Pcper: Intel X25 G1 does not need TRIM

[taltamir]

http://www.pcper.com/article.p...750&type=expert&pid=12

The gist of it is, the G1 is optimized in such a way that it does not need trim. The G2 has been optimized towards write combining, through which it wrings the 2x IOPS, at the cost of internal fragmentation dropping its write speed to 65MB/s from 80MB/s under extreme loads (doesn't happen in G1 under same load), and TRIM should eliminate this issue from the G2.

Also from looking at their numbers it seems to me that the hard speed limit by intel went from 80MB/s write on G1 to 85MB/s on G2.

 

[Old Hippie]

Good read. :thumbsup:

 

[Ourasi]

This is ofcorse just rubbish and an Intel quote from PC Perspective... On one hand he states the importance of purging LBA as it grows like a weed with invalid pages, and then he just skips right over it when talking about gen 1 X25-M.. The firmware on X25-M 50nm does not do anything with LBA, and will over time get severely fragmented, and performance suffers greatly.. The IOPS of a well used 50nm is sadly hurting badly from the lack of TRIM, and no one else then PC Perspective have the possebility to overwrite an entire drive several times to remedy performance, it's just unrealistic, and if you measure IOPS instead of a crappy sequential bench, everyone would see it as it's way easier to maintain sequential write then random write as IOPS plummits while sequential stays the same..

The 8820 firmware is so agressive it defrags while writing on an nearly empty drive (just OS on an HDDErased drive), and defrag while writing cuts IOPS extremely, just when you need it. 8820 was a stopgap solution while waiting for Trim, not a permanent solution..

Gen 1 owners payed the premium for these drives, and to get shafted like this is pretty bad... PC Perspective is infact suggesting that just because X25-M is equal or faster then comparable SSD's while in normal used state, that this should be enough for the 50nm owners and the steap price they payed, and the LBA purged vigin state Trim offers is out of reach or something you see once a year, bullshit imho..

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: Ourasi


Gen 1 owners payed the premium for these drives, and to get shafted like this is pretty bad...

Ah the penalty of being an earlier adopter! It happens all the time with video cards...

 

[taltamir]

you know pcper are the ones who actually discovered and outed the whole issue do you? the tool they used for this benchmark is actually a tool they custom wrote to prove to intel that their drive could fall into a black hole of low performance (intel first denied it, then made a firmware upgrade for it) and so on.
But if we ignore the pcper slamming... I see your point, although I am not sure how right you are. this fragmentation problem is more severe on the G2 without trim though, under the circumstances of their test.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: Rubycon

Originally posted by: Ourasi


Gen 1 owners payed the premium for these drives, and to get shafted like this is pretty bad...

Ah the penalty of being an earlier adopter! It happens all the time with video cards...

I honestly don't see why intel should be obligated to release this... should microsoft give everyone who owns windows vista or XP a copy of windows 7 while they are at it? software is not free, you pay to develop it, you pay to buy it. The hardware can certainly go further, but everyone KNEW what they were getting. I specifically did NOT buy it because it seemed unlikely that they will just gift us with TRIM, and that bet was right.

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: taltamir


I honestly don't see why intel should be obligated to release this... should microsoft give everyone who owns windows vista or XP a copy of windows 7 while they are at it? software is not free, you pay to develop it, you pay to buy it. The hardware can certainly go further, but everyone KNEW what they were getting. I specifically did NOT buy it because it seemed unlikely that they will just gift us with TRIM, and that bet was right.

MS should have given folks that bought ME free upgrade coupons to XP! :laugh:

Tech is continuously changing for the better. People expect everything and that's OK but they need to pay for it too.

 

[Ourasi]

Originally posted by: taltamir

Originally posted by: Rubycon

Originally posted by: Ourasi


Gen 1 owners payed the premium for these drives, and to get shafted like this is pretty bad...

Ah the penalty of being an earlier adopter! It happens all the time with video cards...

I honestly don't see why intel should be obligated to release this... should microsoft give everyone who owns windows vista or XP a copy of windows 7 while they are at it? software is not free, you pay to develop it, you pay to buy it. The hardware can certainly go further, but everyone KNEW what they were getting. I specifically did NOT buy it because it seemed unlikely that they will just gift us with TRIM, and that bet was right.

