Long Term analysis of Intel Mainstream SSD's

Zarf

Zarf

Zarf

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http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669

Very interesting article, to summarise, when used as a main/OS drive the Intel drives internally fragment and it can really hurt performance (especially writes), to make matters worse you can't reliably defragment from within your OS, in some cases you'll need to ghost your drive, format, and ghost it back on to get performance back to as-new status.

I'm wondering if this is what's behind OCZ's comments about their Vertex drive not performing as well once it has a OS installed, I'd put money on it that the new Vertex controller uses the same clever write combining techniques that seem to be both a blessing and a curse.

Can anyone who's been running an X-25 for a few months do an ATTO benchmark, and let us know if the results mirror the articles findings?
 
As far as I can tell it's Intel only at the moment, but looks like it's going to be an all SSD issue, the method of improving small file write performance inevitably causes rapid fragmentation.
The way I understand it is that it isn't fragmentation in the normal sense, it's that when the drives remap the sectors, for wear levelling etc, the previously used cells arn't cleared, and because SSD's (unlike HDD's) need an erased cell before they can write on it, the write process takes longer because they have an extra erase step in there.

That said, according to the article, Intel are working on a defragging app.
 
randal24 said:
Hmm, seems like the defrag tool isn't going to be the cure all solution. The extra writes for moving stuff about is seriously going to compromise the life span of the drive. Especially when you consider:



That's put a bit of a downer on SSD technology for me really, I was getting quite excited about it but this performance/lifespan cut problem is a bit of a show stopper in my opinion.
Click to expand...

The defragger wouldn't affect the lifespan of the drive, since it doesn't matter to SSD's that your files aren't in sequential blocks, all it would do would be to run the erase cycle on the blocks that arn't in use any more, it wouldn't have to move anything (and thus use up write cycles)

Fragmentation isn't really the right word for what's going on, since it's a different issue to HDD fragmentation, but i can't think of anything better.
 
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