• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.

Intel Mainstream SSDs Degrade in Performance Over Time? Intel Says That's Not True

malware

New Member
Joined
Nov 7, 2004
Messages
5,422 (0.76/day)
Location
Bulgaria
Processor Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 VID: 1.2125
Motherboard GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3P rev.2.0
Cooling Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme + Noctua NF-S12 Fan
Memory 4x1 GB PQI DDR2 PC2-6400
Video Card(s) Colorful iGame Radeon HD 4890 1 GB GDDR5
Storage 2x 500 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 32 MB RAID0
Display(s) BenQ G2400W 24-inch WideScreen LCD
Case Cooler Master COSMOS RC-1000 (sold), Cooler Master HAF-932 (delivered)
Audio Device(s) Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic + Logitech Z-5500 Digital THX
Power Supply Chieftec CFT-1000G-DF 1kW
Software Laptop: Lenovo 3000 N200 C2DT2310/3GB/120GB/GF7300/15.4"/Razer
Solid-state drives are relatively new technology for anyone of us, and up until now we've heard only good things about them. They are fast, small, they have no moving parts, but what happens after extensive use of the flash memory that is incorporated in them? Yesterday a review was posted over at PC Perspective, entitled "Long-term performance analysis of Intel Mainstream SSDs". According to the information posted, it appears that Intel's X25-M MLC SSD drives may degrade in performance after a period of time when they are put to extensive use. PC Per claims that once an Intel solid-state drive is used, after a period of time it will no longer be as fast as a new one, neither its rated transfer speeds will be the same.
In response, Intel stated today: "Our labs currently have not been able to duplicate these results," "In our estimation, the synthetic workloads they use to stress the drive are not reflective of real world use. Similarly, the benchmarks they used to evaluate performance do not represent what a PC user experiences." Intel also said: "In general, when a PC's drive (SSD or HDD) is full, there will be some reduction in system performance, however the performance reduction reported by PC Perspective is higher than we generally expect, which is why we are looking into the methodology."
We'll keep you posted if there's new information on the matter.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site
 
Joined
Dec 17, 2007
Messages
78 (0.01/day)
Location
Toronto, Canada
Processor Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650
Motherboard ASUS P5Q DELUXE
Cooling Zalman CNPS9900A
Memory 8GB Mushkin DDR2-1066
Video Card(s) Sapphire Radeon 4870 512MB
Storage 2x WD 500GB 32MB cache
Display(s) Benq V2400W 24"
Case Cooler Master 690
Audio Device(s) Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatal1ty
Power Supply Cooler Master 550W
Software Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Benchmark Scores Benchmarking is for people with OCD.
Well they can't do worse than regular hard drives after extended usage :p
 
Joined
Aug 30, 2006
Messages
7,197 (1.12/day)
System Name ICE-QUAD // ICE-CRUNCH
Processor Q6600 // 2x Xeon 5472
Memory 2GB DDR // 8GB FB-DIMM
Video Card(s) HD3850-AGP // FireGL 3400
Display(s) 2 x Samsung 204Ts = 3200x1200
Audio Device(s) Audigy 2
Software Windows Server 2003 R2 as a Workstation now migrated to W10 with regrets.
Last edited:

Suijin

New Member
Joined
Nov 20, 2008
Messages
61 (0.01/day)
Processor Q6600
Motherboard ABit P35 Pro
Memory 4GB Crucial Ballistix
Video Card(s) 8600 GT
Display(s) HP 2207
Case Antec 900
Power Supply Enermax 750W
Software Vista 64 bit Ultimate
Well they can't do worse than regular hard drives after extended usage :p

Actually they can according to PC Per, you can't defrag an SSD currently. You can defrag a regular hard drive to reclaim the performance.
 

Stearic

New Member
Joined
Sep 20, 2007
Messages
104 (0.02/day)
Actually they can according to PC Per, you can't defrag an SSD currently. You can defrag a regular hard drive to reclaim the performance.

You don't need to defrag an SSD because file fragmentation does not affect sequential or random reads. Free space fragmentation, however, is said to degrade SSD random write performance, and free space consolidation is said to help reclaim performance when it deteriorates after a few months/weeks of use (except for the X-25).

http://www.diskeeperblog.com/archives/2008/12/hyperfast_is_al.html
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?p=4351675


BTW, the fragmentation you see in the X-25 is unrelated to file fragmentation; instead, I believe, it is a result of the wear-levelling mechanism of the drive which is different from other SSDs.
 
Top