X25-M 50 nm Gen 1: What to use it for? Really.

[idata]

I have used an X25-M generation 1 drive as a boot drive for Windows Vista and 7. In both cases, the drive deteriorated within 90 days to unusable write delays. The drives are at the latest firmware level. I realize TRIM support is not coming. No, I do not defrag them.

I really would like to find a way to use the pair as boot drives, but need to know how to maintain them so that they do not die from normal desktop OS activity. Suggestions?

[idata]

I know this doesn't help your situation, but FYI:

I used an X-25M G1 80GB as my only drive in my laptop for over a year. I did not experience significant write delays.

Many reviews show that the latest firmware "maintains itself" with sequential writes.

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=691 http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=691

If you really believe your boot-drive usage model has gotten into a similar situation, you could write a quick script to generate a big (50MB) file and erase it. You could do this a few times to see if that modulates your performance and helps segment the problem.

[idata]

MS SteadyState made my G1 80gb MLC drive a lot better.

OCZ's forums has a good installation guide and discussions about how it works...google it, it should get you started.

It did not fix the problem entirely but it made the situation a whole lot better, that's for sure.

I would not say that the G1 drives are completely useless, but without TRIM they pretty much have a guaranteed death sentence that's well within the product's support life cycle, and I think that is pretty cold thing to do to customers of your products.

[idata]

Thanks for the info from the OCZ forums.

I'm a proud owner of two OCZ drives, and it didn't occur to me to look for performance improvements for my Intel G1 drive on OCZ forums (I have no performance issues with my OCZ drives, so I didn't go looking.)

Needless to say, I won't bother with Intel SSD drives any more. I just recommend OCZ to everyone now.

[idata]

Catalina588 wrote:

I have used an X25-M generation 1 drive as a boot drive for Windows Vista and 7. In both cases, the drive deteriorated within 90 days to unusable write delays. The drives are at the latest firmware level. I realize TRIM support is not coming. No, I do not defrag them.

I really would like to find a way to use the pair as boot drives, but need to know how to maintain them so that they do not die from normal desktop OS activity. Suggestions?

90 days would be relatively very fast to "dirty up" a G1.

Are you running any atypical workloads?

How much of the drive is filled?