How Big a Deal is the Lack of TRIM Support?

I've been considering buying an SSD for quite some time, and recently I've seen some great deals on Intel G1 MLC drives. These drives, however, seem to lack TRIM support, which from my understanding is necessary to keep a drive's performance from degrading. I'm quite wary of spending $200 on a performance upgrade that would require clean wipes every month just to maintain acceptable performance, so I would like to get a few things straight before a dump a significant chunk of money into the upgrade.

Now, theoretically, I believe I understand the necessity for the TRIM command, however, I do not know how big of a difference it really ends up making.

So, my list of questions:
1.- Does the Intel G1 SSD have some other form of garbage-collecting to prevent performance degradation?

2.- Does the performance really decrease as fast as in a few days of usage, which some sites seem to suggest?

3.- How much does performance decrease - will it really end up bogging down the drive, forcing a clean wipe? Is the performance decrease noticeable, or is it just observable in benchmarking?

4.- Overall, then, would it be worth it buying an Intel G1 SSD that does not have TRIM support at this point? It seems they offer a pretty good price-size ratio, and also have very fast read speeds, but if this will be affected greatly by the lack of TRIM support, perhaps those numbers are deceptive?

5.- On an unrelated note, how much - if at all - does SSD performance decrease with increased usage (say, a drive that is 3/4 full versus a half-full drive)?

Thanks a lot guys!

 

1) it cleans up the mess it creates itself, not the mess the os creates by forgetting to report where it has removed stuff

2) no, just random "we want more hits on our page" bull. i use mine since more than half a year, nothing detected, even while i've tested out several os' on it (win7 betas, etc)

3) no, that was a bug in the first firmware. and even if, chance is very slim, and a clean wipe is not that big of a problem if you have a nice backup solution: backup, cleanwipe, restore. takes time, yes, nothing else.

4) well, here, the g1 and g2 are around the same price, so definitely i'd go for g2 now. but if they're cheaper, then, yeah, i guess i'd pick a g1, even now. the g2 is faster, though, in most of it's numbers. never by much, but it is.

5) never filled my intel, but my mtron raid0 gets sorta laggy if filled up. then again, after 1 year of usage and tons of fillups, it might now be at a point where i should do a clean wipe. then again, even now it's very fast.




so, the final point: the internet always loves any form of problems, and pushes them to the max possible, for high clickrates and thus ad revenue. don't believe the hypes on the web, they make MONEY out of it. trim is nice, bugs are everywhere, but all in all, in general, ssds deliver, no matter which (of now), no matter with or without trim.


because in the end you don't care about all the buzzwords, like gc, trim, and all. if the drive is fast (and it is, after a half year just as at day one), then you don't care.

 

this article explains it very well IMO
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=10

 

As a counter point(s) to davepermen's experience with his systems;

Disclosure: I've played/used/worked on a total of 4 systems with SSD drives (two were Macbook Air's (garbage, IMHO) and two much more recent ones (about 40hrs exp) which both have failed to impress (as everyone here knows ) except for the most superficial reasons (installs fly, but I usualy install only once! ).

Keeping this to the Intel system only;

1) Don't know

2) Yes, not only a few days, but within hours (about 6 hrs) of installing Win 7 and Win updates and programs and their updates, etc. the drive was noticeably slower than when I started the clean install. Eg. copying some of the clients data onto the drive was at a 'blistering' 37 MB/s and even dropping down to single digit numbers for seconds at a time.

3) I've read G1 drives actually 'dying' because of too much use (with their original firmware), but don't know about the G2's (haven't pushed one that hard). But to me, as I've stated in point 2, the performance degradation is easily noticeable - I want to see the firmware at the end of the month installed on that system to see just how bad it really is (or conversely, how good the G2 can be).

4) On this point, I would say if you're running Win 7 anyways, then you'd be crazy to not buy the G2's with the TRIM firmware promised at the end of the month. Or, get the G1's at 1/2 or 1/3rd the cost of the G2's (I'm believing Anand here). Not that the G1's are worthless; just saying how much I believe TRIM will make the drives truly 'install and forget'.

5) A lot. When I went back to my client's office (4th week) and ran CCleaner, disabled Windows restore points, backed up (and deleted) his older, unused data to external drives and disabled hibernation (8GB) on the desktop and made the notebook's (Samsung SSD) pagefile size 512MB instead of 6GB (system managed) - the performance increased enough that even he noticed. Between the two systems he 'saved' about 45 GB's (128GB Samsung and 160GB Intel).

