TR Forums

Non-gadgetar link:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820227924

I'm trying to get rid of my Agility drives now; I just don't like how performance degrades on Async NAND SSD's with the Sandforce controllers;
Get them more than half full, keep them that way for a year and then look at your woeful benchmark scores in things like CrystalDiskmark and IOmeter.

Other drives like the Marvell-based and Samsung 830 are still behaving themselves at 80% or more of their "fresh install" speeds - that's all the evidence I need given that the rest of the platform is identical.

Chrispy_ wrote:

I just don't like how performance degrades on Async NAND SSD's with the Sandforce controllers;
Get them more than half full, keep them that way for a year and then look at your woeful benchmark scores

Isn't that what garbage collection / TRIM is supposed to take care of? I know async NAND does have performance deltas compared to sync and toggle NAND, but I didn't know there was a problem with performance degredation. (the 30MB/s reduction from fresh to tortured after TRIM doesn't seem significant to me) The major user-experience benefit of SSD's is their low access times anyway.

**Disclaimer: I don't own an Agility 3 and I realize the TRIM results linked above only show sequential write performance on the tortured drive for a relatively limited duration of writes and seemingly only one TRIM cycle.

Yeah, I don't know what causes it, can't really say I notice it much in day to day use either.....

All I know is that none of the Sandforce drives (Vertex3, Force3, Agility3) run as well now as they did new. I never fill them more than about 75% and they all have TRIM enabled, are correctly-aligned and the drives are being run in AHCI mode. I'll have the opportunity to format one of them soon so I'll see if it is excessive NAND wear or whether it was just poor page management from the Sandforce controller.

Neither explanation bodes well for those drives in consumer machines that are under 2 years old.