Re: Gigabyte BIOS Upgrade F11b BETA solved a lot of diffuse hardware problems

>>>> A 'lot of diffuse hardware problems' is a story too long to recite. I 
>>>> was
>>>> reluctant to upgrade to a BETA BIOS. When I did I thought I'd bricked 
>>>> the machine. After a nights sleep, I realized the upgrade had reset to 
>>>> defaults / PCI monitor rather than PCIe. Now hardware works perfect. 
>>>> However, 500GB Seagate Barracuda says it has 30% life left. The red 
>>>> light that indicates drive activity glowed too often.
>>> The SMART table here can allow looking at individual parameters.
>>>
>>> http://hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe
>>>
>>> That means the raw data field in the "Reallocated"
>>> has gone non-zero. At a guess.
>>>
>>>    Paul
>>
>> Thanks Paul,
>>
>> Using that tool, '(05) Reallocated Sector Count' was displayed for the 
>> 500GB Samsung EVO SSD, but not for the 500 GB Seagate Barracuda SSD. It's 
>> connected to a different controller, a PCIe (x1) SATAIII card.
>
> Sorry, I thought that 500GB Seagate Barracuda was a HDD.
>
> The HDTune tool is too old to display SSD tables properly.
>
> You were probably using some Toolkit to get that number,
> and maybe the Toolkit has the SMART table in it somewhere.
>
> My SSD samples here, tend to have rounded numbers,
> like 256GB or 512GB, rather than 250 and 500 values.
>
> The red glow, means SATA commands are coming in. The drive
> can still be writing, as it rearranges the data, but the
> LED does not light while this is happening. Any LED glows,
> indicate your OS is doing something. You would need to
> probe further, to figure out whether the operations are
> read or write. (Task Manager has I/O columns you can turn
> on for this.)
>
> The SSD has a processor inside, and it is running for as
> long as the drive has power.
>
>    Paul

Thanks again Paul,

I'm still trying to solve some performance issues. Here is:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 Shizuku Edition (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo
                           Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

           Sequential Read :   181.235 MB/s
          Sequential Write :   156.012 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :     2.018 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :   150.887 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :    26.341 MB/s [  6431.0 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :    38.755 MB/s [  9461.7 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :   127.105 MB/s [ 31031.5 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :   106.460 MB/s [ 25991.2 IOPS]

  Test : 50 MB [D: 21.7% (101.2/465.8 GB)] (x1)
  Date : 2021/04/10 15:58:02
    OS : Windows 8.1 Pro [6.3 Build 9600] (x64)

Test of Seagate Barracuda. Note anomalous Random Read 512KB :     2.018 
MB/s. Could this low number indicate problem with Seagate Barracuda or with 
cable. I'm using a 7 conductor cable, 2 pairs +/- data, 3 ground. Is my 
Seagate damaged? Is my cable insufficient? What about 'twinax'? Maybe my 
Startech PCIe SATA controller is to blame.