What are you on about man..... Firmware updates for new standards/commands is a normal behaviour for ANY company, and is not a "gift", it's just normal support that any customer should expect, ecpesially when it's such a big change like this, after all they are chosing to not support the first proper SSD filesystem they have been wanting for an eternety and craving like mad. Now they get what they wanted to fully support SSD's, and make them function properly, and they choose to not support it, what a load of crap... Most SSD controller manufacturers is working their asses off to get Trimmable firmware out by Win7 release, but not Intel, they should just get a free pass on supporting their customers in a normal way, yeah right....

The fact is, without TRIM, no SSD is working like it's intended to do, and all manufacturers - including Intel - have correctly put the blame on the lack of a proper SSD friendly OS, now we get the SSD friendly OS, and a hope that now, finally the SSD we bought for a heafty price will work like it should, instead we get shafted by Intel. I can feel the pain in my bones.... Most SSD buyers knew that they had to live with a disk that did not function properly utill Win7 hit the shelves, as Intel stated so many times, and was willing to endure that for a while, I for one are not willing to endure this permanently...

It's like buying a graphic card early that needs and support a new standard to show it's full potensial, and then the manufacturer choose not to support it when the new standard comes, forcing you to buy a new card instead... Good grief the lawsuits would hit them like a ton of bricks.......

 

[Binky]

Ummmm, welcome to AT.

 

[taltamir]

What are you on about man..... Firmware updates for new standards/commands is a normal behaviour for ANY company, and is not a "gift", it's just normal support that any customer should expect, ecpesially when it's such a big change like this, after all they are chosing to not support the first proper SSD filesystem they have been wanting for an eternety and craving like mad. Now they get what they wanted to fully support SSD's, and make them function properly, and they choose to not support it, what a load of crap... Most SSD controller manufacturers is working their asses off to get Trimmable firmware out by Win7 release, but not Intel, they should just get a free pass on supporting their customers in a normal way, yeah right....

TRIM is a performance upgrade, pure and simple, most manufacturers are incapable of competing with intels out of the box performance, so they work their asses off to give such free performance boost upgrades to compete with intel, and also give people the impression that buying their product will eventually pay off via upgrades making it faster than intel's.

The fact is, without TRIM, no SSD is working like it's intended to do, and all manufacturers - including Intel - have correctly put the blame on the lack of a proper SSD friendly OS

Except for intel, which just made a controller powerful enough to not care if the OS is friendly or not.

It's like buying a graphic card early that needs and support a new standard to show it's full potensial, and then the manufacturer choose not to support it when the new standard comes, forcing you to buy a new card instead... Good grief the lawsuits would hit them like a ton of bricks.......

DX10 cards are turing complete, they can run any code you want. This means every single one of them can be upgraded for DX10.1 and DX11 compatibility via software / firmware. Not a single one of them has. (although they did all get an upgrade from openGL2 to openGL3).
This is because when you buy a card you buy a certain set of features and performance, they are not obligated to give you more, and they are not going to, because if they did you would have no reason to buy their newer products.

 

[sharad]

Originally posted by: taltamir

Originally posted by: Rubycon

Originally posted by: Ourasi


Gen 1 owners payed the premium for these drives, and to get shafted like this is pretty bad...

Ah the penalty of being an earlier adopter! It happens all the time with video cards...

I honestly don't see why intel should be obligated to release this... should microsoft give everyone who owns windows vista or XP a copy of windows 7 while they are at it? software is not free, you pay to develop it, you pay to buy it. The hardware can certainly go further, but everyone KNEW what they were getting. I specifically did NOT buy it because it seemed unlikely that they will just gift us with TRIM, and that bet was right.

While your bet paid off, I think your Microsoft analogy is incorrect. Microsoft regularly release patches for performance issues. They even add features with their Service Packs, case in point Windows XP SP2. What do you think should happen if the gen 2 disks have a serious problem and Intel just told you to buy gen 3 instead? Gen 1 owners aren't asking for a new disk here. While Intel certainly doesn't have any obligation to release TRIM firmware (if PcPer is right) for gen 1 disks they certainly will piss off a lot of people if they don't and the performance degradation indeed becomes a problem.

/Edited from "I don't think" to "I think".

