SSD Decreasing in Performance?

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hhara

Gawd
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May 8, 2009
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817
It seems like my Intel X-25M G2 80GB has started to decrease in performance. Recently I was playing SF2 and doing the time trial and had just finished a fight. After the fight the "Now Loading" screen appeared and it literally sat there for about 15 seconds and then the next fight started. I have just updated my SSD to the new TRIM enabled firmware. This was the first time I have ever seen that loading screen while playing SF4! I have always had SF4 loaded on the SSD, whether the TRIM enabled firmware was there or not.

Having experienced this I thought that there was something obviously wrong. It has seemed to me that if I have about ~15 GB or more of free space the SSD works flawlessly, but if I fall to around ~5 GB I get issues. Whether or not that is relevant remains to be seen because I have 17 GB free.

This is what HD Tune Pro returns now:

hdtunef.jpg


Before upgrading to the TRIM enabled firmware that graph consisted of about 1 or 2 spikes down to 150 MB/sec but other then that it was literally a straight line across at ~225 MB/sec. It was amazing how straight the line was.

Am I just being paranoid here or is something going on?
 
I don't have the intel, but with my crucial, the performance degraded to the point where I was getting down to 10mbps random read/write speeds over the course of 2 months or so.

I ran a tool that brought performance back for a short time, but then quickly degraded within a few tests (win 7 was rating it lower than my mechanical drives). I backed the machine up, set it to AHCI mode in the bios (it was running as IDE), reformatted/reinstalled and it's been fine since.

are you running the drive in IDE mode by any chance? Is there a utility from intel to improve/maintain the performance?
 
I am running in AHCI. Always have been. I am not aware of such utility if it exists. I wonder if formatting would fix this, but that is not a step I really want to take every couple of months.
 
are you running windows 7, and do you know for sure that you have TRIM firmware on your drive? if either of those are no, then to get your performance back, you have to do a secure erase of the entire drive. the easy way:

image the drive
secure wipe the whole thing
image back to drive
 
I am running Windows 7 and HDTune lists my firmware version as "2CV102HD" which I am pretty sure is the newest firmware. Any other ideas?
 
It has seemed to me that if I have about ~15 GB or more of free space the SSD works flawlessly, but if I fall to around ~5 GB I get issues.
Click to expand...

20% free space is what's recommended....16GB in your case.
 
hhara said:
I am running Windows 7 and HDTune lists my firmware version as "2CV102HD" which I am pretty sure is the newest firmware. Any other ideas?
Click to expand...

Yes that is the latest firmware. You need to keep a large amount space free (25% or more) and run Intel SSD Toolbox every now and then.

My X25-M has degraded slightly (WEI used to rate it 7.7, now it is 7.6)... this is after about 2 months of use.

And yes, I do believe the TRIM firmware degrades performance across the board slightly (maybe 1-5%) but should not be huge. TRIM will help you keep your SSD from degrading in the future from rewrite operations.
 
It seems like Intel has pulled the SSD Toolbox from their website because of the issues it is having with Windows restore points. See here.

I guess I will have to wait before I can run that.
 
I still don't see whats wrong with the hd tune results..
 
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