New Intel 34nm X25-M SSD Firmware Brings Impressive Performance Gains
Table of contents
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Test Platform and System Details
The new firmware provides very impressive numbers and takes SSDs to a higher level of performance well beyond HDDs as system drives in desktop computers.
Intel today released
new firmware for its 34nm X25-M.
Old firmware: 02G9
New Firmware: 02HA
The new firmware supports TRIM. This feature requires Windows 7 with Microsoft AHCI drivers. Intel drivers doesn’t support TRIM yet. For Windows Vista or XP you have to use the Intel SSD Toolbox, which supports TRIM.
The TRIM attribute of the ATA data set management command synchronizes the operating system’s view of deleted files with those that are deleted, but not erased on the drive. TRIM tells the SSD which data blocks are no longer in use. This helps stabilize the performance and health of the SSD over time.
For the tests we set up a Windows 7 system on our standard storage test platform. We used the Microsoft AHCI driver to support TRIM.
Drive performance is much better with the new firmware. Also after torturing the drive with IOMeter. The sequential write performance in used state areas is in the close to that of the former new state areas, the numbers still decrease but not near as much. Random reads and writes in our database benchmarks double. Very impressive. Workstation benchmarks also double and Webserver and Fileserver numbers increase significantly.
Early adopters who bought the first X25-M will not get a firmware update. Very sad.
Testing Order:
- H2benchW
- IOMeter
- 30min idle time for triming the drive
- Second run of H2benchW
- Second run of IOMeter
The new firmware provides very impressive numbers and takes SSDs to a higher level of performance well beyond HDDs as system drives in desktop computers.
Latest Internal Storage News
Latest Internal Storage reviews
- 16/05 – Intel SSD 330 Review: 60, 120, And 180 GB Models Benchmarked
- 11/05 – Do-It-Yourself: Upgrading Apple's 27" iMac With An SSD
- 01/05 – Marvell-Based SSDs From Corsair, Crucial, OCZ, And Plextor:...
- 26/04 – Best SSDs For The Money: April 2012
- 25/04 – Hitachi's 4 TB Hard Drives Take On The 3 TB Competition
Impressive performance gains! What size x25-m drive were you using? I double checked and didn't see it in your methodology. The recent review by Anand mentioned that the 80gb version doesn't see as great performance benefits, can you confirm and possibly update to inform your readers so we don't go buying an 80 thinking we will get these numbers. thank you.
What happens after page 4?
Very little comments on why a used drive manages to get such significantly higher speeds than a fresh drive. The IOmeter workstation and fileserver benchmarks look puzzling to me.
TRIM also doesn't seem to help performance degradation all that much at this stage. I believe further firmware tweaks are required before they get this right.
also doesn't say clearly whether 32 or 64 bit
It's an 80G Drive and an Engineering Sample, so take the results with a pinch of salt.