How many of you guys buying the Vaio Z Quad SSD? Do you know about TRIM?

Hey guys,

Hope I find fellow SSD fans here.
I'm crazy about SSD and jumped on it the first time it was available with the TZ on SSD.

But if you've been following news about SSDs, you'd know that they degrade with time.

So the industry, after being forced to admit that SSDs suck after a while, came up with a solution called TRIM.

Now that the new Z is out with Quad SSDs, I am thinking of getting one but it doesn't make sense to get it if there isn't a TRIM command.

Without that, you're basically having a blindingly fast system to start which would only die a painfully slow death down the road.

It's almost like having the fastest SCSI HDD only to be told you can't do a defrag on it.

 

When can we actually notice it degrades?

How soon is it? Any idea?

 

Here you have feeled 2000 Postings about the theme ^^

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=447505

The facts are, that you loose TRIM within Raid. But you can kill the Raid, and setup Bjod or something without Raid...

So you have trim.. For me i like Speed, and i will get Raid0 ;-)

 

There are several ways of handling the lack of TRIM support.

ShadowProtect...

Or perfect disk... just search.

And as I gather it, and I may be wrong here, TRIM isn't supported yet. Yet as in... will be in future firware updates?

 

Okay...

I think I answered the question myself.

Bad news guys...there's no hardware in the world right now that supports TRIM with RAID.
So the answer is no.

Would you buy a hard drive which wouldn't defrag? I wouldn't do that unless I hardly use it for programs and it's only purely for archiving.

The Quad SSDs are on the working computer which has a lot of file movement...the lack of TRIM kills the whole idea of "performance"

 

*laugh*

That's the best thing about being with the best blokes in nbr forums.
You guys are the BEST.

I'll look into it.

Thanks!

 

I believe it wouldn't be supported.

SONY's really good at introducing some of the best leading technology out there but awefully bad at supporting the ones which they've launched.

My video drivers for all my Vaios had to be updated using the community drivers.
[I have 4 VAIOs...*laugh*]

 

Wouldn't the time it takes for the SSD to degrade, outlast the useful lifespan of the notebook itself?

Considering general usage, not write/delete abuse...

 

Hmm.
To really simply it...think of TRIM as defragging but specifically for SSDs. Cos it's something to do with how the drive deletes something.

So to answer your question, there is no true answer. it depends on how much you fill up your hard drive and delete it.

To really feel how much it affects your computer, you'd install the OS, fill it up to the brim, format it and run it.

Some drives become absolutely crap. [some samsung MLCs suffer really badly]
Some drives using SLCs don't suffer as much.

But no matter what there is noticable degrade. Cos I am using an SSD on my Vaio TZ now and I feel it. [It was like 40 gigs...really easy to max out even if you didn't intend to.]

 

That totally depends on how you use your hard drive.

The thing is...it is actually easier to hit the degrade much faster than fragmentation.
[so my analogy of fragmentation is slightly off]

In fact, ironically, a way to "defrag" a HDD is to delete everything, format everything to zeros and re-copy everything back.

If you did the same exact thing for and SSD, you'd immediately hit the worst possible SSD degrade and you'd need TRIM to get it back to at least 90% of the original performance.

Without TRIM, some Samsungs MLC based SSDs are known to suffer up to 50%.

That's totally unacceptible.

 

I see... that's worrying...

Can we actually restore a degraded SSD when it doesn't support TRIM?

something about TRIM = automatic and we can do a manual TRIM (Wiping?)

 

Quoting myself...

There are several ways of handling the lack of TRIM support.

ShadowProtect...

Or perfect disk... just search.

 

I've done a search on both those products.
One is a backup product [shadow protect]
And the other is a popular defrag product [perfect disk]

What do these two products have to do with SSD degradation and TRIM?

 

(courtesy of ajreynol)

if it starts slowing down:

image the drive with ShadowProtect Desktop, Norton Ghost, Acronis TrueImage (15 minutes)
delete raid array (1 minute)
rebuild raid array (1 minute)
restart computer and start image restoration software with boot disc (3 minutes)
expand image (15 minutes)
reboot back into windows right where you left off @ max speed again (25 seconds)

grand total time lost:

35:25

********************************

Originally Posted by arth1
TRIM, GC and defragmentation are three different things:

Garbage collection:
When the drive is idle, it can run an expensive (slow) "erase" operation on blocks it knows are no longer used. This ensures that there are spare blocks that can be written to quickly.

TRIM:
The OS tells the drive about which blocks are no longer used by the file system. Which gives the drive a chance to let the garbage collector erase those blocks. Otherwise, the garbage collector can only pre-erase blocks that it itself has reallocated, i.e. when you overwrite data.

Defragmentation:
This occurs on a file system level, not a hardware level. A drive doesn't understand fragmentation, because it's irrelevant to the drive whether a block is used for data or for a pointer to the next block.

Judging from your other posts here, you also seem to think that the saturation-without-TRIM problem with high latency for random writes occurs when a drive is full, as in showing 100% full. This is not the case at all. It occurs when all the blocks on the drive have been written to at least once, without the drive knowing that some of them are really free because you've deleted data too.
In other words, when a drive isn't 100% full.

******************************

Or look up "Tony trim" on the OCZ forums...

 

Except that those steps don't include a wipe command that tells the drive that the blocks are empty and can be erased.
Unless you add a wipe/erase operation, from each drive's point of view, the above are only more writes.