The only other thing I can offer is this:
if you're looking for a productivity boost via SSD's, I hope the rest of your system has been optimized first (fastest CPU, most RAM, etc.), then make sure you have a good return policy from wherever you buy them from. Do a productivity test before you tear down your system and repeat with the SSD, then you'll know if you've actually upgraded your system, or simply spent money for ???.

See this post (#1)?

http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=771974&highlight=ssd

This mirrors what performance gains I have noticed on the two systems I have used SSD's extensively on. (Very little gains).

Yes, the O/S is very responsive (or should be with an SSD, at least) but responsive does not always translate into more productivity - but I'll be waiting for you to post your results for your specific usage scenario soon.

 

The "G1's dying" is total BS. It's recoverable, its not the flash memory dying. And I'm pretty certain it happens more with systems that have compatibility issues like Nvidia controllers and certain Apple systems.

If you have two drives in your system and one is a slow drive and one is your X25-M, it'll feel slow in general. I had to plug in a 5400RPM notebook drive that is on its deathbed and I was wondering why the system was so slow. If you are going to use an SSD, try not to pair it with a slow drive.

I can agree about the "filled space" being a performance degradation reason. The general rule is don't exceed 80-85%.

Is TRIM worth it? Oh yea it definitely is. I can't see G2's being substantially expensive compared to G1's. Plus you'll want it more when they release the 100MB/s write firmware again when its fixed.

 

i do.. i do research instead of babbling stuff

from where have you copied it? from a usb external disk? sounds like around exactly the READ spead you have on external disks. try real gb lan that delivers 1gb (most doesn't).

again, you babble about stuff you don't know. they, with the very first firmware, might happen to fall in a degraded state they couldn't (see 1)) fix themselves out of it. and then, you needed to use hdd erase on them to get them working fast again. but that's NOT DYING AT ALL. that's like "my table is messy, i just take everything off and start sorted again".

the g1 is install and forget, too. that's exactly how i use it without a problem. and i'm not nice to it, too. that's btw how i use EVERY of my ssds, and so far the g1 is the one that does the job the best.

but of course, the g2 is better, so it depends on the pricing and availability.

which is most likely because of ccleaner, and disabling restore points, not having ANYTHING to do with the rest.. espencially disabling restore points after a while makes your system feel 'fresh' again. espencially on vista.

well, i use the intel drive to boost atom based netbooks successfully, but it's obviously a balance. if your system has most of the time the cpu at 100%, then it's the cpu that is the bottleneck. in most configs, that's NOT the bottleneck, including netbooks. the hdd is.

well, come over to see how they perform here (the multitude of them). you did something very wrong but so far never tried to fix it.

 

davepermen, I don't babble and your discounting my experience is showing more on you than on me.

First, it was copying from an internal 3.5" drive (SataII).

Second, I already mentioned that it was the first (original firmware) that were having problems - if having to do HD Erase is acceptable for you fine - but to me they're dead. Either way, this has no bearing except to point out to the OP that he should do the firmware upgrade if he decides to go for G1's.

(Too lazy to search for the dead G1's I read about, but you're welcome to put your research skills to work).

Last but not least; either these SSD's are install and forget for everyone (including me) or not. What can I possibly be doing wrong installing Win 7 and the needed drivers & software? How else can I get the system up to speed?

In other words; just because my experience is contrary to yours (sorry, but true! ) your stance seems to indicate that SSD's are not infallible and therefore I must be doing something wrong? Seems to me you're the one that's babbling here.

You have a good (SSD) experience and that's fine - my SSD experiences are not as rosy but that is no reason to discount them.

Quite the opposite, I would say.

 

they not dead until you can't use them anymore. that's like you die when you need some sleep to get energy again.. or your laptop is dead as you don't want to load the battery again.

dead g1s are something different, might have been the "8mb bug" you talk about.

well, and last but not least, nothing is install and forget for everyone. there are always SOME with problems.

and yes, tons of stuff can go wrong on installation but all in all, yes, it should be install and work perfect. still, doesn't work always. when will you try it on your real systems?

 

Hopefully, soon (before the holidays start officially and then I'll be too busy till sometime in the New Year).