How I Overcame My M.2 Nightmare And Became Better At IT
By Ramsey Pietro Nasser in London, United Kingdom
After countless “Blue Screens Of Death” that lasted multiple days, I realised what was causing the problem. I hadn’t followed the step-by-step guide in the manufacturer’s manual. Here, I chronicle what happened during a difficult week where I had no choice but to format my C: drive. Thankfully, all my and my clients’ data was backed up on NAS drives
After countless “Blue Screens Of Death” that lasted multiple days, I realised what was causing the problem. I hadn’t followed the step-by-step guide in the manufacturer’s manual. Here, I chronicle what happened during a difficult week where I had no choice but to format my C: drive. Thankfully, all my and my clients’ data was backed up on NAS drives
I’m always resolving to improve my business, and one of the ways that I’ve recently achieved this is by installing an M.2 drive. Little did I know this would start a week-long odyssey into a dark cave, where I encountered multi-headed hydras, a cyclops, and a terrifying minotaur
For the uninitiated, the M.2 SSD is a major breakthrough in personal computing, and prices have come down drastically in recent months. A year ago, a 1 terabyte M.2 SSD cost a thousand pounds; but now, thanks to high-tech facilities producing them en masse in South Korea, they’re now around two hundred pounds. Watching it work, I can say it was definitely worth the upgrade — and the effort
The big deal is their fast read/write speeds of 3,500/3,300 MB/s, respectively. That’s up to seventy times faster read speed and up to sixty-six times faster write speed of the trusty HHD drive that’s in the average laptop
If you’re not astonished at the figures, here’s what these speeds mean for me, in practical terms: I could be much more creative with motion graphics titles and special effects in Adobe After Effects, without having to wait around. Digital creativity involves a lot of Ctrl Z or Cmd Z, a shortcut that instantly undoes decisions to render applied graphics or effects. Without fast read/write speeds & rendering the waiting around kills the creative moment
Not only that, anyone who’s familiar with post-production workflows knows apps are often used in layers, one invariably after the other, or simultaneously, and on different screens: — this is especially true when delivering on agreed timeframes. The northbridge southbridge chipset buses make it all possible; and the WACOM Intuos Pen Pad with backlit keyboard shortcuts, make the experience almost seamless
The software company I use for motion graphics is world-famous, thanks to Photoshop. Adobe After Effects is just like Adobe Photoshop, but it’s for video. With it, I can add or remove unwanted elements, I can add trackers, I can add shapes, I can create animations, I can composite graphics, I can key out colours, etc.; all of this needs processing power and speed
In terms of throughput, M.2 SSD NVMe also delivers blisteringly fast transfer speeds from one folder to the other. In post-production, that’s manna from the heavens, especially if combined with USB3.1, which transfers files up to 10GB/s. Thankfully, my motherboard has that port built-in, so I’m in a good place
These two high technologies, USB3.1 and the M.2 SSD NVMe combined is a world away from my Toshiba Satellite laptop days
In plain language, if you want me to film a three-day conference with four cameras and to push it out shockingly fast, I can do that now
It wasn’t simple to get to that stage, though. Let’s start at the beginning of my odyssey
After I bought the M.2 SSD NVMe online, it quickly arrived in the post. My first impression was that it was TINY. I read in the literature it was remarkably small, but to see the drive almost disappear in the palm of my hand really made me laugh. I then watched a video on how the thing works, and it was an excuse to be astonished again before I made a cup of tea
My M.2 SSD NVMe, on the other hand, is up to five times faster than regular SSDs, thanks to non-volatile storage media via PCI Express (3)
After I had a few sips of my hot Darjeeling brew, I got the screwdriver out, I switched off my workstation, and switched on all of the lights, including my LED headlamp. My tongue was also curled — I noted — up against my lip. It was time for that upgrade! In my excited stupor, I noticed the screw that needed to fasten down the tiny thing against my motherboard was missing. I looked inside the box again, turning it upsidedown, but nothing came out. I soon realised I had to buy the screws separately. “That’s okay,” I thought, as I neatly slotted in the drive into its proper slot. “That’ll do for now”
After screwing the case back on and powering up the machine, and hearing all the reassuring beeps and sounds, there was the fabled drive under Devices and drives. Just under 1 terabyte of Promised Land where I could have fun and games (and push out video)
I moved my first files onto the drive. Everything seemed fine, at first. The transfer rate was respectfully fast at around 170MB/s. Needless to say, the bottleneck was my optical drive where my pictures were stored and not the M.2. There were some .RAW pictures that I took of a cat that casually strolled past my back garden, as if it was on some thoroughfare to a more interesting location (there are three cats that regularly do this, for some reason, and they always take the exact same path apart from when they’re trying to kill a bird)