 

[taltamir]

now who is making an incorrect microsoft analogy?
Certain performance improvements get bundled together into a new OS, like windows 7. Other times it doesn't make sense to make a whole new OS out of it, early after vista released, patching vista increases vista sales... making a new version called windows 6.1 will cause resentment and refusal to purchase in anyone but apple fanatics. But there is no obligation on microsoft's part to IMPROVE a product.
You are also not clear on what constitutes an improvement, and what constitutes a bugfix

 

[sharad]

Originally posted by: taltamir
now who is making an incorrect microsoft analogy?

It's certainly not me. You brought up Microsoft comparison, so I am adding facts.

Originally posted by: taltamir
Certain performance improvements get bundled together into a new OS, like windows 7.

Windows XP SP2 was compiled with Microsoft's new VC++ 2005 optimizing compiler and had many performance fixes. This is true for other Microsoft products like SQL Server.

Originally posted by: taltamir
Other times it doesn't make sense to make a whole new OS out of it, early after vista released, patching vista increases vista sales...

XP SP2 came out almost 3 years after XP was shipped. It wasn't early on and it wasn't to increase sales.

Originally posted by: taltamir
making a new version called windows 6.1 will cause resentment and refusal to purchase in anyone but apple fanatics.

Windows 7's version is 6.1. Price not withstanding, the Gen 2 drive is more of an OSX type update.

Originally posted by: taltamir
But there is no obligation on microsoft's part to IMPROVE a product.

I never said there is any obligation on Intel's part either. It's what they think about their customers. If there are indeed performance degradation issues, which could easily be addressed by OS sending a TRIM command to the disk. Also everyone, including Anand himself, expected Intel to do the right thing and add the TRIM support.

Originally posted by: taltamir
You are also not clear on what constitutes an improvement, and what constitutes a bugfix

If the drive significantly degrades performance with usage then it's a bug. If Intel managed to make the drive use less power that would be an improvement.

 

[Forumpanda]

Originally posted by: sharad

Originally posted by: taltamir
You are also not clear on what constitutes an improvement, and what constitutes a bugfix

If the drive significantly degrades performance with usage then it's a bug. If Intel managed to make the drive use less power that would be an improvement.

I'm not an Intel fan but, the thing is the drive does not degrade significantly in performance with usage.
It is only when running a very specific benchmark program to do random writes over the entire drive the performance is lower for a little while.

The analogy would be like burning a cars tires by doing wheel spin and then calling it a bug that the cars performance is degraded until new tires are put on, there is a difference between using and torturing a product.

No one has shown that the drives decreases in performance over time from actual real world usage, because they don't.

 

[Forumpanda]

I fail at forums

 

[Emulex]

Originally posted by: Forumpanda

Originally posted by: sharad

Originally posted by: taltamir
You are also not clear on what constitutes an improvement, and what constitutes a bugfix

If the drive significantly degrades performance with usage then it's a bug. If Intel managed to make the drive use less power that would be an improvement.

I'm not an Intel fan but, the thing is the drive does not degrade significantly in performance with usage.
It is only when running a very specific benchmark program to do random writes over the entire drive the performance is lower for a little while.

The analogy would be like burning a cars tires by doing wheel spin and then calling it a bug that the cars performance is degraded until new tires are put on, there is a difference between using and torturing a product.

No one has shown that the drives decreases in performance over time from actual real world usage, because they don't.

which filesystem are you quoting for performance loss? zfs? ntfs (version?)? ext3?

the fault is in the fact the SSD is not application and filesystem aware. sql server could probably handle raw flash better and faster than intel. why? it knows exactly how/where to put data and when.

the sad thing is until microsoft buys intel we may never see that level of integration. application aware storage controllers.

 

[coolVariable]

Originally posted by: Ourasi
This is ofcorse just rubbish and an Intel quote from PC Perspective... On one hand he states the importance of purging LBA as it grows like a weed with invalid pages, and then he just skips right over it when talking about gen 1 X25-M.. The firmware on X25-M 50nm does not do anything with LBA, and will over time get severely fragmented, and performance suffers greatly.. The IOPS of a well used 50nm is sadly hurting badly from the lack of TRIM, and no one else then PC Perspective have the possebility to overwrite an entire drive several times to remedy performance, it's just unrealistic, and if you measure IOPS instead of a crappy sequential bench, everyone would see it as it's way easier to maintain sequential write then random write as IOPS plummits while sequential stays the same..

