loading times on the SSD don't seem noticeably worse, but the slow download performance is concerning. The SSD is about 50% empty and only has two games installed. Is the drive failing, and what tools or tests can I use to check its health?
1 Answer
Check the SSD’s SMART data with CrystalDiskInfo, which can show its reported health, temperature, errors, and remaining lifetime. You can also run CrystalDiskMark to compare its read and write performance with what the drive should normally achieve. The BX500 is a budget, DRAM-less SSD, so sustained writes can slow down significantly once its temporary cache is exhausted. That can affect game downloads, especially when the launcher is downloading and unpacking files at the same time. Being 50% full usually isn’t considered nearly full, so that alone probably doesn’t explain the entire slowdown, but the drive’s health report and a benchmark should help narrow it down.
So being only half full probably isn’t the same as the drive being too full? What numbers or warnings should I pay attention to in the health report?