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

[Shikaku]

Or don't use NTFS or any kind of FAT volume.

Most Linux filesystems do not have a serious fragmentation problem, but NTFS and FAT[x] do.

citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3#Defragmentation

That being said, as the Linux System Administrator Guide states, "Modern Linux filesystem(s) keep fragmentation at a minimum by keeping all blocks in a file close together, even if they can't be stored in consecutive sectors. 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."

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

Of course they're seeing a lot of fragmentation

[jimfrost]

They're using Windows. (Half joke.)

It still astounds me that twenty-plus years after BSD FFS we have NTFS doing absolutely nothing whatsoever to avoid initial fragmentation. You want to talk about a lazy monopoly, there's proof right there; nobody else still has this problem.

Back on the subject at hand, SSDs were always likely to have teething pains, that's one of the reasons I've avoided them. We saw the same kind of thing with compact flash, if you remember. Give 'em a couple more years to work through it and get the prices down and capacities up and laptops won't have spindles anymore.

Oh yea, and try hard not to use SSDs for swap. The very thought of a Windows paging storm to an SSD makes me think of a burning wallet.