Intel X25-M *G1* extremely high Disk Queue Length

[idata]

I purchased an Intel X25-M (G1) 80GB SSD in October 2009 when I built my computer - so a little over a year ago. Initially it was beautiful, very fast and reliable. Expensive, at $240 from Newegg, but I figured I was paying for quick boot times, snappy OS, fast core applications and web browsing.

Unfortunately in the last 3-4 months, performance has been degrading gradually, frmo noticeable, to bad, to outright terrible. It seems to manifest most often as insanely high disk queues in Windows 7 Resource Monitor. When I look in the Disk tab, I see the following, without fail, every time my system does its periodic lock-ups:

http://i163.photobucket.com/albums/t299/anon09876/discqueue.png Example 1

http://i163.photobucket.com/albums/t299/anon09876/discqueue2.png Example 2

Both shots are literally from the last few minutes as I was typing this message. Response time column in Resource Monitor skyrockets (sometimes 6,000+), Disk Queue Length soars to over 1.00, CPU usage drops to 0, and the system is unresponsive for 5-30 seconds at a time.

It's always the SSD. Usually the responsible processes are related to my browser (Firefox) but thats because it's my most used application.

That blue line going up indicates "% Highest Active Time" according to the Resource Monitor. This happens even under light load - I could be loading a webpage or opening a speadsheet or what have you.

Here's the pretty sorry-looking specs I get from http://i163.photobucket.com/albums/t299/anon09876/as-ssd-benchINTELSSDSA2MH0811820117-22-54PM.png AS SSD.

The performance degradation of the Intel X25-M G1 SSDs seem to be pretty well documented online, although I don't know if Intel has ever acknowledged it. The most useful article I've come across is this: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669&type=expert&pid=1 http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669&type=expert&pid=1

I was hoping I maybe just had to update firmware, but Intel's tool says I have the latest (8820) so no hope for a quick fix there. System also tells me I have TRIM on but I don't know if Intel ever updated the G1s to make use of trim.

Other information:

Windows 7 64 bit

8GB RAM

Intel Core 2 Duo CPU (E8500 @ 3.16 Ghz)

And no, I don't try to defrag this drive, I know better than that. It seems to me like the extensive writes to the firefox profile files and maybe my images folder (which I recently moved off the SSD because of all this) wore the drive out - but in only a year! I still have mechanical HDDs from 5 years ago that run indistinguishably from when they were new.

What are my options, besides "wipe with secure erase and reinstall windows", or "buy a G2" - because I'm honestly wary of Intel SSDs now, and maybe SSDs in general. I'm willing to spend money on my PC but dropping $240 ($3/GB!) for less than a year of solid performance from my storage is not worth it. I could have bumped up to a quad core CPU and picked up a fast mechanical HDD for about the price the SSD cost me.

[idata]

Regarding free space: I think the lowest it ever got was around 7GB (of the 74.5 visible in Windows), and currently it has 28.7 GB free.

mistermokkori wrote:

also, what is the total amount of data that has been written to the ssd? (the intel ssd toolbox or crystaldiskinfo will give you this info).

Is that Host Writes under Check SMART Attributes? It says 5.55TB. Seemed like a lot at first but I saw one of my mechanical HDDs was reporting over 100PB so...

redux wrote:It sounds like it's going to be a real pain, but if you do a fresh instal in AHCI mode on the ICH controller and have a correctly aligned drive you will have much better performance that will last a lot longer.

Sigh... I'm just not willing to go through the pain of doing a totally fresh install.

In years of owning many computers and many many parts this is definitely the one piece of computer hardware with the poorest $/value over time ratio. The idea of having to go through convoluted (for me, at least) refreshes like this, which won't even fix the underlying problems, simply because the technology is fundamentally faulty, is really unappealing to me.

Rather than stick witha drive that's basically a high mainenance time bomb, I think I'd rather cut my losses and shell out for a decent 15,000 RPM HDD, or ask around to see if there are more reliable SSD makers out there.

I do thank everyone for their help, as I know it's not forum posters' fault that this is bad technology - it's just incredibly frustrating that something so basically flawed was allowed on the market in the first place. And more importantly, that I lost $240 on it.

Edit: Regarding SSD toolbox, I'd already run the various diagnostics on that and it reported all green.

