The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Early TRIM Support on Indilinx Drives
As I already briefly mentioned, Indilinx has added support for the TRIM instruction in an early firmware for OCZ and Super Talent drives. OCZ calls this firmware 1.42 while Super Talent sticks with the Indilinx label: 1711. Unfortunately, the firmware caused data loss if you put your machine to sleep and has since been pulled from both OCZ and Super Talent's websites.
When it was available, the firmware did work:
| SuperTalent UltraDrive GX 1711 | 4KB Random Write IOPS |
| Clean Drive | 13.1 MB/s |
| Used Drive | 6.93 MB/s |
| Used Drive After TRIM | 12.9 MB/s |
TRIM is triggered by two things it seems. Either deleting a file and emptying the recycle bin (to truly delete it) or formatting the drive. Simply deleting a partition doesn't TRIM the entire drive as I found out the hard way. During normal use, TRIM should deliver somewhere in the upper 90s in terms of percent of new performance.
There are significant limitations to TRIM at this point. The instruction only works in a supported OS (Windows 7 and some Linux builds) and only with supported drivers. Under Windows 7 that means you have to use a Microsoft made IDE or AHCI driver (you can't install chipset drivers from anyone else).
Unfortunately if you’re running an Intel controller in RAID mode (whether non-member RAID or not), Windows 7 loads Intel’s Matrix Storage Manager driver, which presently does not pass the TRIM command. Intel is working on a solution to this and I'd expect that it'll get fixed after the release of Intel's 34nm TRIM firmware in Q4 of this year.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
The tables the drive needs to operate are also stored in a small amount of flash on the drive. The start of the circular logic happens in firmware which points to the initial flash locations, which then tells the controller how to map LBAs to flash pages.Take care,
Anand
Bakkone - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Any gossip about the new SATA?Zaitsev - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Thanks for the great article, Anand! It's been quite entertaining thus far.cosmotic - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
The page about sizes (GB, GiB, spare areas, etc) is very confusing. It sounds very much like you are confusing the 'missing' space when converting from GB to GiB with the space the drive is using for its spare area.Is it the case that the drive has 80GiB internally, uses 5.5GiB for spare, and reports it's size as 80GB to the OS leaving the OS to say 74.5GiB as usable?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
I tried to keep it simply by not introducing the Gibibyte but I see that I failed there :)You are correct, the drive has 80GiB internally, uses 5.5GiB for spare and reports that it has 156,301,488 sectors (or 74.5GiB) of user addressable space.
Take care,
Anand
sprockkets - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Weird. So what you are saying is, the drive has 80Gib capacity, but then reports it has 80GB to the OS, advertised as having an 80GB capacity, which the OS then says the capacity is 74.5GiB?sprockkets - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
As a quick followup, this whole SI vs binary thing needs to be clarified using the proper terms, as people like Microsoft and others have been saying GB when it really is GiB (or was the GiB term invented later?)For those who want a quick way to convert:
http://converter.50webs.com">http://converter.50webs.com
ilkhan - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
so they are artifically bringing the capacity down, because the drive has the full advertised capacity and is getting the "normal" real capacity. :argh:Vozer - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
I tried looking for the answer, but haven't found it anywhere so here it is: There are 10 flash memory blocks on both Intel 160GB and 80GB X25-M G2, right? (and 20 blocks with the G1).So, is the 80GB version actually a 160GB with some bad blocks or do they actually produce two different kind of flash memory block to use on their drives?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
While I haven't cracked open the 80GB G2 I have here, I don't believe the drives are binned for capacity. The 80GB model should have 10 x 8GB NAND flash devices on it, while the 160GB model should have 10 x 16GB NAND flash devices.Take care,
Ananad