Sudden decrease in SSD speed. (Crucial M4)

[BeeJee]

Hey guys and gals, I recently purchased a Crucial 256gb SSD when they were on sale a few weeks ago and at first the performance was awesome. But I just shut down my computer and when rebooted it started to act a little funny (my wallpaper was reset to factory) so I ran a disk speed test and the test showed that it is now writing 100mb/s slower than it was just a week ago! I understand that speeds will always vary a little however an almost 50% decrease is unacceptable to me. I hope I'm missing something as I want to get what I payed for and right now its not. Thanks a lot for anybody with any insight on the problem.

 

[Ves]

Which firmware version are you one?
Did you enable TRIM?

 

[Donka]

Also, what were you doing prior to the shut down?

 

[Weaselboy]

Are putting it to sleep immediately after use perhaps? The M4 uses a method of garbage collection in its controller that runs during system idle time AFTER a lot of write activity. Try disabling sleep and just letting it sit running a couple hours and see if that restores write performance.

Read over the TRIM section of this review of another drive for an overview of what is going on.