Long-Term Performance Analysis of Intel SSDs

Vigile writes "When the Intel X25-M series of solid state drives hit the market last year, there was little debate that they were easily the best performing MLC (multi-level cell) offerings to date. The one area in which they blew away the competition was with write speeds — initial reviews showed consistent 80MB/s results. However, a new article over at PC Perspective that looks at Intel X25-M performance over a period of time shows that write speeds are dramatically reduced from everyday usage patterns. Average write speeds are shown to drop to half (40MB/s) or less in the worst cases, though the author does describe ways that users can recover some of the original drive speed using standard HDD testing tools." Reader MojoKid contributes related SSD news that researchers from the University of Tokyo have developed a new power supply system which will significantly reduce power consumption for NAND Flash memory.

Why?

[IamGarageGuy 2]

I didn't see anything that answered the question of why this would happen. I may be slow but shouldn't it either fail or work? Is storage being lost and therefore getting less with more time used to find a good area? Please don't mod me as troll for not knowing (maybe flamebait for being stupid, I guess)

SLC vs MLC

[w0mprat]

Isn't the problem partly MLC? SLC has consistently better small random write performance. Many cheap SSDs use MLC for obvious reasons, it fairs well in benchmarking -MLC has relatively high read performance- but write performance hurts real bad in real world usage. You may get noticeable micro-lag anytime the OS writes to storage. Application loading may be snappy for example, but the whole system slows down while writes are done. It's good to see the truth coming out amongst all the benchmarketing

It's early days for SSDs. I'll be sticking with my power guzzling magnetic frisbe stacks for a while yet.

Re:TL:DR

[mcbridematt]

Will the traditional flash file systems (jffs2) etc. still work when we have SSD's interfacing over SATA? USB sticks don't work with it because they 'pretend' to be a hard drive over USB, and same for the SSD's over SATA. jffs wants the flash device (MTD) interface.

Intel employee Matthew Wilcox spoke at linux.conf.au about some kernel performance improvements related to the Intel SSD drives - redundant ATA calls that have been removed, and allowing larger sector sizes under ATA 8 [lwn.net], so maybe the authors of this article should look to a recent Linux kernel.

Re:SLC vs MLC

[Kneo24]

I've been using an Intel SSD as a boot drive and I think it's worth every penny so far. I have a few programs and games on the boot drive and they all load up considerably faster than the alternatives. I don't care about write speeds. Their size alone means they're not really meant for storage yet, so using it as such is a bit retarded. If you're doing a lot of write operations to your SSD, you should probably think about moving that file(s) to a different storage device.

Re:TL:DR

[TheRaven64]

Not sure about the Linux world, but LFS on NetBSD counts as mature. It's been sitting in the BSD tree since 4.4BSD (1990, a year before the first Linux release) and is well supported by NetBSD, although the other BSDs dropped it from their trees in the intervening decades because it didn't provide major benefits on rotating mechanical disks. With flash becoming cheap, suddenly it's seeing a lot more interest...