Intel is facing another challenge to its technology as a study by PCPerspective shows that the performance of its solid state drives (SSDs) degrades over time. So far, Intel has reacted the same way as it did to the Pentium flaw, by denial.
With flash limited in its rewrite cycles to 10,000 for MLC and 100,000 for SLC it is important for SSD manufacturers to spread the memory load evenly across the memory array so that wear is spread evenly.
Intel did this very effectively but, it seems, the result over time is a massive fragmentation of the SSD which degrades performance. Defragmentation tools only make it worse. The only way to get the drive back up to speed is to wipe it.
Intel, so far, is denying the problem. “Our labs currently have not been able to duplicate these results,” says Intel, “in our estimation, the synthetic workloads they use to stress the drive are not reflective of real world use. Similarly, the benchmarks they used to evaluate performance do not represent what a PC user experiences.”
Despite this denial, Intel, according to PCPerspective: ‘Reportedly has something in the works.’
PC Perspective concludes: “The PC laptop user placing light workloads on their X25-M may never see the worst of these issues, but many users are going solid state for their desktop OS partitions, and a typical power user workload can fragment these drives in short order. While the specialised controller used by Intel enables it to bulldoze through most scenarios, we have seen that even the best logic is subject to severe write combining / internal fragmentation. Hopefully Intel can further tweak their algorithms with a future firmware update to the X25-M.”
With the Pentium flaw, as described in ‘Only the Paranoid Survive’, the book written by Intel’s CEO at the time, Andy Grove, the first reaction to the emergence of the flaw was to ignore it. Intel argued that the flaw only affected people doing heavy duty maths, and so it wasn’t appropriate to replace anyone’s Pentium.
As press coverage grew, and public reaction became hostile, Intel decided to reverse strategy and replace any Pentium which any purchaser wanted replaced. Intel took a write-off of $475m.
“And”, concluded Grove, “we embarked on a whole new way of doing business.” Now we’ll see if the ‘new way of doing business’ still applies.