Update from Intel's NAND Solutions Group

[Alan_F_Intel]

Dear User of the Intel® SSD Communities:

Thank you very much for your blogs on Intel Support Community related to updating the firmware on your Intel® 34nm High Performance SSDs. Intel is committed to its customers and its products and is taking this issue very seriously.

We have been contacted by users with SSD issues after using the firmware upgrade tool (version 1.3) in a Windows 7* 64bit environment. Intel has replicated the issue on 34nm SSDs (X25-M) and is working on a fix. If users have downloaded 02HA firmware and not upgraded, Intel recommends they don't upgrade until further notice. Intel is pursuing the resolution of this as a high priority. No related issues have been reported by users who have successfully upgraded to 02HA firmware via the firmware upgrade tool (version 1.3)."

You should know that Intel is seeking direct feedback on this issue from members of the Community. In fact, we have communicated with selected users of the blog "Trim Update Hosed my Windows 7 Install", asking them to send their drives directly to Intel to expedite the analysis of the issues. This action will enable us to more quickly generate a resolution for this issue.

We appreciate your patience in this matter. And thank you for participating in the Intel Support Community.

rgds,

Alan

NAND Solutions Group

[idata]

Here is the actual statement from Microsoft blog about defrag, etc.:

Will disk defragmentation be disabled by default on SSDs?

Yes. The automatic scheduling of defragmentation will exclude partitions on devices that declare themselves as SSDs. Additionally, if the system disk has random read performance characteristics above the threshold of 8 MB/sec, then it too will be excluded. The threshold was determined by internal analysis.

The random read threshold test was added to the final product to address the fact that few SSDs on the market today properly identify themselves as SSDs. 8 MB/sec is a relatively conservative rate. While none of our tested HDDs could approach 8 MB/sec, all of our tested SSDs exceeded that threshold. SSD performance ranged between 11 MB/sec and 130 MB/sec. Of the 182 HDDs tested, only 6 configurations managed to exceed 2 MB/sec on our random read test. The other 176 ranged between 0.8 MB/sec and 1.6 MB/sec.

Will Superfetch be disabled on SSDs?

Yes, for most systems with SSDs.

If the system disk is an SSD, and the SSD performs adequately on random reads and doesn't have glaring performance issues with random writes or flushes, then Superfetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadDrive will all be disabled.

Initially, we had configured all of these features to be off on all SSDs, but we encountered sizable performance regressions on some systems. In root causing those regressions, we found that some first generation SSDs had severe enough random write and flush problems that ultimately lead to disk reads being blocked for long periods of time. With Superfetch and other prefetching re-enabled, performance on key scenarios was markedly improved.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

[idata]

Hey ambizytl - thank you so much for linking that. I hadn't seen it and was confused by the conflicting information out there!

[idata]

Glad to be of help. Lots of good reading on that blog.