Intel SSD 520 Review: Cherryville Brings Reliability to SandForce
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 6, 2012 11:00 AM ESTPerformance Over Time & TRIM
SandForce's controllers have always behaved poorly if you pushed them into their worst case scenario. Should you fill a SF-2281 based drive completely with incompressible data then continue to write to the drive with more incompressible data (overwriting some of what you've already written) to fill up the spare area you'll back the controller into a corner that it can't get out of, even with TRIM. It's not a terribly realistic situation since anyone using an SF-2281 SSD as a boot drive will at least have Windows (or some other easily compressible OS) installed, and it's fairly likely that you'll have other things stored on your SSD in addition to large movies/photos. Regardless, it's a corner case that we do have to pay attention to.
I was curious to see if Intel's firmware did anything differently than the standard SandForce build used by other partners. To find out I took an Intel SSD 520 (240GB) and a Kingston HyperX (SF-2281 240GB) and filled both drives with incompressible data. I then ran a 60 minute 4KB random write torture test (QD32), once again, with incompressible data. Normally I'd use HDTach to chart performance over time however HDTach measures performance with highly compressible data so we wouldn't get a good representation of performance here. Instead I ran AS-SSD to get a good idea for incompressible sequential performance in this worst case state. Afterwards, I TRIMed the drives and ran AS-SSD again to see if TRIM could recover the drive's performance.
| Intel SSD 520 - Resiliency - AS SSD Sequential Write Speed - 6Gbps | |||||
| Clean | After Torture | After TRIM | |||
| Intel SSD 520 240GB | 284.5 MB/s | 162.9 MB/s | 162.9 MB/s | ||
| Kingston HyperX 240GB | 289.3 MB/s | 162.5 MB/s | 162.5 MB/s | ||
Surprisingly enough, Cherryville doesn't actually perform any differently than the stock SandForce firmware in this case. SandForce definitely improved the worst case scenario performance with the SF-2281 compared to the first generation controller, and it also improved performance compared to earlier builds of the 2281 firmware, but Intel appears to have not done anything above and beyond here. Based on these results I'd be willing to bet that Intel doesn't have source code access to the SF-2281 firmware otherwise it would've worked on a solution to this corner case. Performance in this worst case scenario isn't terrible but the fact that it's irrecoverable even after a TRIM is what's most troubling. Again, I don't see most end users backing themselves into this corner but it's worth pointing out.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
138 Comments
View All Comments
eman17j - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - link
Are you trying to say that Amd's cpus are unreliable? I have one and I have no problems at all with it. I dont have crashes or freezes.bji - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - link
He's a beginner. He doesn't know what he's talking about.eman17j - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - link
Wrong because the business buys the drive at an higher price then raises the price on their product or service and passes the cost of the drive to the consumer so the consumer ends up paying for the price premium anywaysgamoniac - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link
Is playing game part of Brian's job description?Brian Klug - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link
Heheh, I guess you could say that for once, yes, playing BF3 was part of the job! :)-Brian
Oberst - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link
Seems like there is the first customer with the bsod bug in the intel forum. It seems like the reliability is no better than at all the other SF drives and it's just a matter of (bad) luck.http://communities.intel.com/message/149389#149389
Makaveli - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link
That tool installed his brand new Intel 520 drive in IDE mode?NitroWare - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - link
You would be surprised how many laptop owners (and even desktop owners) are unaware that they should use AHCI mode. I can guarantee that there are millions of boards out there with modern HDD or SSD in non optimal mode.Another large tech site interviewed several mobo vendors about Z68 and most sad it was supposed to ship with RAID mode as default due to the SRT feature., the reality is much different.
2010 1st gen core i5 thinkpad has problems with third party SSDs which some users claim IDE mode is the only way they get their 'cheap' SSD working
There is a mentality that if a user knows how to physically install a drive then they do not need to do anything else. Then there is the old drivers issues, yeah whatever the motherboard came with at best.
That is something the chipset vendors need to work on. Some motherboards put up a warning if you try to turn AHCI off with an auto counter to re-enable it.
It is definitely possible that a BIOS can detect a SSD and at least put up a text message saying what the recommend setting is. It is hard to ignore such messages.
mustardman29 - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link
I was trying to tell the OCZ support guys ever since their latest firmware that the BSOD is still there. It happens a lot less but it's still there.They were trying to tell me it was something wrong with my system and that I should re-install windows. That the kind of thing I would expect to hear from a 1-800 number that goes to someone in India reading a script. Not from a drive manufacturer.
I'll never buy another OCZ drive. Not because of the problem but because of the way they are dealing with it. Pretending it's does not exist and telling people to re-install windows.
And yes, Sandforce deserves part of the blame for pretending there was no problem for a long time despite many people saying otherwise.
However, I would not hesitate to buy this intel drive. They obviously found the problem and fixed it with their own firmware. Something the controller manufacturer seems incapable of doing.
ckryan - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link
You're not crazy. SF2281s still have stability issues, and the TRIM related BSODs are still happening too. Most people won't ever have problems with a 2281, but many did and still live with the occasional problem. The last round of FW did indeed fix many problems (it solved mine), but others still suffer. I stopped using the drives just because I have quite a few I play with, but you can still get a 2281 to flop on TRIM every once in a while.I'm sure Intel really put the screws to Cherryville's FW, but I think some of the issues with 2281 and their ilk are still mysteries to the SF partners, and possibly even LSI/SF and Intel (the expect fewer problems?).
Here's hoping the next gen of the SF is bulletproof.