'Laptops w. Intel Series 5 chipset can not take full advantage of fast SSDs'

[tilleroftheearth]

JJB,

I'm not speaking for OCZ, but all manufacturers have had failures in the first day of releasing their SSD's and I wouldn't be surprised if they still have failures after 3 years with them too.

Your usage pattern seems right in line with what Intel is expecting from their users (7*30*20GB/day=4.2TB) so you're not 'abusing' your drive.

What ocztony is saying is that there is a difference between normal use and simply benchmarking (with certain tools) an SSD over and over and expecting it to perform the same.

A good example is the many stories I read of people initially buying the Intel G1's and killing them in a few short weeks in a server setup.

With the proper SSD in the servers (an Intel X25-E SSD), the 'issues' were resolved.

So, what this is indicating to me is that today's SSD's are targeted very narrowly to consumers or enterprise users - know what your usage model is and buy appropriately.

[stamatisx]

gentlemen...first off i must ask.

You do know that CDM and AS-SSD write large amounts of data to your drives each time you run them and as such dramatically reduce the life of the drive?

General Discussion AS SSD Benchmark read from there,

main thread...General Discussion AS SSD Benchmark

most newer ssd now use nand with 5K P/Ec, running such benchmarks is just stripping life from your drives.

Why do you not this bench we are using on the OCZ forum....Guide Random and Sequential Testing

It uses winsat and writes MB not GB worth of data to the drive and will still give you comparable results.

Last, you made a good catch here, Apple have been doing the same for years with their notebooks as anyone with a SF based drive will tell you...install it in a apple then test it in a PC and see a massive speed difference. All in the name of battery life and reducing heat.

First of all, Ocztony thank you very much for the heads up concerning the extended usage of benchmarking tools and their impact on the faster wear and tear of the SSDs. I am sure MLC owners will really appreciate it and should consider twice before they start benching.

Secondly, I really appreciated the links you provided and especially the one with the batch file.

The thing is though that this thread is dedicated to the low performance of SSDs (of any brand, not a specific one) and specifically to the low 4K random reads and writes that PM55/HM55 chipset based laptop owners experience and for this reason I would like to ask you, what is your opinion concerning this matter. Is this behavior normal or is something wrong here?

I am pretty sure that members of this forum and of this particular thread, wouldn't have to perform 200+ benchmark runs of any program and try various drivers, bios settings, registry tweaks, etc in order to find out what gives them the best results and performance.
Why would someone pay a premium and buy a Vertex 2 instead of a Vertex or in my case an Intel X25-E instead of X25-V if he gets the same capped 4K performance? (I know there are many other reasons but you get my point)
Isn't it more important for a consumer to get the performance that he/she paid for instead or worrying about the wear level of the NANDs when he tried to figure out what's wrong with the drive? (In the very end that's why the warranty is for 3 years)

[JJB]

I just ran CDM while on battery, which with the Envy 15 the CPU is throttled to an x9 multiplier (1.2Ghz). Surprisingly when on the 'idle disabled' tweak the results were almost as good as when plugged in (see below), the interesting thing is that my CPU power draw when on battery is ~8.5W vs. 19.5W when plugged in and the idle temps are 46C core 0 and 39C core 1. This to me indicates that even though the CPU is throttled the C1E power state is still disabled giving full (almost) SSD performance without causing eccessive idle temps and power draw .

After looking at all the registry options for CPU idle settings, parking of cores and other power setting options that there must be a way to reduce the 'idle disabled' state to either 1 core (or possibly just 1 thread) and give reasonable temps while getting full SSD speeds. Anyone who knows how to further adjust these regisrty settings, please see if there is a way to make this work as a permanent fix while giving reasonable CPU temps....

On battery with 'idle disabled' and HP throttled CPU x9 multiplier (1.2Ghz), CPU temp 46C / 39C.

[JJB]

JJB,

I'm not speaking for OCZ, but all manufacturers have had failures in the first day of releasing their SSD's and I wouldn't be surprised if they still have failures after 3 years with them too.

Your usage pattern seems right in line with what Intel is expecting from their users (7*30*20GB/day=4.2TB) so you're not 'abusing' your drive.

What ocztony is saying is that there is a difference between normal use and simply benchmarking (with certain tools) an SSD over and over and expecting it to perform the same.

