So, I got a budget Mini-ITX PC for some living room fun in the spring, and now I'm kind of arriving at the conclusion that yes, a budget SSD can be not only non-ideal but actually really bad. I got a 500 GB Kingston NV2 since it was cheap for what it offerred, and initially I was happy enough with it. However, over the months, I've been experience some random slowdowns that last for up to dozens of seconds at once, then perhaps the situation eases for a few seconds, and then it gets really bad again, and so forth. When it's bad, you can't basically do absolutely anything on the PC. For example, simply opening the Start menu can take dozens of seconds, and sometimes even the cursor stops moving. At some point the situation might get remedied entirely, and usually if I can start up a game, there are no issues whatsoever.
Anyway, recently I finally investigated the situation a bit, and it turns out that disk utilization is at exactly 100 % whenever the slowdowns occur, and then we're talking about sub-1 MB/s speeds. No wonder it's slow... When it's not terrible, it's at least several hundreds of megabytes per second, and it's supposedly capable of more, but I haven't benchmarked it properly. Not sure if a faulty disk or just bad, but some online discussions indicate that it gets really poor performance very quickly when its gets filled up, and not necessarily even very much. Gonna have to investigate further, but I kind of suspect things will improve if I uninstall some games... That, and there's some other things I might be able to try still (such as a firmware upgrade). Not at all happy though! I'm probably going to assume that cheap SSDs can be absolutely crippling, even worse than HDDs, if things get really bad (not that I was going to cheap out too much on my new desktop probably later this year).
Last edited by Zkuq - on 11 August 2023
