I recently purchased three used 860 Pro 4TB SSDs, and while they have 80-90% SMART health with no bad sectors, I'm facing a serious issue with their write speeds. Read performance is just fine, but writes are stuck at around 230-250MB sequential and only 10-11k IOPS, which is unusually low.
I've ensured the firmware is current, all cables and ports are functioning well, and I've disabled all power-saving settings in both Windows and the BIOS, with AHCI enabled. I'm utilizing the standard Microsoft controller. I've attempted secure erasing and formatting them correctly using GPT, but still no improvement.
I noticed that the write cache can't be enabled, possibly due to a lack of SLC caching, although it does have LPDDR4 DRAM cache. I've been researching and trying numerous suggested solutions online over the last few nights, but most advice, particularly from similar posts, is unhelpful, often dismissing the issue as 'normal' despite benchmarks that prove otherwise.
In my comparison with other SSDs, including TLC drives that do have DRAM caching, they exhibit significantly higher write speeds under the same setup—and NVMe drives don't seem to have this problem at all. Currently, I'm on an X870E Carbon WiFi motherboard with a 9800X3D processor and 96GB of DDR5 6200 RAM, running Windows 11 Pro.
I'm beginning to suspect that all three drives might be defective, but I would prefer not to go through the hassle of returning them. Any advice on how to troubleshoot this issue further would be greatly appreciated!
3 Answers
It's possible that the drives are just aging. You've mentioned they’re about seven years old; wear on the NAND can definitely impact performance, especially on write speeds. It’s also worth investigating if the drives might have been used heavily before you got them. But I hear you—it’s frustrating that only the write speeds seem affected. Have you thought about testing them on different cables or ports, just to be thorough?
You might want to check if the drives are in the correct mode in your BIOS. Sometimes SATA modes like IDE can throttle performance. Also, ensure that the drivers for the SSDs are up to date; outdated drivers can definitely affect speed. If write caching isn't enabled, that could be a major factor here. Have you checked your disk management settings in Windows to see if anything looks off? Maybe even try another machine just to rule out a hardware issue with your current system.
I see you're already doing a lot of troubleshooting, which is great! The fact that you’re unable to enable the write cache suggests there could be a firmware or optimization issue, perhaps a feature just isn’t functioning correctly. You might want to reach out to Samsung's support and see if they can provide any specific guidance or updates for these older models.
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