To recap, to resolve the saturation situation requires that the drive knows which blocks are safe to delete, and deletes them (or lets the Garbage Collector know it can delete them in spare moments). This can happen in multiple ways:

- A wipe/erase command (not to be confused with format or quick format, which happens at file system level, not disk level). Normally, you need special software provided by the drive manufacturer or OEM, although there are free apps out there that work with "most" drives. And you have to be able to pass the command to the individual drives, not a stripe array.

- Automated TRIM. Which is a way for the OS to tell the drive which blocks have been freed and can be re-used. The OS and controller both need to support TRIM, and there must be a 1:1 mapping between what blocks the OS sees and the drive sees. I.e. no RAID, striping iScsi or other layers that use remappings.

- Manual TRIM. As above, but you do a scan of the disk, and send the drive a list of all free blocks. Takes the OS support for TRIM out of the equation, but there's much more overhead, and requires tools provided by the drive manufacturer or OEM.

- SSD firmware that "understands" the overlaid file system on the drive, and can do its own manual TRIM kind of operations. Depends on a whole slew of things, including assumptions about the MBR type, no striping or RAID, the file system manufacturer not making future updates or changes to the file system, and the user never doing operations at file system level (what do you think would happen if this kicked in while a user was in the middle of a partitionmagic session? Or while halfway done restoring from an image "backup"?)
In my opinion, a worse-than-nothing approach, and this "feature" being included would be enough for me not to buy those drives.

 

It's pretty simple, just make a ghost image, drop the array in bios, boot HDDErase off a CD or USB stick, Wipe the drives, reenable the array in bios, restore ghost image.

http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml

 

Thanks. I gotta wrap my head around that.
Based on what I've been reading so far, none of the sites which discussed about TRIM [tom's/anand/tweak/overclock] seems to suggest that wiping everything and reimaging helps.

Actually, the last bit about your stating that I believe free space is what is causing the latency isn't true. I did say that the degradation happens if you did a full format which pads out every single portion with zeros. In other words, a secure full format. It's sorta like the opposite of how you would solve fragmentation problems in a funny way. I have a RAID 5 file server system which lacks defragging capabilities and that's what I do to defrag it.

 

Don't forget that you have to switch the controller in BIOS setup from RAID or AHCI to IDE mode, or HDDerase won't work. (And back again afterwards, obviously.)

And, of course, the SSD has to be compatible with HDDerase. Most will, but some newer drives work with older versions of HDDerase, but not newer ones, and a few drives won't work with HDDerase at all.

 

That probably wasn't directed at you. He quoted a post I had made, where I said that to a different user.

 

*laugh*

Yes, silly me.

So to recap. I can actually do this procedure to my old Vaio TZ SSD even though it doesn't have TRIM and bring it back to its original performance?

Because I definitely feel the sluggishness of the system compared to when it was new nowadays. I've used up the 40 gigs a couple of times. [40 gigs is really easy to fill nowadays. To think I was so proud of my top the end 120 MB hard drive 20 years ago. *laugh*]

 

Arth...
We're not even sure whether the VAIO Z Quad SSD solution is embedded RAID, meaning that the computer sees the device as a single storage instead of 4 drives to play with.

If it is the former, doesn't that mean there is nothing one can do about the degradation and RAIDing the SSDs was possibly a terrible design mistake? [Great for marketing obviously. And fantastic performance at the beginning until the degrading makes it slower than a single high end SSD]

 

Oh, but we do know. Screenshots have been posted here.
It's Intel Matrix Storage software RAID, and yes, you can see the individual devices, so no, that particular problem is a non-issue.

 

I am buying two 4x128GB =512GB SSD Vaio Zs
I know about TRIM and the possible lack thereof but it will be a non issue as I intend to run two of the SSDs in RAID 0 for storage and the other two will be one System disk and the other will be free at all times available for maintainance.

 

Just to be clear...You did not need to "fill up" the drive to cause the degradation. You just need to write a total of 40G. You can write a 1 gig file, delete it, and do this 40 times and then you will hit the degradation.
An SSD, does not erase memory cells. It marks them as invalid until there are no more free ones. Then it has to do an erase before a write. This takes a loooong time.
TRIM will do the erase in the background.
If you want to know everything about SSD's read the anadtech articles.

 

moved, can be deleted

 

Hey tomb,

Yeah, I'm aware of that too. But that's assuming your controller was doing wear levelling for you.

My 40 gig SSD was like the first ever SSD launched by Sony so it's pretty much a relic today. I'm not sure what they've chucked in the Samsung SSD. *laugh*

Nonetheless, hitting your hard drive max basically tells you you will hit degrading.
And I can feel the darned thing running slow now. It's almost the same lousy feeling as a HDD about to go bad sectors when things start to bog down and slow.

PLUS, the 40 gig SSD was painfully slow to begin with. It was the access speed which was wonderful. And once I lost that...I wish I went for the 4800rpm instead.

 

Arth,

Thanks!
You have addressed the main worries I had.
Quad SSD for me baby! *laugh*

Would you happen to have the link to the screenshots? I would like to see if it's 4 drives or 2.

 

That's funny.
Why wouldn't you wish to have your RAID 0 as your system and double up your throughput?
The biggest strength of SSDs is the access speed but they are painfully weak in throughput. I believe that was the biggest reason for Sony's designer to think about quad RAID 0 to effectively quadruple the throughput.

You've got great SSDs on your desktop, I'm not sure if the Sony SSDs are going to be of the same level in terms of throughput performance.

 

Because I do not need greater throughput.