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

So f*cking what? SATA is the bottleneck nowadays.

[Qbertino]

What's the big fat hairy deal? Correct me if I'm wrong, but with SSDs access times out of the ms and in the ns range SATA is the bottleneck for those aswell. As it has been with throughput ever since we've had upwards of 5K RPM disks and upwards of 8MB cache on the controllers. Which was around 2002 IIRC.

In fact, it's actually the strangest thing to connect a SSD via SATA in the first place. A waste of power, space, time and complexity. Throughput wise anyway. An entirely different diskbus is long overdue. USB 3 could maybe be a candidate, no? One piece of outdated legacy less - allways a good thing imho. I personally thought of skipping SATA entirely and using internal USB 2 instead, back in the day when SATA was the hottest new thing.