Solid-State Drives (SSD)

[deletion]

Why are you guys so obsessed with the sequential write performance? It's something that HDDs are good enough at too, sometimes even better than SSDs. And SSDs are so small and expensive that I really don't see any point in using an SSD to store media files for example, and that's about the only reason why anybody would need a good sequential write throughput.

The 1819 firmware changelog says this:

Bug Fix: Performance boost routine reused the recently used block and it did harm to wear leveling.

What if the performance of 1511 is so good only because its wear leveling routines are buggy and actually fail to do wear leveling properly? Now that they fixed the wear leveling algorithm to actually do wear leveling, the side effect may have been a lower write throughput. Makes sense.

If the above is true, it means that if you're using 1511, you might be getting the extra throughput speed at the cost of wearing out your drive prematurely. Is sequential write performance really so cricital to you that you'd sacrifice your disk for it?

In the end, what makes SSDs so great compared to HDDs is their random read/write latency, and this is what your computer is doing all the time. That's what counts. Forget caring about sequential write speeds because that's something where SSDs don't bring anything new on the table. HDDs perform just fine in that task, so if sequential writing is what you do, you're much better off using HDDs than SSDs.

[targetbsp]

Because it's not just the sequential write speeds that were down.  Performance was down across the board but the sequential speeds are the easiest speed to verify as we have the official quoted specification speeds for that value.  So you know that when you have achieved those speeds - the drive is working as intended.

Personally I think high sequential write speed is the most useless statistic there is because to do a 200mb/sec write that is useful I'd need a read source that fast.  I'm not going to get that from a cd/dvd or the internet so the only thing I can do with a high sequential write speed is create pointless files for use in benchmarking.

[kallogan]

"Because it's not just the sequential write speeds that were down. Performance was down across the board but the sequential speeds are the easiest speed to verify as we have the official quoted specification speeds for that value...."

Exactly. So to the moralizing guy who takes us for a bunch of noobs :*keep it courteous* who land on the thread and take us for morons by saying freakin' **bleep** generalities that we ALL already know !!!!!

Wear leveling bug ??? side effect ???? Come on...30-40 mb/s as for sequential and 5 mb/s as for 4k writes...that's half the 1571 performances !!! Prematurely kill the ssd ??? Let me laugh.

[djinnuk]

my'nes still fuxord on 1819. Just cant remedy a fix no matter how many times I wipe/reboot the **bleep** drive.

I've given up + im sure all this wiping cant be good for the drive.

Yeah that performance wear levelling bug affecting the drives performance post was a joke kallogan.

I think the amount of degradation you would see by the drive reusing a block a few times to often pales in comparison to the huge degradation im getting with the new firmware (-45%-50% write speeds!)

[djinnuk]

SOLVED! not by wiping unfortunatly only cure was to flash back to 1571 and its happy dayz folks!

Im gonna wait for a proper GC firmware, not interested in trim at all.

[targetbsp]

My write speeds are still fine. :S

[sonicsonic]

Same here no noticeable performance drop only when drive gets filled but nothing special

maybe its hardware depended bad memory or whatsoever

[uneverno]

Seems OCZ are having the same problem with their latest firmware as well.

[DaZ]

There is a new Anandtech article out detailing SSD TRIM support which is a interesting read.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667

FYI my benchmarks have drifted up by 10Mb to around the 80Mb/sec write mark.

Even day seems to bring small improvements so maybe giving TRIM some time is the answer.

[hakcenter]

I feel so retarded after all that waiting, for performance issues. This goes well past synthetic benchmarks.

A lot of my games were loading incredibly slower than usual.. I wonder if IO's dropped as well.. I've rolled back to 1571 in any case.