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."

Comments

Re:Just a small dip in performance

[AllynM]

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