Intel 520 Life Time Throttling

[idata]

Can you please confirm if the 520 has deployed the Life Time Throttle capability that is part of the Sandforce feature set?

If Life Time Throttling has been enabled how much write activity is required before the controller will throttle writes?

[idata]

Good question. Are you aware of any issues arising from that "feature" in other SandForce SSDs? I don't recall if the guys at Extremesystems doing the SSD write marathons (as I call them) ran into that with SF drives.

[idata]

CT 03/2012 page 66/67 . : SSD Zerstörung: SSD im Härttest

OCZ Solid 3 with Sandforce 2281-Controller: The write performance drops after 25 TB WRITE Data from +/- 140 MB/s ---> <10 MB/s.

[idata]

The option to set life time throttling is a vendor configurable option. The vendor has four options:

No throttling

1 year warranty

3 year warranty

5-year warranty

OCZ drives tested to date have been set to 1 year. Mushin and Corsair drives that have been tested have no throttling. Throttling is based on power on hours not calendar hours. A 5 year setting would result in more aggressive throttling than a 1 year setting.

Intel (unlike other vendors) have been given much wider access to customise the Sandforce firmware, but no one knows yet if Intel have selected to use this feature. It will be known soon however as it is currently being tested

I have seen write speeds drop to 6 MB/s after throttling has kicked in. The only way to remove throttling is idle time. As Intel drives are popular in semi enterprise applications I doubt it has been enabled. If it has anyone using the 520 for an onerous enterpise workload is in for a surprise.

[idata]

redux, you said it about the enterprise environment. I would be surprised if any throttling was enabled. I wonder if that can be checked in the "Drive Details" entries, which can be seen in the SSD Toolbox.