Slow SSD Peformance

[kvrr79]

Hi,

After using this drive for 45 days. The drive slowly became slower than regular hard drive.

I am constantly running wiper. But no speed gain.

My Windows 7 system occationally freezes when I try to do Multi tasking like Opening multiple Explorer windows. I have to kill that process inorder to avoid freezing.

Can GSKILL team help me out here?

Thanks,
Venkat

[barrychuck]

Re: Slow SSD Performance

The first question is how full is your drive?

The whole point of the wiper tool is to clear unused block of flash memory so that they will be the ones used to write to. If any SSD is near full capacity, no controller or firmware tricks are going to get around the fact that you must erase blocks before they can be written. Small writes amplify this, so this is why you see stuttering. Basically, no SSD should ever go much over half full. You effectively "need" half the drive for random writes that occur. Even the Intel drives have this problem. I also noticed this on my SLC Samsung drive. All flash has an extended time cycle when a block must be cleared and then rewritten. It's far worse for valid data blocks as the the entire block gets cached someplace and the "changed" data (the delta) gets rewritten to the block (because all the other blocks are full).

Also, every time you use wiper, you are using a write cycle on all of the blocks that are not "used". This shortens the lifespan of the SSD, since we are puposely aborting the firmware write leveling so that we can maintain the "performance" of writing to blank blocks. At some point, those block are getting more "wear" and will fail. Hopefully, the firmware is smart enough to start clipping capacity, otherwise, the drive will die.

[kvrr79]

Thanks barrychuck for the info.

My 128Gb is bootcamped by allocation 64 for MAC and 64 for Windows 7.

I currently have 18GB left out of 64GB on Windows 7.