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• Performance Zooms with New Firmware for Intel 34nm X25-M SSDs

  Intel today released new firmware for its 34nm X25-M SSDs. New Firmware: 02HA; Old Firmware: 02G9 The new firmware supports TRIM. This feature requires Windows 7 with Microsoft AHCI drivers. Intel drivers don’t support TRIM yet. For Windows Vista or XP you have to use the Intel SSD Toolbox, which supports TRIM. The TRIM attribute of the ATA data set management command synchronizes the operating system’s view of deleted files with those that are deleted, but not erased on the drive.  TRIM tells the SSD which data blocks are no longer in use. This helps stabilize the performance and health of the SSD over time. For the tests we set up a Windows 7 system on our standard storage test platform. We used the Microsoft AHCI driver to support TRIM. Drive performance is much better with the new firmware. Also after torturing the drive with IOMeter. The sequential write performance in used state areas is in the close to that of the former new state areas, the numbers still decrease but not near as much. Random reads and writes in our database benchmarks double. Very impressive. Workstation benchmarks also double and Webserver and Fileserver numbers increase significantly. Early adopters who bought the first X25-M will not get a firmware update. Very sad. Testing Order: H2benchWIOMeter30min idle time for triming the driveSecond run of H2benchWSecond run of IOMeter The new firmware provides very impressive numbers and takes SSDs to a higher level of performance well beyond HDDs as system drives in desktop computers.

• Throughput Testing Do you remember read performance crashing to 42 MB/s with the old firmware? Intel’s engineers did a great job in optimizing the firmware, as the read throughput didn’t decrease significantly any more with the new 8820 firmware. The minimum throughput after the first h2benchw/IOMeter cycle was 109 MB/s, but after just the second cycle the X25-M was able to adjust and maintain a minimum sequential read throughput of 200 MB/s. Although the firmware update cannot prevent minimum write throughput decreasing to only a few megabytes per second, the maximum results stay at a constant 80 MB/s, while the average numbers even keep increasing. Clearly, the firmware adjusts to the workload much more efficiently. I/O Testing There still is a little performance drop, but the 8820 firmware manages to buffer the drop significantly. A decrease from 3,300 to 3,100 I/O operations per second for typical database transactions is certainly acceptable. The extreme performance differences of the 8160 firmware are gone with version 8820, but the fileserver performance keeps increasing. Web server performance doesn’t suffer from the heavily changing torture testing with the new firmware, as the X25-M reaches 11,400 I/O operations per second in the Web server test at all times. Workstation performance, which is based on small to medium block sizes, is different now. Although the first run results in less I/O performance than was the case on the old firmware, the following runs actually are much better. Overall, the new 8820 firmware for the X25-M offers a significant improvement over the old 8160 version, as it manages to maintain performance at a higher level than was possible before. Both throughput and I/O performance are more predictable and closer to the maximum results. Compared to the performance increases caused by driver or firmware updates on graphics cards or for processors and platforms, the improvements here are much more significant. Intel X25-M Mainstream Solid State Drive -... (4 offers) Online shop Price Buy.com $346.82 ElectronicsPLUS $404.99 SuperMediaStore.com $479.99 NextWarehouse.com $610.87 See more products

• SSD Summer Slam: 12 New 2.5" And 1.8" Drives Rounded-Up

  Hardly a week goes by in which we don’t receive information or updates about solid state drives (SSDs). These flash-based storage alternatives were introduced in 2006 when Samsung released a 32GB prototype that used UltraATA/66. The first drives available at retail were easily capable of outperforming hard drives when it came to I/O performance, but not all delivered greater throughput. Overall, first- and second-generation flash SSDs simply weren’t as efficient as promised. In addition, processing power seems necessary to reach maximum SSD performance, and all SSDs have demonstrated negative performance impacts over time due to write amplification, wear leveling algorithms, and the fact that flash memory cannot just be overwritten. It has to be read, erased, and rewritten. Older SSDs or those with older firmware are still susceptible to these problems. It wasn’t until late 2008, when drives arrived with built-in cache to sail around these issues, that we saw substantial progress. Today, key vendors are assidious about providing firmware updates every few weeks, so it was time for us to collect a dozen new drives and put them to the test. All have been added to our SSD Charts for easy comparison, as well. Why SSDs? Regular readers have probably visited this question several times already, but it’s important to point out that the future of fast storage solutions for your operating system does not lie with magnetic hard drives. System storage will increasingly be based on non-volatile silicon technology, such as flash memory, for speed and efficiency reasons. Hard drives will be around for many years to come, but they’ll increasingly be used for longer-term storage and archiving because they suffer from rather long latencies due to necessary head repositioning from one track to another (seek time) and rotational latency. SSDs are capable of providing much quicker random access. While hard drives require between 4 and 20 ms for average access operations, SSDs run between 0.05 ms and 2 ms in worst-case write access scenarios. Depending on the SSD model and firmware focus (desktop versus enterprise workloads), the resulting I/O performance can be up to 50 times faster than on hard drives. Finally, SSDs deliver throughput of up to 240 MB/s, while even the fastest enterprise hard drives are still limited to a bit more than 200 MB/s (Seagate's Cheetah 15K.7). Yet, it has to be said that hard drives are still much more reliable in delivering consistent and reproducable performance. Trends and Capacities While Western Digital has already announced the first 2.5” mobile hard drives with a 1TB capacity (12.5 mm z-height), SSDs are still limited to a maximum of 256GB in the same form factor (although Intel is expected to start shipping 320GB versions of its X25 drives soon). In contrast, even regular 2.5” mobile hard drives (9.5 mm z-height) deliver twice the capacity of the largest SSDs. More significantly, 500GB notebook drives are affordable at prices between $80 and $120. You can get an SSD drive for about the same price, but then your capacity will most likely not exceed 32GB (for example, the OCZ Vertex 30GB) or you might be stuck with outdated technology (PQI, Transcend, Crucial 32GB). Ultimately, with SSD, you’re buying 5% to 15% of a hard drive’s capacity at the same price, or you’ll pay up to $800 if you want 256GB. The Candidates We received several new SSDs between July and mid-August: A-Data’s 128GB S592 drive (Indilinx controller, MLC flash); two models from a Chinese vendor called Asax (1.8” and 2.5”, MLC flash); Cavalry’s SSD 32GB Pelican (JMicron JMF602); Corsair’s P256 (based on the Samsung PB22-J); the new Crucial M225 series (Indilinx, MLC); Intel’s new 34nm X25-M at 160GB; the OCZ Summit, Vertex and Vertex Turbo (Samsung, Indilinx); and lastly the Super Talent's UltraDrive ME (Indilinx). UltraDrive ME 32GB... eWiz.com $112.99 SuperMediaStore.com $179.99