Defiance Laptop EXTREMELY SLOW - HDD / Optane issue ?

I just bought a nice Defiance laptop (Clevo P950HR).

I needed super fast drive access (I do mostly video editing) so I got these 2 options, which are advertised to be the fastest:

- SSHD 2 To SEAGATE FIRECUDA 2,5 pouces, 128 Mo de CACHE (5400 t/min) (since it was advertised: 5 TIMES FASTER THAN HDD)
- INTEL® OPTANE 32 Go

The computer has been incredibly slow since I received it: 5 to 10 minutes boot time, freezes, inability to playback 720p video smoothly etc..
I ran several tests and benchmarks over the past weeks, and the problem seems to be the drive access, but it appears to be a bit random, sometimes the computer is working fine, but struggles at least once every hour.

The best way to reproduce the problems / system slow down is to just copy a file locally (3Go for high disk performance) :
I sometime get great results, 1 copy out of 5, almost 1GB/s, the copy takes 3 seconds to complete. Great !





Most of the time it starts fine, and after a few seconds, the transfer rate drops to 100-300Kb/s.
Computer stops responding for about 1-2 minutes, and then copy resumes and fluctuates between 5-10Mo/s.
It will then take 5-10 minutes to copy the file.






In the meantime, everything freezes, computer barely responds, and the computer is unusable.
Ctrl-Alt-Sup takes between 1 and 2 minutes to come up.


While I don't copy files all the time, this drive problem seems to be happening in the background, all the time, and makes freezes and hick ups constantly (except when disk usage is low: ie Gaming after everything preloaded).


Has anyone encountered similar problems ?
Would you think it's rather a Optane problem, a SSHD FIRECUDA issue ?

I contacted technical support but I don't think they understood the issue.
I'll try again Monday, but any input will be appreciated

Thanks

Is that your full drive configuration? Can you post your full specs?

Which drive is your OS installed on (which is the C drive)?

Did you order with or without windows?

SpyderTracks said:

Is that your full drive configuration? Can you post your full specs?

Which drive is your OS installed on (which is the C drive)?

Did you order with or without windows?

Click to expand...

Thanks for asking !


I have only one Drive:
SSHD 2 To SEAGATE FIRECUDA 2,5 pouces, 128 Mo de CACHE (5400 t/min) WITH OPTANE.
I have 2 partitions on this drive, but same problems regardless: C to C, C to D or D to D, always the same issues.

Yes, it came all pre-installed with win10.


Here are the full specs:
Defiance Series : Écran large LED mat 120 Hz 15,6 pouces Full HD (1920 x 1080)
Processeur (Unité centra... Processeur Quad Core Intel® Core® i7 7700HQ (2,8 GHz, 3,8 GHz Turbo)
Mémoire (RAM) 16 Go HyperX IMPACT 2400 MHz SODIMM DDR4 (1 x 16 Go)
Carte graphique NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1070 Max-Q - 8 Go de RAM vidéo GDDR5 - DirectX® 12.1,

G-SYNC

1er disque dur SSHD 2 To SEAGATE FIRECUDA 2,5 pouces, 128 Mo de CACHE (5400 t/min)
Mémoire Intel Optane MÉMOIRE INTEL® OPTANE 32 Go
Lecteur de carte mémoire Lecteur de carte intégré 6-en-1 (SD /Mini SD/ SDHC / SDXC / MMC / RSMMC)
Adaptateur C.A. 1 ADAPTATEUR C.A. 180 W
Câble d'alimentation 2 câbles d'alimentation Cloverleaf Europe, 1 m
Pâte thermique PÂTE THERMIQUE STANDARD POUR UN REFROIDISSEMENT EFFICACE
Carte son Intel 2 Channel High Def. Audio + MIC/casque + SoundBlaster X-Fi MB3
Bluetooth et sans fil GIGABIT LAN ET WI-FI INTEL® AC-8265 M.2 (867 Mbps, 802.11AC) + BT 4.0
Options USB 3 x USB 3.1 Type A, 2 x USB 3.1 Type C EN STANDARD
Langue du clavier CLAVIER FRANÇAIS RÉTROÉCLAIRÉ RGB
Système d’exploitation Genuine Windows 10 Professional 64 bits - DVD et licence mono-utilisateur inclus
Langue du système d’ex... France/République Française - Français
Support de récupération... Windows 10 (64 bits) DVD avec manchette papier
Logiciel Office PAS DE LOGICIEL OFFICE
Antivirus PAS D'ANTIVIRUS
Navigateur Google ChromeTM
Sacoche Housse néoprène noire/rouge 15,6 pouces Belkin pour notebook
Souris notebook SOURIS TOUCHPAD 2 BOUTONS INTÉGRÉE
Webcam WEBCAM INTÉGRÉE 2 MÉGAPIXELS
Garantie Garantie Gold de 3 ans (2 ans de garantie collection et retour atelier, 2 ans de