A good example is the many stories I read of people initially buying the Intel G1's and killing them in a few short weeks in a server setup.

With the proper SSD in the servers (an Intel X25-E SSD), the 'issues' were resolved.

So, what this is indicating to me is that today's SSD's are targeted very narrowly to consumers or enterprise users - know what your usage model is and buy appropriately.

I agree. Although the 'first day failures' you mention I would think are a completly different issue than the wear levels we're talking about here.

My point is, for my companies business usage (we have 5 Envy 15's so far w/ SSD's), the life expectancy is a non issue at our current (and estimated future) usage levels. My numbers that you quoted as appearing 'right in line with what intel is expecting...' are just that, well within the range of the expected long term capabilities of the SSD's we spec'd. Actually since my machine is the 'test bed' for the company it has significantly higher R/W volume than our other machines. Considering this and looking very conservatively at the wear level, these drives will far exceed the life of the next 2 or 3 notebook upgrades we will most likely have over the next 4 to 6 years. And by that time I truly expect that the current drives will be basically obsolete and relegated to an external portable / backup drive function...

So again no worries at all about premature wear of these drive in our application. I would think that most people attempting to use SSD's in a server (or other high usage) application would be smart enough to work out the numbers and select the appropriate enterprise type drive.....

[ssassen]

After looking at all the registry options for CPU idle settings, parking of cores and other power setting options that there must be a way to reduce the 'idle disabled' state to either 1 core (or possibly just 1 thread) and give reasonable temps while getting full SSD speeds. Anyone who knows how to further adjust these regisrty settings, please see if there is a way to make this work as a permanent fix while giving reasonable CPU temps....

I've done some digging as well, but can't find any such registry settings either (yet). For what it's worth, I wholeheartedly agree with you on the lifespan of these SSDs, a few runs of CDM won't suddenly turn them into expensive paperweights.

Now if only my Crucial C300 256GB would arrive I could join in the search for a solution, I'm not scared of a little creative registry editing, that's what we have backups for

Cheers,

Sander Sassen - Hardware Analysis

[JJB]

I've done some digging as well, but can't find any such registry settings either (yet). For what it's worth, I wholeheartedly agree with you on the lifespan of these SSDs, a few runs of CDM won't suddenly turn them into expensive paperweights.

Now if only my Crucial C300 256GB would arrive I could join in the search for a solution, I'm not scared of a little creative registry editing, that's what we have backups for

Cheers,

Sander Sassen - Hardware Analysis

I hope you can find something that works in the registry. I played with a few settings with no luck (yet). FYI there is a 'control set 001' and 'control set 002' that at first appeared to be the same set of power options, after comparing them some are actually different, any idea what the set '1' vs. set '2' differences are?

[sean473]

if someone can make a solution which doesn't cause overheating , i wouldn't mind disabling c-states.. for now , best way is bombard intel with requests for new chipset software.

[Tinderbox (UK)]

Can somebody make an message/alert that can be posted on other forums so that we can get as much publicity as possible, just post the alert here and i will post it on all my other forums.

Basically the problem in an nutshell , also we can link to this thread, for anybody who might be interested.

[Phil]

Has anyone tried running Crystal with a PM55 and normal hard disk drive?

And Seagate XT?

I wonder how those will be affected, if they're affected at all.

Can somebody make an message/alert that can be posted on other forums so that we can get as much publicity as possible.

Basically the problem in an nutshell , also we can link to this thread, for anybody who might be interested.

Here's what I ~ posted on Macrumors:

According to benchmarks run by several members of Notebookreview.com laptops with Intel HM55 and PM55 can not take full advantage of fast SSDs. The performance hit is especially visible in 4K random read and write performance. The related thread is here.

For example: A OCZ Vertex 2 should get about 20MB/sec 4K random read and 60MB/sec 4K random write. (CrystalDiskMark 3.0 at default settings)

A Vertex 2 on PM55 chipset scores about 12 MB/sec 4K random read and 22 MB/sec 4K random write.

These differences were consistent between CrystalDiskMark and AS-SSD benchmark.

The only workaround sofar sacrifices battery life and temperatures.

[Tinderbox (UK)]

Well that`s five other forums made aware of the problem, if everybody does this we should have a fix soon