- Email |
- Print |
- Comments (23) |
- Share
The performance difference between the old and the new storage test system (see charts above) wasn’t significant, but knowing that the Intel X25-E flash SSD can do 15% better than this, and that the ICH10R is much faster than our old Promise SATA 300TX4, we began looking into the issue. We also found reports on the Web about performance issues with X58 and ICH10R, such as this thread on Xtreme Systems. It starts off with throughput issues with an Acard ANS-9010 RAM drive on an Asus P6T X58 motherboard. The Acard device is faster than the Intel SSD we used, because it’s based on faster SDRAM memory.
While we didn’t try SATA drives other than the Intel X25-E SSD, we encourage anyone who is running into irregular SATA bandwidth performance to try again with all power saving options disabled. We’re confident that this is not an issue on the parts of Asus or Intel, but simple performance bottlenecks that result from the efforts to save energy.
Wear Leveling and Write Amplification Algorithm Issues?
Initially, we also believed that there could be issues with the wear leveling algorithms, or other problems related to the nature of flash-based storage devices. Wear leveling makes sure that all flash cells are being used evenly, to maximize life expectancy of the device, because flash memory cells have a limited number of write cycles. Other issues emerge from an effect which is called write amplification, that basically results in a large activity overhead. It results from the fact that flash memory has to be written in blocks, which means that even a small chunk of data will trigger the write process for an entire block (erasing and programming it).
The whole issue becomes even more complex knowing that the Intel SSDs are based on ten individual channels of flash memory, and that the physical location of data on the SSD has nothing to do with the file system that is presented to the operating system. In the case of a flash SSD, sequential throughput isn’t really sequential, and fragmentation is not an issue on a file system level, but rather on a physical level. One consequence of this is that there are known issues resulting from switching between heavy I/O intensive operations to sequential operations, as the controllers adjust to the type of workload in an effort to consider wear leveling and write amplification while maximizing performance.
However, this wasn’t the issue in the case of our performance analysis. We repeatedly used the drive erase tool Secure Erase by CMRR to “reset” the Intel X25-E SSD to reach high throughput and remove existing data debris (try this if you are seeing performance issues with your SSD). However, we had to use the software version 3.3, which worked with the X25-E and the X25-M, while we only found version 4.0 on the CMRR website.
- 1 / 2
- Next
-
Sponsored links
Related forums topics
- I7 not so hot for 3D CAD
- Upgrading My Computer
- Actuality Systems is Working on a 3D Display for Gaming
- CPU Liquid Cooling - As For The Case...
- Ok... In a bit of a pickle... mobo/ram/psu
- New i7 920 build
- ¤i7 System Build¤ Please give me advice!
- Extreme Gaming PC Build
- 1st time overclocker
- Seeking Input on First-Time PC Build
- Slow Performance: 4x OCZ SSDs and Adaptec RAID Controller
- SSD? Go or no go?
- Intel Matrix Raid 0/5 for data and SSD for system ?
- WD Raptor 74GB on a XI 2550 laptop?
Best offers
|
HDDR500E04XL 500GB Portable External... | $99.99 Dell Home More info |
|
640GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard... | $119.97 TigerDirect More info |
|
SimpleTech FS-U25/ 500E 500GB... | $139.99 STAPLES More info |
|
My Passport Essential 500GB Portable... | $129.99 STAPLES More info |
|
My Book Essential Edition External... | $148.00 ServerSupply.com More info |
- x58 ich10r
- intel x25e
- write amplification
- which is faster ssd or hdd
- flash memory sata
- ssd wear leveling
- ssd life expectancy
- ssd drive life expectancy
- only part of a read process memory or write process memory
- will initializing a drive erase the data
- p6t intel ssd
- life expectancy of hdd
- ich10r throughput
- ssd throughput
- x25 m write amplification
Partners
The Games selection
crazy :
PC Breakdown
What is worst than a Fatal Error occuring during a game you did not save? Unleash your rage at your PC in this game. Blow it to pieces, it feels so...
|
violent :
Interactive Buddy
Unwind on your interactive buddy: Do anything you want to him, it will earn you money, and you can buy other stuff to torture him with.
|
Articles like this make me wish we could rate articles. Great article!
how bout amd???
