Intel X25-M *G1* extremely high Disk Queue Length

[idata]

I purchased an Intel X25-M (G1) 80GB SSD in October 2009 when I built my computer - so a little over a year ago. Initially it was beautiful, very fast and reliable. Expensive, at $240 from Newegg, but I figured I was paying for quick boot times, snappy OS, fast core applications and web browsing.

Unfortunately in the last 3-4 months, performance has been degrading gradually, frmo noticeable, to bad, to outright terrible. It seems to manifest most often as insanely high disk queues in Windows 7 Resource Monitor. When I look in the Disk tab, I see the following, without fail, every time my system does its periodic lock-ups:

http://i163.photobucket.com/albums/t299/anon09876/discqueue.png Example 1

http://i163.photobucket.com/albums/t299/anon09876/discqueue2.png Example 2

Both shots are literally from the last few minutes as I was typing this message. Response time column in Resource Monitor skyrockets (sometimes 6,000+), Disk Queue Length soars to over 1.00, CPU usage drops to 0, and the system is unresponsive for 5-30 seconds at a time.

It's always the SSD. Usually the responsible processes are related to my browser (Firefox) but thats because it's my most used application.

That blue line going up indicates "% Highest Active Time" according to the Resource Monitor. This happens even under light load - I could be loading a webpage or opening a speadsheet or what have you.

Here's the pretty sorry-looking specs I get from http://i163.photobucket.com/albums/t299/anon09876/as-ssd-benchINTELSSDSA2MH0811820117-22-54PM.png AS SSD.

The performance degradation of the Intel X25-M G1 SSDs seem to be pretty well documented online, although I don't know if Intel has ever acknowledged it. The most useful article I've come across is this: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669&type=expert&pid=1 http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669&type=expert&pid=1

I was hoping I maybe just had to update firmware, but Intel's tool says I have the latest (8820) so no hope for a quick fix there. System also tells me I have TRIM on but I don't know if Intel ever updated the G1s to make use of trim.

Other information:

Windows 7 64 bit

8GB RAM

Intel Core 2 Duo CPU (E8500 @ 3.16 Ghz)

And no, I don't try to defrag this drive, I know better than that. It seems to me like the extensive writes to the firefox profile files and maybe my images folder (which I recently moved off the SSD because of all this) wore the drive out - but in only a year! I still have mechanical HDDs from 5 years ago that run indistinguishably from when they were new.

What are my options, besides "wipe with secure erase and reinstall windows", or "buy a G2" - because I'm honestly wary of Intel SSDs now, and maybe SSDs in general. I'm willing to spend money on my PC but dropping $240 ($3/GB!) for less than a year of solid performance from my storage is not worth it. I could have bumped up to a quad core CPU and picked up a fast mechanical HDD for about the price the SSD cost me.

[idata]

Your issue is exactly what you suspect.... dirty blocks. Since there are no more clean blocks, the SSD has to do a read-modify-write every single time and this causes disk latency. As you already know, the G1 does not process the TRIM command even though the OS is sending it. TRIM was specifically developed to reduce this issue.

Your best solution really is to image, secure erase, and re-image. Intel does provide the Data Migration Tool free of charge:http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=19324 http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=19324

I assume your SSD has been in use for over 2 years without a reformat? Intel SSDs are known too be very robust against dirty pages and it shows.... that long without TRIM and you only know are seeing any major performance degradation. If so, the next time you will have to perform this process.... SSDs will be less than $1/GB.

[idata]

DuckieHo wrote:

Your best solution really is to image, secure erase, and re-image. Intel does provide the Data Migration Tool free of charge:http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=19324 http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=19324

Which is what I feared. It seems like a lot of SSD users have just come to accept that having to periodically wipe everything because of drives not working correctly is normal, but to me it's a pretty onerous burden, and not something I have needed to do in the past with other drives. I'l try the migration tool, but that means I also have to spend hours moving around files to free HDD space.

Plus, doesn't reimaging like that just speed up the degradation process, because it thinks you're writing every part of the drive? I thought I'd read a few specific warnings about that. Then again it seems like the only solution anyone has for this besides "throw it out", which I admit feels tempting if I'm expected to erase the drive repeatedly.

DuckieHo wrote:

I assume your SSD has been in use for over 2 years without a reformat?

I noted that I bought it in October 2009... that's only a little over a year, and noticeable degradation began upwards of four months ago and rapidly accelerated. Only getting 11-12 months of decent performance out of a $3/GB drive may sound okay to others, but it's pretty clearly unacceptable to me.

[idata]

Hi DuckieHo, with the G1 drives if you write a large file would this help to get performance back? If I'm reading the pc perspective article correctly this is what they seem to imply that the new f/w introduced.

"It turns out the 8820 firmware was so aggressive that any fragmentation caused by the smaller combined writes was immediately cleaned up by a subsequent larger write covering that same area".

Is that what you mean when you say Intel drives have no GC, but good resistance to dirty pages?

[idata]

If you look at your AS SSD benchmark it states 31K BAD. That means your drives is incorrectly aligned, which is very strange considering you are using Win 7, which should auto align the drive when the OS is installed.

Next up AS SSD is showing your controller as pciide. Not good. What controller are you using? If you have an onboard ICH chipset try using the Intel SATA port and set the bios to AHCI mode.

Bad alignment and IDE mode = poor performance and accelerated degradation. As the drive cannot be restored with TRIM you will need to run a secure erase, however once restored if you use AHCI mode and correctly alight the drive you should find long term performance is improved.