The 8820 firmware is so agressive it defrags while writing on an nearly empty drive (just OS on an HDDErased drive), and defrag while writing cuts IOPS extremely, just when you need it. 8820 was a stopgap solution while waiting for Trim, not a permanent solution..

Gen 1 owners payed the premium for these drives, and to get shafted like this is pretty bad... PC Perspective is infact suggesting that just because X25-M is equal or faster then comparable SSD's while in normal used state, that this should be enough for the 50nm owners and the steap price they payed, and the LBA purged vigin state Trim offers is out of reach or something you see once a year, bullshit imho..

Very true.
intel better release a firmware for these drives with TRIM support. That is something that should have been included from the very beginning!

 

[coolVariable]

Originally posted by: Ourasi

Originally posted by: taltamir

Originally posted by: Rubycon

Originally posted by: Ourasi


Gen 1 owners payed the premium for these drives, and to get shafted like this is pretty bad...

Ah the penalty of being an earlier adopter! It happens all the time with video cards...

I honestly don't see why intel should be obligated to release this... should microsoft give everyone who owns windows vista or XP a copy of windows 7 while they are at it? software is not free, you pay to develop it, you pay to buy it. The hardware can certainly go further, but everyone KNEW what they were getting. I specifically did NOT buy it because it seemed unlikely that they will just gift us with TRIM, and that bet was right.

What are you on about man..... Firmware updates for new standards/commands is a normal behaviour for ANY company, and is not a "gift", it's just normal support that any customer should expect, ecpesially when it's such a big change like this, after all they are chosing to not support the first proper SSD filesystem they have been wanting for an eternety and craving like mad. Now they get what they wanted to fully support SSD's, and make them function properly, and they choose to not support it, what a load of crap... Most SSD controller manufacturers is working their asses off to get Trimmable firmware out by Win7 release, but not Intel, they should just get a free pass on supporting their customers in a normal way, yeah right....

The fact is, without TRIM, no SSD is working like it's intended to do, and all manufacturers - including Intel - have correctly put the blame on the lack of a proper SSD friendly OS, now we get the SSD friendly OS, and a hope that now, finally the SSD we bought for a heafty price will work like it should, instead we get shafted by Intel. I can feel the pain in my bones.... Most SSD buyers knew that they had to live with a disk that did not function properly utill Win7 hit the shelves, as Intel stated so many times, and was willing to endure that for a while, I for one are not willing to endure this permanently...

It's like buying a graphic card early that needs and support a new standard to show it's full potensial, and then the manufacturer choose not to support it when the new standard comes, forcing you to buy a new card instead... Good grief the lawsuits would hit them like a ton of bricks.......

Very true!

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: coolVariable

Originally posted by: Ourasi

Originally posted by: taltamir

Originally posted by: Rubycon

Originally posted by: Ourasi


Gen 1 owners payed the premium for these drives, and to get shafted like this is pretty bad...

Ah the penalty of being an earlier adopter! It happens all the time with video cards...

I honestly don't see why intel should be obligated to release this... should microsoft give everyone who owns windows vista or XP a copy of windows 7 while they are at it? software is not free, you pay to develop it, you pay to buy it. The hardware can certainly go further, but everyone KNEW what they were getting. I specifically did NOT buy it because it seemed unlikely that they will just gift us with TRIM, and that bet was right.

What are you on about man..... Firmware updates for new standards/commands is a normal behaviour for ANY company, and is not a "gift", it's just normal support that any customer should expect, ecpesially when it's such a big change like this, after all they are chosing to not support the first proper SSD filesystem they have been wanting for an eternety and craving like mad. Now they get what they wanted to fully support SSD's, and make them function properly, and they choose to not support it, what a load of crap... Most SSD controller manufacturers is working their asses off to get Trimmable firmware out by Win7 release, but not Intel, they should just get a free pass on supporting their customers in a normal way, yeah right....

The fact is, without TRIM, no SSD is working like it's intended to do, and all manufacturers - including Intel - have correctly put the blame on the lack of a proper SSD friendly OS, now we get the SSD friendly OS, and a hope that now, finally the SSD we bought for a heafty price will work like it should, instead we get shafted by Intel. I can feel the pain in my bones.... Most SSD buyers knew that they had to live with a disk that did not function properly utill Win7 hit the shelves, as Intel stated so many times, and was willing to endure that for a while, I for one are not willing to endure this permanently...

