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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Bonesdad - Sunday, October 10, 2010 - link
Been over a year since this article was published...still very relevant. Any plans to update it with the latest products/drivers/firmware? There have been some significant updates, and it would be good to at least have updated comparisons.Well done, more more more!
hescominsoon - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Excellent article but you left out sandforce. I'm curious if this was an oversight or a purposeful moission.PHT - Friday, September 28, 2012 - link
This article is fantastic, the best I ever read about SSD.Any follow up with new SATA III drives and new controllers like SandForce, new Indilinx etc.?
I will be glad to see it.
My Best
Zygmunt
lucasgonz - Wednesday, October 16, 2013 - link
Hello everyone.This post is quite old but I hope someone can answer.
I am concerned about the life of my ssd (sandisk extreme 240). I performed partitions ignoring the issue of the level of wear and partitions. I have it for one year ago with a 30gb partition and one with 200GB. I wanted to use large drive for data but I did not have time for that and just use the first 30gb partition . My question is if the ssd may be damaged by using only a little segment. DiskInfo shows 10tb reading 18 tb and writing.
sorry my poor English.
Thanks for any help.
Ojaswin Singh - Monday, January 13, 2014 - link
Hey,This is the most informative article i have ever read.Can You Please clear Out Some Of my Doubts:-1.Does Playing Video Games or Running Programs add to Writing on the SSD
2.Is 1 Write Cycle=Filling 120GB of SSD once
3.I really write on my HDD a lot(Seriusly a Lot) So how much life cycle can i expect from Samsung 840 SSD(Neither Pro nor EVO) I mean for how much time can i expect it to be writable
Please Help me cause i want the speeds of SSD but i want it to last for me too
Thanks,
Ojaswin