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All Solid State Drives Suffer Performance Drop-off
Lucas123 writes "The recent revelation that Intel's consumer X25-M solid state drive had a firmware bug that drastically affected its performance led Computerworld to question whether all SSDs can suffer performance degradation due to fragmentation issues. It seems vendors are well aware that the specifications they list on drive packaging represent burst speeds when only sequential writes are being recorded, but after use performance drops markedly over time. The drives with better controllers tend to level out, but others appear to be able to suffer performance problems. Still not fully baked are benchmarking standards that are expected out later this year from several industry organizations that will eventually compel manufacturers to list actual performance with regard to sequential and random reads and writes as well as the drive's expected lifespan under typical conditions."
Not, "I said," "it said." Damn my incompetence!
They actually have PCI-E versions as well, to bypass the SATA bottleneck.
Some filesystems, like ext3, effectively allocate the free block that is nearest to other blocks in a file. Therefore it is not necessary to worry about fragmentation in a Linux system."
Right, the answer to every Linux problem. Redefine the unavoidable to "not a problem" while the other guy "has it" and "it is bad".
Grandparent, and the whole chain, are *way* off base here. SSD LBA remap table fragmentation has absolutely nothing to do with file system fragmentation. ext3 will cause just as much of a slowdown as NTFS would. I share the same appreciation for Linux as everyone else around here, but in this case it is in no way the magic bullet we might like it to be.
Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective
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wrote a thorough review of SSDs, including the X25, complete with a full technical explanation of exactly what causes the performance degradation.
About 2 months ago.