CloudSpeed ECO 960GB disconnecting

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Glock24

Active Member
May 13, 2019
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Some time ago I got a good deal on a few CloudSpeed Eco 960GB drives. My intention was to use them as secondary storage in some home systems and as external storage using a USB enclosure.

I tried copying around 80GB from one computer to the other and after a while the drive just disconnects. Tried another drive and same behaviour. SMART says both drives are OK, a full "surfcace" scan with hdtune shows no errors. I can dd to /dev/null multiple times and no slowdowns or errors are shown.

I suspected a bad USB/SATA enclosure, tried with another one but got the same result. I checked for firmware updates and no newer firmware is available. I then suspected overheating but the drives only go up to about 40-45C, unless the firmware has a very low overtemp threshold.

Will try again with the disk attached directly to a computer via SATA, but suspect the outcome will be similar.

Anyone got any experience with these drives?
 

DarkServant

Member
Apr 5, 2022
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If the SATA to USB enclosure is using an asmedia chipset, try to update it to the latest version. The firmware is most of the time generic and you can use one that is not from the case vendor directly. It can be too a problem, that the USB port does not deliver enough power for the drive or the cable is crap.
Update to the the latest ssd-drive firmware should'nt hurt too...
I saw that there is a specific tool from Sandisk (SCLI Tool, SanDisk Guard Tool) to set some parameters for the drive.There are power saving stuff like DIPM, APM, Aptst, DevSlp which i would try to disable to avoid troubles.
The same with the MPTool if its an Asmedia chipset, there are too some auto-sleep settings.



...but no, i have no experience with these drives
 
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Glock24

Active Member
May 13, 2019
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I didn't think about the USB adapter's firmware, I updated them, althogh I had 2 Asmedia and one Jmicron and it happens with all of them.

The drives were already at the newest firmware.

Maybe there's a power issue, although I've powered 2.5" 7200rpm HDDs without a problem. According to the spec sheet max ampr draw for the CloudSpeed Eco is 1.2A and 5.5V, that would be 6.6W, which would not be a problem.

The problem happens after a few tens of GBs.

I haven't had time to test with the drives connected directly to a SATA port, if the drive disconnects with a direct SATA connection then the problem is the drive.
 

Glock24

Active Member
May 13, 2019
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I finally tested the drives directly attached to a SATA port and the disconnection still happens after writing a few tens of GBytes. SMART attributes show 99% life left, don't show TB written. Short SMART offline test completes successfully, extended test never ends but doesn't show it fails either, it just never completes.

So the problem is not the USB adapter and USB power is not the problem either. Is it possible to tamper with SMART data? I think the NAND may have too many writes but SMART reports otherwise. Reads are very erratic and average less than 200MB/s, which is very slow.

Both drives came from the same vendor.
 

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Glock24

Active Member
May 13, 2019
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Update on one of the disks.

I copied everything out to another (know good working) ssd, read speed during transfer were a sad 70-80MB/s.

After that I ran a full rw pass of badblocks, then a full dd with zeroes.

I copied back around 600GB of data and write speeds were now in the 200-250MB/s. After copy was complete I tested copying big files out and now I got over 400MB/s reads.

During all of this the disk did not disconnect and a couple weeks later performance is still decent.

When I got the disks I did not zero them, maybe they required it to freshen the cells.