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• 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

• Intel’s latest X25-M drive is based on the same in-house controller with 32MB cache memory as the initial X25-M series, which is why you can keep grabbing firmware upgrades at the usual location. There have been several firmware updates that help prevent substantial performance drops after intensive use. The latest firmware, which we used for the review, does not deliver much higher performance than previous X25-M drives, but the performance impact under intensive use seems to have abated to the point of being almost unnoticeable. Even after significant use of the drive, we were still seeing 200 MB/s read throughput. This latest Intel model carries a “G2” code in its model name, standing for 34nm MLC flash memory, while “G1” marks the older 50nm generation. Both perform equally, but the 34nm version is the basis for the upcoming 320GB model. We found that it required quite a bit of power to deliver workstation-type I/O (2.2W), which spoiled the efficiency results in the I/O performance per watt summary. Almost the same applies to power at maximum streaming (up to 1.8W). However, these results indicate maximum performance. Stay under these levels and you’ll find a 0.2W power requirement for HD video playback as well as 0.1W idle power draw. Only Corsair’s P256 and the OCZ Summit are close at 0.2W; all other SSDs require 0.4W to 1.0W at idle. One watt does make a difference in battery runtime over the long run. However, we’re missing progress on the performance side, as the X25-M is no longer the best flash SSD for performance users. The exception is in enterprise scenarios, which Intel dominates thanks to incredible I/O results. Almost all Indilinx-powered SSDs now deliver higher throughput than Intel. Still, the difference is small once the SSDs are in the 200 MB/s range and up.

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

  10/28/2009: Woops! Intel has pulled the firmware. Check out our news story to find out why. 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.