The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Free Space to the Rescue
There’s not much we can do about the scenario I just described; you can’t erase individual pages, that’s the reality of NAND-flash. There are some things we can do to make it better though.
The most frequently used approach is to under provision the drive. Let’s say we only shipped our drive with 20KB of space to the end user, but we actually had 24KB of flash on the drive. The remaining 4KB could be used by our controller; how, you say?
In the scenario from the last page we had to write 12KB of data to our drive, but we only had 8KB in free pages and a 4KB invalid page. In order to write the 12KB we had to perform a read-modify-write which took over twice as long as a 12KB write should take.
If we had an extra 4KB of space our 12KB write from earlier could’ve proceeded without a problem. Take a look at how it would’ve worked:
We’d write 8KB to the user-facing flash, and then the remaining 4KB would get written to the overflow flash. Our write speed would still be 12KB/s and everything would be right in the world.
Now if we deleted and tried to write 4KB of data however, we’d run into the same problem again. We’re simply delaying the inevitable by shipping our drive with an extra 4KB of space.
The more spare-area we ship with, the longer our performance will remain at its peak level. But again, you have to pay the piper at some point.
Intel ships its X25-M with 7.5 - 8% more area than is actually reported to the OS. The more expensive enterprise version ships with the same amount of flash, but even more spare area. Random writes all over the drive are more likely in a server environment so Intel keeps more of the flash on the X25-E as spare area. You’re able to do this yourself if you own an X25-M; simply perform a secure erase and immediately partition the drive smaller than its actual capacity. The controller will use the unpartitioned space as spare area.
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Hrel - Thursday, April 09, 2009 - link
Instead of making me dinner can you send me that test system instead??? Please!!! ReplyHrel - Thursday, April 09, 2009 - link
I was wondering what controller the OCZ solid Series is based on??? Will I experience hiccups with that drive or not? Is the point of my question. Replysfisher64 - Wednesday, April 08, 2009 - link
I just purchased a Dell Latitude E6400 with a 64GB Ultra Performance Solid State Drive. Does anyone know what type of drive this is, and where it fits in the spectrum described in this article? ReplyBaffo - Saturday, April 11, 2009 - link
The Dells use the Samsung drives (you should see this on the bottom if you pull it out). However, as much as I wish this was one of the newer controllers (I have a few of these at work as well), the testing cycles demanded by Dell probably mean these are the older controllers. Replymarraco - Tuesday, April 07, 2009 - link
This article is popular :) ReplyBLHealthy4life - Monday, April 06, 2009 - link
Intel 9.1.1.1010 (Intel) Where are these drivers? I can only find version 1007 and not 1010....Thanks Reply
BLHealthy4life - Sunday, April 12, 2009 - link
found it....Intel obviously keeps the X58 chipset drivers current for their own boards, just not other mfgs boards....
They installed fine on my R2E..
BL Reply
irondukes - Friday, April 03, 2009 - link
Hi-- Do SLCs suffer from performance degradation, or are the controllers pretty agressive at erasing the data since they have far longer read-write cycles? Please help! Deciding between an X25E and X25M Replymdavies - Friday, April 03, 2009 - link
I'm reading this about a day late - got my Patriot PE256GS25SSDR 2.5" 256GB yesterday since I'm bad about destroying hard drives. this drive, in a word, was excruciating. I'll be replacing it with one of your recommended drives today.Thanks Reply
sotoa - Friday, April 03, 2009 - link
Long time reader, first time post.I really liked the background story and appreciate how Anand delves deep into the the SSD's (as well as other products in other articles).
Thanks for looking out for the little guy!
Keep up the great work! Reply