To my glee, the .RAW images loaded almost instantaneously onto my screen. Normally .RAW images take more than a second to load even with my plain old SSD. I then copied some footage of a gig I shot from a few years ago at Netil House. Whenever I used to edit with my optical drive, there was often a small delay before the needle would find the right spot to read a file and to load onto my DDR4 RAM. With the M.2 NVMe, however, I could move the shuttle in Avid Media Composer and the media would load instantaneously. I also tried moving media from one track to the one above. This used to cause a short pause because the optical drive needed to load both clips onto the RAM. There was no such delay this time. I was in seventh heaven. I think I might have done a few over-excited stims and high-pitched sounds before I crunched on a Bramley apple. I’m all for healthy eating
The shops were going to close soonish, so I prepped myself with a mask and I journeyed my way to town. Surely, my local DIY store Screwfix had the missing screw that I needed. As it turned out, they had thousands of screws, all but for the one I needed. The PPE clad shelf stacker recommended a shop two streets away that did specialist screws, but that was closed, too; despite my heroic sprint
Back at home, after sufficiently rested, I decided to move 50GBs of footage onto the drive. When I did that, as the transfer progressed, the MB/s rate slowed down from very fast to zero, and my computer. . .crashed
This happened a few times, so I went onto troubleshooting forums to try to work out what was wrong. It was a sin of mine that I’d previously always taken the computer to a repair shop whenever there was a problem. It was for that reason that I didn’t know that drives had to be partitioned before they could be used. Whilst basic and self-evident to IT people, it was a lightbulb moment to me, thanks to a discussion thread. I opened my Windows Create and format hard disk utility, I formatted the drive and I shrank it by 10GBs
In SSD technology, after partitioning, Windows assigns a separate OS thread to each drive letter, allowing faster disk read/write with shorter and separate threads running at the same time. I didn’t quite understand this at the time; instead, I thought shrinking the drive would allow it to simply operate and, I guessed: the bigger the partition, the higher read/write bandwidth would be allowed per second. I was on the right track but, as it turned out, what actually happens is more complicated: SLC, MLC or TLC caching optimises the drive by boosting read/write performance on demand. It can take up to twenty-five percent & run it in this mode. In this drive, we’re talking up to 250GB cache. This is used as a resource until the cache runs out; and thereafter, idle time is used to convert data to QLC, where storage is optimised toward efficiency but with lower performance
Feeling much more reassured, I then tried to transfer the 50GBs, and it suddenly worked. For a bit. But then my PC crashed again. The good news was that it transferred more than the previous attempt, so I thought I was onto something. I restarted, formatted again, created a bigger partition, and tried again. I noticed the transfer rate increased and I managed to transfer all of my 50GBs. This was thanks to the available cache
After a few days of reading, researching & learning, my mission was successful. But there was another problem at hand. The Adobe software I’d subscribed to would only work on the operating C drive, so I had to clone my small 120GB SSD to my new mothership & boot drive, the 1TB SSD M.2. For some reason that I couldn’t figure out, the Samsung Magician software that came with the drive wouldn’t do it without crashing everything midway through. I tried it a few times to be sure, but each time, it was a failure, no matter how reassuringly big my partition was. I had 700GBs of unallocated space and the transfer rate per second was stellar, but each time it went down to zero and I had to restart
I was stumped. Was my motherboard incompatible with my SSD M.2 NVMe? It couldn’t be the case according to the specs, and I even called the manufacturer before I made the investment, to be doubly sure. Doubts at this stage were creeping in. It was the multi-headed hydra spitting poison at me. I was hitting the infamous QLC penalty for writes
I was the cyclops in the cave. Apart from the QLC write penalty, what was probably causing the problems I later eliminated to two possibilities. The first was clear and simple: in my haste, I didn’t screw down my M.2 SSD NVMe, and as soon as my screw arrived in the post I did the deed and all my nightmares stopped. There was another problem, though. Whenever I installed Avid Media Composer 8.5 onto the M.2 SSD NVMe mothership, it crashed as soon as it asked me to restart my system
