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

But this is filesystem dependent

[Sleepy]

This is going to be a much bigger problem on FAT32 and NTFS, than modern Linux filesystems because FAT32 and NTFS fragment after very little use.

If you're worried, increase your block size. That shouldn't be a problem if you're writing media to the disk (as opposed to a billion tiny files, in which case large blocks would waste extra disk... but still be able to withstand fragmentation...)

Re:But this is filesystem dependent

[RiotingPacifist]

So we should all go back to reiser3 the fragmentation-less filesystem? :P