garantie pièces, 3 ans de garantie main d'œuvre)

And what are you using the optane drive for?

The bottom line really is that the hard drive you have is a painfully slow 5400rpm drive. Although it's fronted by a big drive cache and then fronted again by an Optane module this too, as far as I understand it, acts like a higher level cache for the drive. What you have then is a slow drive with a whole bunch of cached memory in front of it.

A drive cache can be a very good thing, for the right I/O patterns of course. All drive cache works best when your data usage patterns are predictable, the cache controller can pre-load the data it expects you to want next into cache so that your next I/O is satisfied by cache and is thus much faster. AFAIK there is no communication between the Firecuda's cache and the Optane module so they will each be using their own independent algorithms to decide what to cache. In many cases they'll probably both be caching the same data.

A drive cache is worthless if your I/O data pattern is not predictable, and for many workloads it's not. Windows updates is a case in point, there are at least two threads on here of people complaining about terrible Firecuda performance when installing Windows updates, that's because the cache is useless in that case because of the randomness of the I/O data patterns. In fact, a cache miss (not finding the data in the cache) takes longer than a non-cache I/O would have taken because you had to spend a (small amount) of time searching the cache.

I suspect the reason you see falling performance with file copy is because the cache algorithms realise what you're doing and stop caching the data, forcing a read/write to the (slow) spinning disk. This is actually sensible, why waste valuable cache memory for a simple file copy operation?

The weak link in your system is that 5400rpm drive and although the Firecuda's cache and the Optane memory will help overcome that in many instances, there are always going to be a lot of I/Os that the cache can't satisfy, and these will be slow.

I have an old 5400rpm 2.5" drive installed into this PC as it happens (12.5mm iirc, rescued from a USB 2.0 external drive where the USB bottlenecked the drive a bit).

I tested copying files - a 3gb MP4 file of saved gameplay, possibly similar to yours, and the copying was fair erratic but speeds generally didn't drop below ~10 MB/s according to the Windows file copy interface, with it averaging around 30MB/s. Bearing in mind that this is a pretty unreliable way to measure file transfer speed anyway.

But it's not my OS drive, it has pretty much only MP4 files and a few copied Skyrim installations. Yours has your OS and everything else on it.

When I ran a virus scan on a Skyrim installation while copying the file, however, I had more or less the same experience you did i.e. a drop to to well below 1MB/s copy speed.

I wonder if it is therefore worth using Windows' Resource Monitor to see what else you have running that is using the disk. Especially because:

While I don't copy files all the time, this drive problem seems to be happening in the background, all the time, and makes freezes and hick ups constantly (except when disk usage is low: ie Gaming after everything preloaded).

Click to expand...

More generally, Optane + SSHD is not optimal for performance. For your M.2 Drive you would want a proper SSD, ideally a fast NVMe one like a PM961, for your OS and programs to live on, plus any active projects. You could then keep your mass file storage on the HDD.

