Intel SSD

[Catamer]

wow, I just installed windows i7 beta on a raid-0 of two intel SSD drives....
the drives are just incredible...
even browsing the internet seems faster.

[Chranny]

wow, I just installed windows i7 beta on a raid-0 of two intel SSD drives....
the drives are just incredible...
even browsing the internet seems faster.

Hehe. I wish I had the money for two SSD's in RAID 0. /drool
Only negative thing I can say about SSD's (MLC's) is that if it does alot of writing it lowers the longevity of the drive by a significant amount. :<

[magwo]

wow, I just installed windows i7 beta on a raid-0 of two intel SSD drives....
the drives are just incredible...
even browsing the internet seems faster.

Hehe. I wish I had the money for two SSD's in RAID 0. /drool
Only negative thing I can say about SSD's (MLC's) is that if it does alot of writing it lowers the longevity of the drive by a significant amount. :<

Myth.

[Bovidae]

wow, I just installed windows i7 beta on a raid-0 of two intel SSD drives....
the drives are just incredible...
even browsing the internet seems faster.

Hehe. I wish I had the money for two SSD's in RAID 0. /drool
Only negative thing I can say about SSD's (MLC's) is that if it does alot of writing it lowers the longevity of the drive by a significant amount. :<

Myth.

If this is really a myth, someone should inform Intel/OCZ/Samsung/etc because they all support this myth...

[not5150]

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39204/135/

The write longevity issue is with older SSDs. Even under a 24/7 constant write at maximum interface speed, you'll hit the write limit after several months to a year. Under normal workload, they'll last decades.

For those saying the writes significantly decrease longevity, have you personally ever hit the write limit? Have you met anyone that has hit the limit?

[Chorizotarian]

There is an ongoing controversy over how SSD performance will hold up over time. I have no idea who is right.
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news...nce-drop-1.ars

[KvdM]

Unfortunately the technology that these drives are based on does wear out over time. To compensate for this wear various manufacturers (Intel as well) have added algorithms that spread the write operations evenly accross the SSD. For the Intel drives it seems that the algorithm causes internal fragmentation and eventually degrades the ssd's performance.

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid...e=expert&pid=1

[Noids99]

Intel are aware of this apparently and are devising a defragmenting utility to address it. As you are probably aware, this is very different to spindle hdd defragmentation. If you really want to test out the write limit on an MLC drive then windows defrag it a few times...

[Catamer]

The reason fragmentation slows down a standard hard drive is the average latency, or the average time it takes to reposistion the heads for reading in a new location.
framgented drives have to move the heads more often than unfragmented drives thus slowing down the read or write process.
there are other problems with a regular hard drive fragmentation in that the directory structure or the mapping of where the file fragments on the disk reside also have to be read to find out where to get the fragments.

I find it hard to believe that an SSD drive would be that bothered by fragmentation mainly because there is latency or no time required to move the heads around.
the only thing that should be a minor problem is that it takes multiple read commands to find the fragmented data.

I didn't buy an SSD drive before because a lot of reviews from actual users showed that many of the first SSD drives had serious write delays causing short term system lockups meaning the SSD was slower than a regular drive
however these Intel drives seem to have this fixed, at least I haven't seen anything like this.
the SSD are silent and VERY cool to the touch while my hard drives make at least some noise and get pretty warm to the touch.

[Noids99]

Click the link 2 posts above. It gives a fairly good explanation fo the type of fragmentation that occurs. You are right in that SSDs do not suffer from the standard block fragmentation which occurs in normal HDDs but that is not the sort of fragmentation we are referring to. The reason Intel SSDs are so much better in write performance is that they basically combine many sub block size writes into a full block write. The problem is when a sub block size file is deleted leaving intrablock fragmentation. Over time either the block needs to be rewritten entirely, which requires further write wear, or performance degrades. This is the problem which Intel have acknowledged and are currently seeking a solution for.