So, my PC was finally running perfectly well. I did all sorts of testing, including stress testing. I downloaded all of my subscribed software with Adobe, including Photoshop, Lightroom, After Effects, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro. These are all processor-hungry apps, and they all ran fine. Yet, Avid Media Composer 8.5 crashed my workstation — and this was with my drive screwed down. Software clash a well-known and well-documented problem, and crashes can happen without updates; yet, I was assured by a colleague, Senior Editor and former Head of a Post-Production Department with Avid NEXIS that my Avid 8.5 could still run on my SSD. I found out the multiple editing units he managed had no reported issues, after he kindly made some enquires for me. He was based in Greece — that’s the nature of forums, they’re truly international and comradely in times of crises. We both agreed there may be some hardware driver compatibility issues with my M.2 NVMe and Media Composer 8.5
Given this intelligence, I persevered. To be extra safe, and to avoid bad sectors, before I tried to clone my boot drive, each time I Reset the PC in order to make sure there were no bad sectors. As the computer crashed again, though, it just wouldn’t start that time. It froze and I had to hold the power button until it cut out. I didn’t get the Blue Screen of Death, I got something much worse than that. It was something along the lines of: “This computer is kaput. Take it to the IT guy” I wish I’d taken a picture. This was when I turned to my laptop to create a USB Recovery Disk. I restarted the machine and pressed F2 to load the BIOS menu
Not a problem, I thought. This isn’t a situation I was in very often, but I did have an emergency Recovery Drive in the form of a USB stick. All I had to do was to change the boot order within BIOS and reboot the computer and it would be fixed again. It didn’t work. The solution now was a clean install of Windows 10 Pro
Before I did a clean install, I had to learn a few things about IT. One of the advised advantages of having your system drive on a separate disk is that your data isn’t at risk if anything like this happens. I had to learn fast, though, as I’d never been in this situation by myself. I still had the option to try to restore the PC from Command Prompt, despite the lack of a graphics interface. It was still the kernel of my command. I noticed, by the way, the drive I was working from was X: after looking it up, it turns out I was living and running things in my RAM. I’d never been in that situation before, and besides the distress, it was kind of fun
This was when I was re-introduced to DISKPART. DISKPART is a command interpreter within Command Prompt that can clean a hard disk, format a hard disk, partition a hard disk, activate a hard disk, assign it a letter and convert it from MBR to GPT. It can also do the same for volumes or partitions within a single disk. My first task was to clean the disk from my now corrupted Windows 10 Pro operating system, so that’s what I did. I then formatted the disk with NTFS, activated it, and gave it a letter C, and then activated it and gave it a volume name
But then, when I rebooted the machine from the USB by changing the boot order number within BIOS, the application couldn’t install windows. This was because I didn’t know the difference between MBR and GPT file systems. After further research, my memory was jogged. I had to install Windows from a completely clean disk, with no partitions. This was the GPT format. Luckily, I remembered I could easily open Command Prompt from the Windows installation page using the SHIFT + F10 shortcut. From DISKPART, I selected the drive where I wanted to install my operating system, and I typed in: “Convert GPT”. With the task successful, Windows installation initiated, and I was in Windows 10 Pro within minutes — thanks to my super fast and screwed-in M.2 SSD NVMe drive. My motherboard was after all reassuredly compatible with the new drive
In the fray of battle, I also managed to update my Maximus Skylate Hero VIII motherboard BIOS driver for better DRAM performance and my GTX 1070 8GB Strix GPU driver, amongst other fixes and updates. I also learnt about clocked XMP for DDR4 and CPU overclocking for that extra boost in performance; although I prefer to keep the hardware cool, mindful of my VRM MOSFETs
Anyway, with a fresh install of Windows 10 Pro the drive screwed down, it was time to test things. How did my transfer of 50GBs go? Fabulously. How do intermediate format videos play within the new drive? Amazingly. The minotaur staring at me in the face was an out-of-date version of Avid Media Composer
I last reinstated my license in 2016 but support ran out in 2017, so it was time to reinstate my Perpetual License again to Avid 2020. Software engineers have to support an application as Windows updates, and so if it kept updated, things like this can’t happen. Somewhat reassuringly, Microsoft Crop issued a Press Release about their updates causing issues the same week I was having issues, so I feel somewhat reassured that it was a problem with Microsoft, although I can’t be sure because I’d already remedied the problem
In short, whatever the particular coding problem was, I overcame the minotaur by simply walking forward and reinstating my Avid Media Composer Perpetual License
Time for a Granny Smith
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