Intel Gen2 RST trim support + 144gb/128gb partitioned for performance increase

[idata]

http://cafe.naver.com/intelssd.cafe

The link above is for semi-official intel ssd online community in Korea, it is managed by a korean worker in Intel Company Korea.

This guy had a meeting with an engineer from Intel USA.

during the presentation, he saw that a table confirming that

when 160Gb G2 is partioned as 160gb/144gb/128gb for usable space and leaving the rest unpartitioned,

there was performance gain in 4k: 15/42/53, I personally assume that this is for 4k read.

and the engineer also mentioned that RST 9.6 or above supports trim.

I will update this thread once i confirm on these things with him.

[DZand]

2. @ vavabavava:

Thanks for your informations regarding the influence of different partition procedures on the performance of Intel 160 GB Postville SSD's.

I cannot confirm these findings.

Here are the benchmark results with my Win7 x64 system (Intel 160 GB Postville SSD connected to an Intel ICH10R SATA AHCI Controller running Intel RST driver v9.5.7.1002):

1. SSD 100% partitioned (no free = unpartitioned space available):

2. SSD 80% partitioned (32 GB free = unpartitioned space available):

Regards

Fernando

[idata]

I think he was talking about endurance.

Acording to the bellow pdf, endurance is the total amount of random host data which can be writen within the life of the drive.

X-25M with a:

160GB capacity has 15TB of random write lifetime (370TB sequencial write lifetime)

144GB capacity has 42TB of random write lifetime (370TB sequencial write lifetime)

128GB capacity has 53TB of random write lifetime (370TB sequencial write lifetime)

Monitoring write usage and endurance:

Read about it here:

http://maltiel-consulting.com/Enterprise_Data_Integrity_Increasing_Endurance.pdf http://maltiel-consulting.com/Enterprise_Data_Integrity_Increasing_Endurance.pdf

[idata]

My X-25M G2 160GB (4,5 months old)

Host Writes (E1): 2,27TB

Media Wearout indicator (E9): 0

Maybe I'll increase it's endurance...

[idata]

I have a new 160gb g2 drive. Increasing endurance for random writes to 42tb vs 15tb sounds nice.

The linked pdf explains the benefits well (PAGE 11 from document):

- Native 160GB capacity reduced by 16 GB

- 42 TB endurance capability - increases from 15 TB to 27 TB - 2.8x improvement

Great. I assume while using this drive as a boot drive, this trick will make it last a lot longer (2.8x unless sequential writes wears it out first)...

So the final question is exactly how to do it properly.

PAGE 10 of the document states:

Adjust Intel SSD spare area by limiting drive capacity

- ATA8-ACS Host Protected Area feature set is used (SET MAX ADDRESS)

- Use ATA8-ACS SECURITY ERASE UNIT prior to limiting capacity

- Setting partition to smaller size after erase is an option (less robust)

I know how to set the partition size smaller but what steps are needed for the ATA8-ACS features to be implemented.

I'm assuming there's a program one uses to secure erase the drive but what does "SET MAX ADDRESS" mean??

Sharing any knowledge of how to do this and any links to necessary programs would be extremely helpful.

Thanks.

P.S. Looking forward to TRIM supported 9.6.x drivers as well. Hopefully this means TRIM support with an Intel SSD single drive and a hard drive RAID on the same Intel controller set to RAID mode.

I assume Raided SSDs will still lack trim support - which I don't need ... yet.