x25-m G1 80GB freeze

J

jjz-

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 18, 2008
Messages
302
Hey, I have been having this issue for a long time, but it is not extremely annoying so I decided not to bother with it. I have some free time now, so I figured maybe someone here would know what is going on.

Basically, the drive seems to have really good reads/writes, the values are what they should be. It performs fine when I am playing a game or doing everyday tasks; however, if I am installing something to the SSD then I pretty much have to let it focus on the installation. I can browse the internet alright, but I do notice some freezes even on there. It grounds games to a halt.

It does not seem to like scheduling writes from multiple applications.

I also notice that certain benchmarks make the drive make a kind of whining noise, which is very odd considering it is solid state.

Any thoughts on this? It's never died on me or anything, but I can't imagine other people have the same issue I am having with retail x25-ms.

This drive is an engineering sample, purchased from someone on this forum.

-Ian
 
The whining noise sometimes happens with electrical components; i've had that with a passive cooled videocard sometime in the past.

Since this is first generation Intel drive, you do not have TRIM support. That means that you will serious degrade performance once you run out of free cells. That will happen quickly, as the SSD has no clue about unused blocks of data that were written to once but no longer in use. The SSD thinks those are still in use so barely has any free cells. At this stage it will be slowing down especially on small writes, since that would require a lot of work in a so called read-modify-write cycle.

I think you should consider re-installing. Create a smaller partition this time, 60GB or even 40GB; leaving the rest unused. Then install Windows per normal and you never need TRIM.

The unused space will be used by the SSD itself and this should work to keep the drive fast. It would also enhance its lifespan as read-modify-write accelerates your writes; i.e. writing 2 kilobytes might result in 128KiB of write activity. So running without TRIM this way would wear on the drive, causing much lower lifespan.

You're using Windows 7? Windows XP has additional 'alignment' problems with SSDs.
 
I am using windows 7, yea. The person who sold it to me updated the firmware, this was 4 or so months ago though. Maybe a new firmware is out.

sub.mesa, so you think that is this issue? I do still have 20 GB free on the drive. I have reinstalled windows on it before, and it seems to fix it for a *very short* time.

If some people agree this is the issue, I'll reinstall again with a smaller partition. I don't want to take action without being pretty confident it will solve the problem.
 
If you re-install, you HAVE to do a full format under windows 7 to benefit from using a smaller partition - otherwise the SSD still thinks this area is in use. You can also do a Secure Erase; same result as the full format but takes no write cycles; it just wipes the mapping tables; like the 'index' or 'allocation table' of the SSD.

If you did this, then create a smaller partition USING THE WINDOWS 7 SETUP; not any non-windows partitioning programs!

If you do this, your SSD should be very fast and have no issues at all. If problems still occur, something else must be your problem. For example, PIO mode on one of your additional HDDs installed may also slowdown the whole system.
 
Darn, I was hoping to avoid a reinstall. Alright, ill try what you said then when I have some time. Thanks :)
 
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