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.

[mmokk]

redux wrote:

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.

setup only aligns when it creates the partition. on a blank drive, not a problem, but if a partition already existed (say, from a previous windows xp installation), and he simply formatted it instead of deleting and recreating, then alignment would be off. or, perhaps he restored a misaligned image.

[mmokk]

jkjkjk wrote:

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

intel acknowledged it with new firmware. pcper then retested the drive: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=691 http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=691

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.

at this point you will need to secure erase the drive and reinstall the os. use the ssd for the os and applications, and put large files (like videos and pictures) on a hard drive.

how exactly did you originally install windows 7? as others have mentioned, the partition alignment is wrong.

[idata]

mistermokkori wrote:

intel acknowledged it with new firmware. pcper then retested the drive: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=691 http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=691

But I have the 8820 firmware already, according to Intel's firmware update tool. So unfortunately this fix does not help me.

mistermokkori wrote:

how exactly did you originally install windows 7? as others have mentioned, the partition alignment is wrong.

Regular install on a fresh SSD. No partitions. No messing around. Just a one and done straight install. I have never formatted or imaged the drive before.

[idata]

As mistermokkori points out, if you image the drive you not get rid of the alignment issue. I believe it is possible to realign the drive once the OS is installed, but I haven't done it myself.

What controller are you using? Do you have an ICH chipset?

You also really need to be in AHCI mode.

From an Intel rep post:

"Why enable AHCI mode? The answer isn't simple, but one of the bigger advantages is NCQ, or native command queuing.

NCQ is a technology that allows hard drives to internally optimize the order of the commands they receive in order to increase their performance. In an SSD everything is different. There is no need to optimize the command queue, but the result of enabling NCQ is the same – there is a performance increase. In brief, NCQ in an Intel SSD enables concurrency in the drive so that up to 32 commands can be executed in parallel".

It sounds like it's going to be a real pain, but if you do a fresh instal in AHCI mode on the ICH controller and have a correctly aligned drive you will have much better performance that will last a lot longer.

[mmokk]

jkjkjk wrote:

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.

when it happened as you were typing the post, what else were you doing? did you have anything running in the background? what size is your firefox cache? how much free space is on the drive (both before and after you moved your pictures to a spinner)? what is your usage pattern (what do you typically do on the pc)?

also, what is the total amount of data that has been written to the ssd? (the intel ssd toolbox or crystaldiskinfo will give you this info).