Intel X25-M SSD: Intel Delivers One of the World's Fastest Drives
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 8, 2008 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
How Long Will Intel's SSDs Last?
SSD lifespans are usually quantified in the number of erase/program cycles a block can go through before it is unusable, as I mentioned earlier it's generally 10,000 cycles for MLC flash and 100,000 cycles for SLC. Neither of these numbers are particularly user friendly since only the SSD itself is aware of how many blocks it has programmed. Intel wanted to represent its SSD lifespan as a function of the amount of data written per day, so Intel met with a number of OEMs and collectively they came up with a target figure: 20GB per day. OEMs wanted assurances that a user could write 20GB of data per day to these drives and still have them last, guaranteed, for five years. Intel had no problems with that.
Intel went one step further and delivered 5x what the OEMs requested. Thus Intel will guarantee that you can write 100GB of data to one of its MLC SSDs every day, for the next five years, and your data will remain intact. The drives only ship with a 3 year warranty but I suspect that there'd be some recourse if you could prove that Intel's 100GB/day promise was false.
Just like Intel's CPUs can run much higher than their rated clock speed, Intel's NAND should be able to last much longer than its rated lifespan
It's also possible for a flash cell to lose its charge over time (albeit a very long time). Intel adheres to the JEDEC spec on how long your data is supposed to last on its SSDs. The spec states that if you've only used 10% of the lifespan of your device (cycles or GB written), then your data needs to remain intact for 10 years. If you've used 100% of available cycles, then your data needs to remain intact for 1 year. Intel certifies its drives in accordance with the JEDEC specs from 0 - 70C; at optimal temperatures your data will last even longer (these SSDs should operate at below 40C in normal conditions).
Intel and Micron have four joint fabs manufactured under the IMFT partnership, and these are the fabs that produce the flash going into Intel's SSDs. The 50nm flash used in the launch drives are rated at 10,000 erase/programming but like many of Intel's products there's a lot of built in margin. Apparently it shouldn't be unexpected to see 2, 3 or 4x the rated lifespan out of these things, depending on temperature and usage model obviously.
Given the 100GB per day x 5 year lifespan of Intel's MLC SSDs, there's no cause for concern from a data reliability perspective for the desktop/notebook usage case. High load transactional database servers could easily outlast the lifespan of MLC flash and that's where SLC is really aimed at. These days the MLC vs. SLC debate is more about performance, but as you'll soon see - Intel has redefined what to expect from an MLC drive.
Other Wear and Tear
With no moving parts in a SSD, the types of failures are pretty unique. While erasing/programming blocks is the most likely cause of failure with NAND flash, a secondary cause of data corruption is something known as program disturb. When programming a cell there's a chance that you could corrupt the data in an adjacent cell. This is mostly a function of the quality of your flash, and obviously being an expert in semiconductor manufacturing the implication here is that Intel's flash is pretty decent quality.
Intel actually includes additional space on the drive, on the order of 7.5 - 8% more (6 - 6.4GB on an 80GB drive) specifically for reliability purposes. If you start running out of good blocks to write to (nearing the end of your drive's lifespan), the SSD will write to this additional space on the drive. One interesting sidenote, you can actually increase the amount of reserved space on your drive to increase its lifespan. First secure erase the drive and using the ATA SetMaxAddress command just shrink the user capacity, giving you more spare area.
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Alleniv - Wednesday, August 19, 2009 - link
Hi all,I report this new review about X25-M, that takes in consideration a comparative with other SSDs and also with HDDs, with several benchmarks ? http://www.informaticaeasy.net/le-mi...m-da-80gb.h...">http://www.informaticaeasy.net/le-mi...m-da-80gb.h...
Bytales - Saturday, January 3, 2009 - link
You said this: For example, let's say you download a 2MB file to your band new, never been used SSD, which gets saved to blocks 10, 11, 12 and 13. You realize you downloaded the wrong file and delete it, then go off to download the right file. Rather than write the new file to blocks 10, 11, 12 and 13, the flash controller will write to blocks 14, 15, 16 and 17. In fact, those four blocks won't get used again until every other block on the drive has been written to onceBy this i understand that a bigger capacity SSD, for instance 320 vs 160 will have more blocks and hence you will need more writes to deplete the number a write cycles the SSD was designed for. So for SSD bigger means even longer lasting. IS this TRUE ?
lpaster - Wednesday, November 26, 2008 - link
Can you overclock this SSD?Sendou - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 - link
There are optimization methods available for SSD's which can mitigate performance loss through genuine usage over time.One such is Diskeeper's HyperFast Technology.
