256gb flash drive1/10/2024 ![]() ![]() I had checked to see if TRIM was running at all using a utility simply named "TRIM check" by Vladimir Panteleev. Translating that concept over to Windows, I figured I would start by encrypting the drive with BitLocker with the encryption which took a fair bit of time. Poking around further, it seemed commonly suggested that the drive be hardware encrypted then formatted which would apparently perform a secure erase. I then ran across a utility blkdiscard which would skip the file system and send the command to destructively TRIM the entire drive. I suspected it was the USB SATA controller on the drive that was the real culprit. This procedure worked up until the point where it says to run fstrim which would error out for me citing an issue with the filesystem not supporting TRIM (I had tried NTFS and ext4 which both support it). I had found an article about enabling TRIM for hardware that supports it but isn't enabled by default by the OS. I had booted to a live Ubuntu environment where I had attempted to invoke TRIM despite it claiming it wasn't supported. Hard Disk Sentinel reports the drive supports secure erase and a lot of people online seem to imply that this performs a destructive TRIM of the entire drive. After some research of the secure erase implementation in Linux, it seemed like Windows was far less likely to turn my drive into a very small paperweight. ![]() So I ran across some articles that were talking about tricking the drive to do a TRIM via performing a hardware-based secure erase. Tl dr: POTENTIAL FIX! I think I have a quick fix that suggests (but possibly doesn't require) erasing the drive. Does anyone have any experience with these? While it would be bulky in comparison, it seems much more feature-rich and upgradable. I'm considering replacing the drive with a USB NVMe enclosure and an inexpensive NVMe drive. I wanted to just note this for mostly informational and cautionary purposes but I am curious to know if anyone has thoughts on SanDisk's quality of support before and after the acquisition by Western Digital and thoughts on the performance of similar high-speed flash drives. + FullyQualifiedErrorId : StorageWMI 43022,Optimize-VolumeI suspect a lack of TRIM is the only actual issue here and I'll be pursuing this (perhaps with better luck on Linux) however that doesn't quell my frustration with this drive and SanDisk in general. + CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (StorageWMI:ROOT/Microsoft/.age/MSFT_Volume), CimException + Optimize-Volume -DriveLetter D -ReTrim -Verbose Optimize-Volume : The volume optimization operation requested is not supported by the hardware backing the volume.Īctivity ID: PS C:\Windows\system32> Optimize-Volume -DriveLetter D -ReTrim -Verbose Attempting to manually TRIM doesn't seem to help either. Some quick Googling doesn't turn up much in regard to getting TRIM working over USB with few relevant results and one mention of a "USB attached SCSI" protocol that I assume isn't supported by the controller they're using. After running across a forum post on SanDisk's forums of a "SanDisk Guru" ranting about how it's the user's fault for formatting the drive from how it was originally formatted in the factory, I've run some quick benchmarks with the drive formatted under various file system configurations (attached below).ĬrystalDiskInfo says the drive is TRIM capable and HD Sentinel says it is enabled, but running TRIM check seems to show that TRIM is not working. SanDisk's support page still doesn't even acknowledge that the Extreme Pro USB drives even exist. I've attempted to look into it again recently. Now three years old, the drive seems to still be excessively finicky. I received a response back saying that per my screenshots, I was getting the "optimum speed" from the drive which was good enough for them to close my ticket. Even if this was expected behavior for the drive. I asked support if I should expect to see TRIM working (it wasn't clear if it was), if there were any firmware updates I could perform, if there was a special way to format it, or anything I was doing incorrectly that would cause these slow speeds. At times, I was even seeing poor speeds from the drive with it completely empty. I found that completely formatting the drive would improve both up to 340 MB/s and 310 MB/s respectively but filling up the drive even 20% would cause speeds to quickly drop way back down. I initially saw my drive easily hit the advertised speeds of 400+ MB/s reads and 300+ MB/s writes pretty continually.Īfter 10 months of light use, I opened a ticket with SanDisk support in September 2018 reporting diminished read speeds of 273 MB/s and heavily diminished write speeds at 53MB/s. I've been seeing poor performance on my SanDisk Extreme Pro 256GB USB drive since its initial purchase in November 2017. ![]()
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