Diskeeper 12 HyperFast for Intel SSDs - Is it really needed?

[idata]

I handle a couple of very high end build servers and both of them use Intel SSDs. The C: and 😧 drives are on the SSDs. These SSDs were purchased in the second half of the year 2012. They are the latest, I mean to say.

I have not seen a drop in performance in the past 8-10 months. No drop at all.

Recently, the management decided to use Diskeeper 12 for defragmenting and keeping the SSDs fresh.

I know we do not need to defrag the SSD. So I had some doubts in my mind. When going through Diskeeper manual, I found HyperFast.

They have written great things about it.

What I want to know is:

1) Is there any need to have Diskeeper for latest Intel SSDs?

2) I have not seen any drop in performance in the SSDs, but we compile and generate around 100 GB data per day. Will Intel controllers be good enough to handle this usage scenario in the long run or do we need Diskeeper or similar software?

[UHans]

So I just read the Diskeeper/HyperFast sales pitch (http://www.condusiv.com/products/hyperfast/ Increase the Speed and Performance of HDD & SSD | Condusiv Technologies) and I am not convinced. The premise is that it defragments/optimizes the free space so that writes that would otherwise happen to random free sectors around the drive would happen in a more sequential manner. But the storage address space that is presented to the OS is abstract and does not map one-to-one to physical blocks on the flash chips. The drive's internal wear leveling sits in between moves around data as it sees fit, and different drives have vastly different algorithms and policies. Diskeeper/HyperFast can't know how all of them work and it sounds more like a technology that made more sense when it was introduced years ago and drives didn't have TRIM support and the the kind of internal optimization routines we see in contemporary drives.

As for your concerns about the longevity of the drives at 100GB writes per day: You don't write exactly which models of Intel SSDs you use, but Intel's consumer drives are officially rated for 20GB/day for 5 years. Independent long-term write torture tests seem to indicates that the 20GB/day is set very conservatively: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm

Make sure your OS supports TRIM and the drives have a fair amount of free space (to do their internal housekeeping) and you should be fine, also in the long term.

[Jose_H_Intel1 · Accepted solution]

Thank you very much for posting,

I wanted to expand oken's last paragraph. TRIM is all you will need to keep the SSD optimized and it is natively supported in Windows 7 and Windows 8. For older operating systems you will need a software tool to optimize the SSD manually like the Intel® SSD Toolbox.

[idata]

Unlike a magnetic storage device which can record new data directly on top of old, an SSD must first erase the contents of a previously used memory cell to zero out its contents before the new data can be written. This slows down the speed and is what prompted both Microsoft and SSD manufactures to create the solutions known as TRIM and Garbage Collection. These functions can perform this type of clean up task in the background when certain conditions are met. While most SSD's have great wear-leveling routines and multi-channel I/O capabilities, nothing about their design addresses or prevents the impact of NTFS file and free space fragmentation. I'd be happy to post examples of speed performance tests accessing files which are fragmented vs. contiguous if anyone is interested.

Unfortunately, TRIM and Garbage Collection doesn't have anything to do with addressing how the free space is allocated by the NTFS file system. This is where Diskeeper and HyperFast provides benefits. By ensuring that the small sections of free space are better managed, it will cause files to be written in their optimum condition requiring the least number of I/O operations. It doesn't matter if you have the worlds fastest SSD, doing more I/Os than is necessary simply takes longer to complete the task. This also benefits subsequent reads of these files and improves the overall access times across the board.

I admit, that an SSD is really super fast, but you will never get the full potential of the speed over time as promised by the SSD manufacture unless you keep it optimized with Diskeeper with HyperFast. While Intel SSD's have great wear-leveling routines and multi-channel I/O capabilities, nothing about their design addresses or prevents the impact of NTFS file and free space fragmentation.

Here's a short video on the subject...

http://www.condusiv.com/knowledge-center/videos/videos.aspx?index=13 http://www.condusiv.com/knowledge-center/videos/videos.aspx?index=13