There is a white paper regarding HyperFast available at:
http://downloads.diskeeper.com/pdf/Optimizing-Soli...
BludBaut - Thursday, March 31, 2011 - link
I read the pdf article you linked from Diskeeper.Based on the information Anand has given in his articles about Intel's technology, Diskeeper's "whitepaper" sounds like crap advertising by a company who's afraid their technology might be considered not only useless but detrimental to use with SSDs. I'm inclined to agree since Diskeeper's own results show a 4x write loss by just *one* "optimization" while Anand's article clearly suggests that the proper design (which he says Intel has accomplished) eliminates the need for Diskeeper's service.
Until I find more thorough examination of the facts, Diskeeper's remarks make me distrust them.
On the other hand, Anand's article definitely sounds not just like a puff piece for Intel, but qualifies in my mind as advertising. Wonder how much money Intel has spent on Anandtech? That's not to suggest that anything is misrepresentative (well, it wasn't meant to sound that way, but keep reading and you'll find the one-sided praise will later be partially retracted and I don't know the end of the story yet), but we all know that advertising always leaves out the negatives.
(Reviews shouldn't sound like advertisements but anyone who's been reading magazine reviews for 30 years knows that's frequently the case. The reviewer's bills get paid by the manufacturers' of the products he's reviewing. But, the reviewer is objective of course. It's a matter of journalistic integrity. Yeah, I believe that. Don't you?)
One such negative was the promotion of the life of the drive. "20GB a day for five years"? Anand praises Intel for multiplying that by five to "100GB a day for five years" but then tells us that they'll only guarantee the drive for three years and has the audacity to suggest we'll likely have a recourse "if we can prove" ... -- how is anyone going to prove how many GBs a day they put on their computer? The annoyance of trying to keep track is not something 99% of people would do.
Did you do the math to see how long it takes to write 100GB to a drive with a write speed of 200MB/s? Eight minutes and twenty seconds is all it takes.
Well, that's great if all you use your computer for is reading articles, checking the news and sales prices and sending email. The drive should last as long as your computer. But if you love video (who loves video???), it's a different story entirely.
There's another negative that, though first denied, eventually was acknowledged. More than six months later, Anand reports back and says essentially, 'Intel is still the best but the performance does degrade with time and I don't know why.' If he's explained it since then, I've yet to read it.
So, for those just reading the article, don't get so encouraged that you start drooling. The article has a tendency to make one think, "What am I waiting for? I want one of these puppies!" Unfortunately, Intel's technology isn't as rosy and bulletproof and Anand made it sound.
kevonly - Friday, November 21, 2008 - link
I hope you do some benchmark on Samsung's new 256GB SSD. Hopefully it's as good as Intel's.kevonly - Friday, November 21, 2008 - link
its read/write speed is 200/160 mb/s. Will it sustain that speed in a multi applications running environment??kevonly - Friday, November 21, 2008 - link
sorryread/write speed is 220/200 mb/s.
scotopicvision - Monday, November 10, 2008 - link
The article was an amazing read, fantastic, and well done thank you.D111 - Saturday, October 25, 2008 - link
Legacy OS like Windows Vista, XP, and Applications like Microsoft Office 2003, 2007, etc. have built in, inherent flaws with regard to SSDs.
Specifically, optimizations of these OS for mechanical hard drives like superfetch, prefetch, etc. tend to slow down, rather than help performance and is unnecessary to speed up reads in an SSD, but slow it down with unnecessary writes of small files, which SSDs are slower than a regular hard drive.
Things like automatic drive defragmentation with Vista does nothing for SSDs except to slow them down.
Properly optimized, even low cost 2007 generation SSDs test out as equivalent to a 7200 rpm consumer grade drive, and typical SSDs made in 2008 or later tend to outperform mechanical hard drives.
The tests done here have done nothing to "tweak" the OS to remove design hindrances to SSD performance, and thus, have no validity or technical merit.
The test, as presented, would be similar to installing a 19th century steam engine on a sailing ship, and observing that it is rather slow ---- without mentioning the drag and performance hits caused by the unused sail rigging, masts, etc.
See the discussion here for a detailed discussion of SSD performance tweaks and what it takes to make them perform well with legacy OS and Applications.
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/forumdispl...">http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum...display....