OPTANE and Firecuda have incompatibilities.
They don't work well together, and the double cache is counter productive. Computer freezes very often and can't be used..
I disabled optane, and I no longer have these problems. But everything is so painfully slow.

ubuysa said:

The bottom line really is that the hard drive you have is a painfully slow 5400rpm drive.

Click to expand...

Oussebon said:

I have an old 5400rpm 2.5" drive installed into this PC as it happens (12.5mm iirc, rescued from a USB 2.0 external drive where the USB bottlenecked the drive a bit).

Click to expand...

Thanks to both of you, I really appreciate !!



5400rpm and false advertising

Clearly this 5400 is terrible. I would expect at least 50-100 MB/s with large files. But this particular drive gives you a poor 30 MB/s


What I don't understand, is Why is PCspecialist trying really hard to sell them ? They advertise "UP TO 5 TIMES FASTER THAN A HDD".


That would be 250-500 MB/s, I bought this drive expecting these performance (+ the optane acceleration), and I get below 30MB/s.

In fact the drive is too slow to be used, I'm hoping PCspecialist will remove the misleading mention and replace the awful drive they sent me.. I'll keep you posted !

crustea said:

OPTANE and Firecuda have incompatibilities.
They don't work well together, and the double cache is counter productive. Computer freezes very often and can't be used..
I disabled optane, and I no longer have these problems. But everything is so painfully slow.





Thanks to both of you, I really appreciate !!



5400rpm and false advertising

Clearly this 5400 is terrible. I would expect at least 50-100 MB/s with large files. But this particular drive gives you a poor 30 MB/s

What I don't understand, is Why is PCspecialist trying really hard to sell them ? They advertise "UP TO 5 TIMES FASTER THAN A HDD".

That would be 250-500 MB/s, I bought this drive expecting these performance (+ the optane acceleration), and I get below 30MB/s.

In fact the drive is too slow to be used, I'm hoping PCspecialist will remove the misleading mention and replace the awful drive they sent me.. I'll keep you posted !

Click to expand...

That’s not PCS advertising that, it’s the manufacturers. They are awful drives but for those that don’t have an ssd they *can* be a better option than a standard hdd, but in my experience it’s best to avoid them at all costs.

SpyderTracks said:

That’s not PCS advertising that, it’s the manufacturers. They are awful drives but for those that don’t have an ssd they *can* be a better option than a standard hdd, but in my experience it’s best to avoid them at all costs.

Click to expand...

It's definitely a misleading information provided by PCSpecialists (see screenshot - 16/04/18).
I trusted PCSpecialists, and I haven't seen this information anywhere else.







Also with the Drive PCSpecialists installed, I get terrible performance (yes, cache is enabled), compared to the reference benchmark, very strange. Could it be that 2 partitions (one for system) affect performance so badly ?

crustea said:

It's definitely a misleading information provided by PCSpecialists (see screenshot - 16/04/18).
I trusted PCSpecialists, and I haven't seen this information anywhere else.

Also with the Drive PCSpecialists installed, I get terrible performance (yes, cache is enabled), compared to the reference benchmark, very strange. Could it be that 2 partitions (one for system) affect performance so badly ?

Click to expand...

As said, that sales stuff comes from the manufacturers, not PCS.

"UP TO 5 TIMES FASTER THAN A HDD".

Click to expand...

That is the manufacturer's blurb. If you were in a shop and looking at all of these products on a shelf, that is probably what it would say on the packaging for the SSHD.

I wish PCS didn't include that in the dropdown menu as I worry people will expect too much of an SSHD - but I'm not sure it's illegitimate for them to include it either.

OPTANE and Firecuda have incompatibilities.
They don't work well together, and the double cache is counter productive. Computer freezes very often and can't be used..
I disabled optane, and I no longer have these problems. But everything is so painfully slow.

Click to expand...

I suspected this might be the case. I tried to find any articles proving this but couldn't.

The general advice online to people considering an SSHD + Optane module that I saw on other forums was to get an HDD + proper SSD instead. Which is exactly the advice I'd give anyone posting on these forums.