It's like buying a graphic card early that needs and support a new standard to show it's full potensial, and then the manufacturer choose not to support it when the new standard comes, forcing you to buy a new card instead... Good grief the lawsuits would hit them like a ton of bricks.......

Very true!

so you say that nvidia is obligated to make its DX10 cards support DX10.1 and DX11? because as turing complete computational machines they are FULLY CAPABLE OF DOING SO!
nVidia CAN program a shader based applet to do DX10.1 and DX11 code on current cards. Performance might not be all that good, but it will work...

 

[sharad]

Originally posted by: taltamir

Originally posted by: coolVariable

Originally posted by: Ourasi

Originally posted by: taltamir

Originally posted by: Rubycon

Originally posted by: Ourasi


Gen 1 owners payed the premium for these drives, and to get shafted like this is pretty bad...

Ah the penalty of being an earlier adopter! It happens all the time with video cards...

I honestly don't see why intel should be obligated to release this... should microsoft give everyone who owns windows vista or XP a copy of windows 7 while they are at it? software is not free, you pay to develop it, you pay to buy it. The hardware can certainly go further, but everyone KNEW what they were getting. I specifically did NOT buy it because it seemed unlikely that they will just gift us with TRIM, and that bet was right.

What are you on about man..... Firmware updates for new standards/commands is a normal behaviour for ANY company, and is not a "gift", it's just normal support that any customer should expect, ecpesially when it's such a big change like this, after all they are chosing to not support the first proper SSD filesystem they have been wanting for an eternety and craving like mad. Now they get what they wanted to fully support SSD's, and make them function properly, and they choose to not support it, what a load of crap... Most SSD controller manufacturers is working their asses off to get Trimmable firmware out by Win7 release, but not Intel, they should just get a free pass on supporting their customers in a normal way, yeah right....

The fact is, without TRIM, no SSD is working like it's intended to do, and all manufacturers - including Intel - have correctly put the blame on the lack of a proper SSD friendly OS, now we get the SSD friendly OS, and a hope that now, finally the SSD we bought for a heafty price will work like it should, instead we get shafted by Intel. I can feel the pain in my bones.... Most SSD buyers knew that they had to live with a disk that did not function properly utill Win7 hit the shelves, as Intel stated so many times, and was willing to endure that for a while, I for one are not willing to endure this permanently...

It's like buying a graphic card early that needs and support a new standard to show it's full potensial, and then the manufacturer choose not to support it when the new standard comes, forcing you to buy a new card instead... Good grief the lawsuits would hit them like a ton of bricks.......

Very true!

so you say that nvidia is obligated to make its DX10 cards support DX10.1 and DX11? because as turing complete computational machines they are FULLY CAPABLE OF DOING SO!
nVidia CAN program a shader based applet to do DX10.1 and DX11 code on current cards. Performance might not be all that good, but it will work...

I don't think that's what the poster meant - although the wording could have been clearer. Nobody expects older cards to support new DirectX features. But did reviewers and users expect Intel to add TRIM via a new firmware? Absolutely. You see, users are not expecting Intel to improve performance of their gen 1, so they somehow reach the performance of gen 2 disks. They do however expect their gen 1 disks to keep performing at gen 1 speeds without degradation. Now I hope PcPer (and you) are right and gen 1 disks keep performing at their peak or at least don't degrade significantly over time. However if they are wrong and the performance does degrade significantly over time then that doesn't mean people should suck it up and stop expecting Intel to release TRIM support. Intel might still choose not to add TRIM, pissing off customers in the process. I believe this is the point I and others are trying to make here.

 

[alcoholbob]

Not releasing a TRIM update on their older drives is as arbitrary as redlining the drive at 70MB/s for product segmentation. Imagine if nvidia were to say "we are no longer releasing driver updates on 65nm GT200 but we will for the 55nm GT200".

 

[Old Hippie]

I'll bet the majority of buyers don't care as long as our drives give acceptable performance.

It'd be nice but I bought the product "as is" with no expectations other than the drive will work as promised.

So far, so good.

If you bought an Intel drive and don't like what they've done, vote with your wallet and don't buy Intel again.