Comments on: Intel X25-M SSD Shows Long-term Fragmentation Issue http://gigaom.com/mobile/intel-x-25m-ssd-showing-long-term-fragmentation-issues/ Sat, 11 Feb 2012 20:29:01 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Amarnath http://gigaom.com/mobile/intel-x-25m-ssd-showing-long-term-fragmentation-issues/#comment-413358 Fri, 20 Feb 2009 06:34:40 +0000 http://jkontherun.com/?p=30053#comment-413358 There is a difference between the internal (wear levelling?) and external (file system) fragmentation. I believe the relationship between these is not direct. None of the Windows OSs currently are really optimized for SSDs, so file system fragmentation will occur anyway, and free space fragmentation will force random writes and cause slow down of the SSD over time.

Diskeeper who make file system defraggers have a new add-on to Diskeeper ’09 called Hyperfast that optimizes file system free space on SSDs and some other stuff. I noticed it in my copy of DK’09 pro, but never had a chance to test it since I don’t own an SSD. But the company’s benchmarks show a nice improvement on Apacer drives.
http://www.diskeeper.com/hyperfast/index.aspx
http://downloads.diskeeper.com/pdf/HyperFast.pdf

There is still much unknown/speculation/misinformation about long term SSD reliability and performance I feel. Things will be clearer in a year or two, when SSDs have been through extended periods of heavy usage.

]]> By: Sumocat http://gigaom.com/mobile/intel-x-25m-ssd-showing-long-term-fragmentation-issues/#comment-413357 Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:03:21 +0000 http://jkontherun.com/?p=30053#comment-413357 Since all three test machines used Windows XP or Vista, I wonder how much a factor NTFS played in this. It was reported a few months ago that NTFS fragments free space on flash drives. Could possibly be compounding the problem with Intel’s wear-leveling algorithm. If so, the bright side of this story could be that the SSD optimization in Windows 7 will help. I’d also be interested in seeing this test done with Linux or OS X.

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