It might be worth raising this with PCS to make the points that:
a) including the 'upto 5x faster' bit could leave people disappointed if they're not familiar with the limitations of an SSHD and
b) There may be broader compatibility issues with the SSHD + Optane that they should look at

crustea said:

It's definitely a misleading information provided by PCSpecialists (see screenshot - 16/04/18).
I trusted PCSpecialists, and I haven't seen this information anywhere else.

Also with the Drive PCSpecialists installed, I get terrible performance (yes, cache is enabled), compared to the reference benchmark, very strange. Could it be that 2 partitions (one for system) affect performance so badly ?

Click to expand...

For SSHD, their performance might be just a slightly better compared to a standard 5200RPM HDD, however, SSHD has a small amount of NAND Cache which allow your system to perform better on everyday tasks, the machine learning will recognize which data you access the most and store it in the NAND Cache, which increase the performance whenever you trying to access those data.
So in conclusion, SSHD is 5x better than normal HDD when they access data in NAND Cache (which is advertised), but they will perform the same like a usual HDD for tasks like copy pasting files, unless you keep copying the same files for few times.

Quick update:

The story has gotten worst and worst, here are some details to hopefully help some people avoid the same problem.

Optane + SSHD.
It looks like they're just not compatible. PCspecialists did not test the setup, and shipped a dysfunctional computer.
They had a look remotely but couldn't figure out a solution, or a cause. No solution was found. Great !

So I had to buy an extra SSD (960 evo from samsung, awesome) 190euros elsewhere, migrate the system and waste a lot of time. It's now super fast, but I'm so upset at PCspecialist.

SSHD, up to 5x faster
I raised the issue that this can be misleading (also my SSHD is still performing poorly, with <30-50 Mo/s, actually slightly slower than my other 5200rpm drive).

They acknowledged the issue and assured the misleading info would be fixed. Until i asked again, and it turns up they won't do anything.
I suggested they replaced this terrible SSHD by a SSD drive of the same capacity and I would happily close the case and forget all the time I wasted on diagnosing and fixing the computer they shipped me, but they only offered a SSHD replacement (with no guarantee of any better performances). Great !

RAM and M.2 solts:
The technical support assured me that I could add 2x 8Go Ram to my setup, plus one more M.2 drive.
So I order that, only to find out they did not check my configuration, gave me wrong info, and the new ram and drive won't fit. Great !

So PCspecialists acknowledged they repeatedly made mistakes with my configuration, and apologized, but wouldn't offer any better compensation other than refund or replacement or the SSHD, leaving me with a slow drive and terrible support.

Considering all the mistakes they made and the time I spent to fix them, I'm so mad at them, and I would recommend everyone to be extremely careful with PCS, I just wish I never ordered with them in the first place, they made me regret every euro I gave them.

The disaster continues, SSHD is still painfully slow, and tech support failed to fix it.
They offered me a replacement, but only after they received the old one (backup and transfer is going to be a pain), and with no guarantee of better performances.

The "x5 faster than a HDD" turned out to be 0.8 times slower than my old 5400 rpm. I really wish I spent 1700 euros somewhere else.

They refuse to swap it with a SSD as a compensation for all the time wasted, and I'm left with a slow machine.

I've spent 8 days, a 45 emails conversation and 3 phone call on this, and yet no solution.

crustea said:

The disaster continues, SSHD is still painfully slow, and tech support failed to fix it.
They offered me a replacement, but only after they received the old one (backup and transfer is going to be a pain), and with no guarantee of better performances.

The "x5 faster than a HDD" turned out to be 0.8 times slower than my old 5400 rpm. I really wish I spent 1700 euros somewhere else.

They refuse to swap it with a SSD as a compensation for all the time wasted, and I'm left with a slow machine.

I've spent 8 days, a 45 emails conversation and 3 phone call on this, and yet no solution.

Click to expand...