[idata]

We do understand your frustration with your situation. The maintenance issues with the G1 SSDs are more than some people care to deal with. Another issue is the necessary OS tweaks needed to prolong an SSDs life, given that all OSs are not truly designed for use with SSDs. That is also with, forgive me for saying, less than optimal initial setup, meaning the alignment situation and not using AHCI mode, both of which are very important in getting optimal performance from any SSD. Not that I am blaming you for the former, but from what we can see from your AS SSD data, that is a problem. Our resident G1 SSD expert, mistermokkori, uses them and is quite pleased with them, I would heed his advice if I were you. But it can also be truthfully said that first/early generation SSDs from all manufactures were not simply plug-n-play devices that could be ignored once installed, they were more so an enthusiast product.

I'd like to say that becoming wary of SSDs given your experience is somewhat reasonable, but from the maintenance and long term performance side of things, the Intel G2 SSDs are completely different. With TRIM support and the extra optimization provided by the Intel Toolbox, the issues of the G1 SSDs are nonexistent. We all should keep in mind that all current OSs are not optimized for use with SSDs, the Logical Block Address (LBA) of a NTFS file system must be translated into the actual location within an SSD and vice versa, all SSD controllers must do this. They do this just fine but this operation is still overhead that a true SSD oriented file system would not require SSDs to perform. I am not aware of any development along these lines, but I imagine that will happen in the future.

The realities and solutions regarding your problems have been presented and it is up to you how you proceed. If you don't care to use your valuable time to perform the tasks, that is perfectly understandable. But there is no simple solution beyond what has already been stated here, sorry to say.

Also, regarding the SMART values you've seen for one of your HDD's, at 100PB (100 Peta-Bytes, 1PB = 1000 Tera-Bytes.) I have also seen that, on HDDs that are six months old with very light usage and a couple barely needed defrag's performed on them. IMO, those figures are erroneous and frankly rather crazy, they can't be correct. The 5.55 TB figure on you SSD, if correctly reported to you, shows some fairly heavy usage and is likely a contributing factor to your problem. Regarding throwing away your G1 SSD, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that would say, "please throw it in my direction".

[idata]

jkjkjk wrote:

Sigh... I'm just not willing to go through the pain of doing a totally fresh install.

In years of owning many computers and many many parts this is definitely the one piece of computer hardware with the poorest $/value over time ratio. The idea of having to go through convoluted (for me, at least) refreshes like this, which won't even fix the underlying problems, simply because the technology is fundamentally faulty, is really unappealing to me.

Rather than stick witha drive that's basically a high mainenance time bomb, I think I'd rather cut my losses and shell out for a decent 15,000 RPM HDD, or ask around to see if there are more reliable SSD makers out there.

I do thank everyone for their help, as I know it's not forum posters' fault that this is bad technology - it's just incredibly frustrating that something so basically flawed was allowed on the market in the first place. And more importantly, that I lost $240 on it.

Edit: Regarding SSD toolbox, I'd already run the various diagnostics on that and it reported all green.

You don't need a fresh install.... an image, secure erase, and reimage should resolve the issue. It is pretty easy with the free tool provided.

SSD technology has vastly progressed since the original G1. There is much more awareness and solutions for the known issues.

Just so you know..... A recent 300GB 15K RPM HDD will costs $250-300 plus the cost of a $100 SAS controller (assuming you don't have one). For all that, a 15KRPM HDD will still perform a magnitude slower in random performance.

[idata]

DuckieHo wrote:

You don't need a fresh install.... an image, secure erase, and reimage should resolve the issue. It is pretty easy with the free tool provided.

SSD technology has vastly progressed since the original G1. There is much more awareness and solutions for the known issues.

Just so you know..... A recent 300GB 15K RPM HDD will costs $250-300 plus the cost of a $100 SAS controller (assuming you don't have one). For all that, a 15KRPM HDD will still perform a magnitude slower in random performance.

All excellent points and quite true. But as we can see, some (many) people don't want to be bothered with fooling around with their PC's internals, any more than they want to change the oil in their car or worry about what kind of tires are on it. Which is one of the reasons why Apple has become so successful. To Apple users, a PC is a tool, not a toy. In many cases, what is done with that tool is more toy-like, but they still don't want to play with their tool. Personally, I like it to be both.

[idata]

parsec wrote:

All excellent points and quite true. But as we can see, some (many) people don't want to be bothered with fooling around with their PC's internals, any more than they want to change the oil in their car or worry about what kind of tires are on it. Which is one of the reasons why Apple has become so successful. To Apple users, a PC is a tool, not a toy. In many cases, what is done with that tool is more toy-like, but they still don't want to play with their tool. Personally, I like it to be both.

I definitely agree..... SSDs are still on the cutting edge still though. The G1 were really for early adopters of technology. In 2-3 years, SSD will really become mainstream and will just work all the time without any thought.