Next step is to find a workaround.
I don't yet have a system to experiment with but have a few suggestions.
How about setting process affinity and raising priority of the processes involved with disk access?
On my Dell laptop, I use an application called SpeedSwitchXP that makes it possible to manipulate the C-state policies for Demote/Promote-limits on microsecond level. It seems reasonable that introducing a little more hysteresis in the C-state policies would keep the CPU faster between disk operations.
Run 4 & 5 for X8SAX show the same stuff disabled (and a capitalization missed) .... mistake?
Do power saving options also affect hard drive performance?
No. The fastest hard drives available are still far from reaching 200 MB/s. We benchmarked two 15,000 RPM SAS drives, but could not see a difference as significant as was the case with the Intel X25-E flash SSD.
Btw, does this assessment count for raid usage as well? I'm seeing fairly irregular speeds on my raid 5 (5x500gb) on my ich9r based system. Gigabyte said it was because I was using the raid as a system drive. So I created a raid 0 of 2x500gb drives for windows, but the irregular speeds on the raid 5 remained.
Just out of curiosity, will the performance be affected if a dedicated raid card is used to connect the SSD?
@cedriclam: Hard to say, but I'd guess yes. We will look into this again soon, using different platforms.
We didn't have two X25-Es to check if this is also the case for RAID setups, but my feeling says yes. The same applies to other controllers, but we'll look into this in greater detail soon!
This may be a case of benchmarks not showing what true real world results would be. Since most things that would truly stress the hard drive performance would most likely also be using more CPU so they would not be in the low power states.
Just thinking out loud.
Tomshardware dudes:
Today I feel a deep rant, giving you 5 stars for this investigation.
Keep doing good work.
Nice work on the article! I've got a couple of questions though:
Does this affect I/O performance as well, or is it just throughput?
and,
Do you get the same affect on AMD systems?
patrick, what car are you driving in your avitar? (just curious)
Does the SSDs support Write Caching (in disk properties), and if so, have you turned it off? It's been my experience with regular HDDs that turning off write caching has an impact on CPU usage...
how bout amd???
For god sake!!! I own an Opteron, but please you AMD spammers are killing us! Who the hell would buy a crappy slow $200 Phenom to pair it up with a $800 SSD?
Buy a Tata $2500 car and put some 26in wheels on it too!
For god sake!!! I own an Opteron, but please you AMD spammers are killing us! Who the hell would buy a crappy slow $200 Phenom to pair it up with a $800 SSD?Buy a Tata $2500 car and put some 26in wheels on it too!
As far as my knowledge goes, Phenoms II are not slow. ;-) Sure they are slower than core i7, but they are fairly cheap. Not only core i7 can benefit from SSD.
I'm sure Tom's will test this issue on an AMD platform too. :-)
Do MLC flash drives also exhibit the same slowdown with the power saving features turned on?
I know they are much slower to start with, but do they also get affected equally?
... Who the hell would buy a crappy slow $200 Phenom to pair it up with a $800 SSD?Buy a Tata $2500 car and put some 26in wheels on it too!
Somebody who need the fastest SSD, on a limited budget, and found that AMD does not have the energy-saving performance issue (Who knows?. for THAT reason we want to see the AMD benchmarks)
please benchmark some of the new OCZ SSD's now that you have a new reference system, i've been dying to see real world numbers for the OCZ apex and especially the VERTEX series! Two drives that claim decent performance without completely emptying my wallet.
In the top paragraph of the "Outlook, Conclusion And Remaining Questions & Answers" section the second sentence reads: "...and the X25-E (for consumers)" That should probably be X25-M
Otherwise, very interesting article.
-mcg
If you are worried about performance are you going to be running with the power savings stuff anyways?
To me, the bigger issue is the amount of dependency this setup has on the CPU. It would be interesting to see this same set of tests run through a hardware based SAS or SATA RAID controller on a single drive (no RAID, just a drive).