To be fair it's not PCS making the '5x faster' claim, it's Seagate, PCS simply repeat Seagate's claim because they have no evidence that it's not true (and under ideal conditions it probably is). Buyer beware, and especially of 'up to' claims because in practice you'll almost never get 'up to' that performance.

There are plenty of threads on here where experienced posters have advised against an SSHD, and especially one backed by a 5400rpm drive. If memory serves I don't think I've seen a post where anyone was recommending an SSHD over a decent 7200rpm HDD and certainly not in preference to an SSD (even a slowish one).

The 1700 Euros you spent is far from wasted, it's simply let down by a bad choice of drive and probably by mixing Optane memory with an SSHD. I'm not a personal fan of Optane memory in any case, and certainly not as a big disk cache. It's unfortunate that you didn't put your proposed spec up here before you bought it, many of us would have rung alarm bells at the mixture of the phrase 'I needed super fast drive access' with an SSHD, with or without Optane. If super fast drive access is what you need then you need an SSD, even a 540 MB/s SATA SSD would be a huge improvement, but a fast (3000 MB/s) M.2 NVMe drive would have provided exactly the sort of storage performance you need.

My best advice to you now is to accept that you chose a poor spec for your needs and dump both the Optane and the SSHD (and definitely dump the SSHD - you might even be able to sell the SSHD and Optane memory on) and go with an SSD, ideally a fast M.2 NVMe SSD or even a SATA SSD, you'll see your laptop in a very different light if you do.

ubuysa said:

My best advice to you now is to accept that you chose a poor spec for your needs and dump both the Optane and the SSHD (and definitely dump the SSHD ..

Click to expand...

Yep, totally with you here ! I ordered a NVMe somewhere else and thing are improving..

I guess my main mistake was to trust PCspecialist in the first place, and expect a good support. They made a lot of mistakes here, and failed to provide assistance, and come up with a compensation.

Luckily your advice and infos on this page has proven much more useful.. I have to spend an additional 300-350 euros to cover up PCS mistakes, which makes me super angry still. I reached out to CEO Daniel Williams to express my concerns about these issues, so at least he's aware about the poor service I received.

Thanks for your help anyway.

crustea said:

Yep, totally with you here ! I ordered a NVMe somewhere else and thing are improving..

I guess my main mistake was to trust PCspecialist in the first place, and expect a good support. They made a lot of mistakes here, and failed to provide assistance, and come up with a compensation.

Luckily your advice and infos on this page has proven much more useful.. I have to spend an additional 300-350 euros to cover up PCS mistakes, which makes me super angry still. I reached out to CEO Daniel Williams to express my concerns about these issues, so at least he's aware about the poor service I received.

Thanks for your help anyway.

Click to expand...

What mistakes did PCS make? As I mentioned, the '5x faster' claim isn't made by PCS but by Seagate. PCS built the laptop you specified and it's not really their fault that it underperformed. Perhaps it would have been better had the configurator not allowed you to select Optane and and SSHD but as far as I can see from this thread that's the only 'mistake' that PCS made?

Be fair - 'Up to 5' includes a lot of numbers BELOW 5!

ubuysa said:

What mistakes did PCS make?

Click to expand...

1- misleading info on the website. (misleading SSHD perf + a bug in the form warning with optane 32G)
2- lack of tests before shipping the computer (1-2 minutes freezes, and <300kB/s perf on system drive, computer basically unusable).
3- wrong information was given by support (about RAM and M2 slots), they did not actually check my configuration before suggesting the acquisition of additional hardware, so I had to return the drive and Ram, as there is no more slot available.


So far I had to spent 350+ euros to fix these issues.


I spent 8 days, a 45 emails conversation and 3 phone calls with PCS support, to understand the causes and potential solutions.

This forum thread has been far more useful. Thank you !

polycrac said:

Be fair - 'Up to 5' includes a lot of numbers BELOW 5!

Click to expand...

I had to buy a SDD, move system, re-partition.

Current SSHD perf is still 0.8 slower than my old 5400 rpm. So that's actually BELOW 1.