OCZ Vertex Drives

[Ao1]

I can get similar results. Have a look at this thread where I'm mucking about with different BIOS SATA modes. The results are not identical, but you can see a theme.

Halk, was it the AMD drivers/ AHCI mode or was it fragmentation that changed your results?

I'd suggest that unless you format after each test you will not get proper results because benchmarking adversely fragments all SDD drives. Maybe you get a ball park idea, maybe not.

For a valid benchmark you need a formatted non OS drive, otherwise you are just testing how badly you have fragmented your drive.

I can't understand why anyone would want to cripple the performance of an OS based SDD by benchmarking (assuming they are not formatting afterwards)......it's a lot of money to spend to then loose performance by pointlessly fragmenting it.

It would be worth asking the guys over at the OCZ forum for their opinion on how long it takes their drives to recalibrate after a test if you don't format. That would enable people to decide if they should be benchmarking or not on drives they are using for their OS.

[Halk]

Halk, was it the AMD drivers/ AHCI mode or was it fragmentation that changed your results?

I'd suggest that unless you format after each test you will not get proper results because benchmarking adversely fragments all SDD drives. Maybe you get a ball park idea, maybe not.

For a valid benchmark you need a formatted non OS drive, otherwise you are just testing how badly you have fragmented your drive.

I can't understand why anyone would want to cripple the performance of an OS based SDD by benchmarking (assuming they are not formatting afterwards)......it's a lot of money to spend to then loose performance by pointlessly fragmenting it.

It would be worth asking the guys over at the OCZ forum for their opinion on how long it takes their drives to recalibrate after a test if you don't format. That would enable people to decide if they should be benchmarking or not on drives they are using for their OS.

It was AHCI + AMD drivers together that caused the performance drops. If I run in either IDE mode, or AHCI without AMD drivers then the ATTO scores are pretty much the same. Running ATTO doesn't seem to degrade performance. I think you're maybe overreacting to the effect benchmarks have on the drive. Someone had a figure of 50GB writes per day for 16 years before the drives "run out". I don't know if that's true or not, but I suspect a couple of dozen ATTO runs will be neither here nor there.

[Ao1]

It was AHCI + AMD drivers together that caused the performance drops. If I run in either IDE mode, or AHCI without AMD drivers then the ATTO scores are pretty much the same. Running ATTO doesn't seem to degrade performance. I think you're maybe overreacting to the effect benchmarks have on the drive. Someone had a figure of 50GB writes per day for 16 years before the drives "run out". I don't know if that's true or not, but I suspect a couple of dozen ATTO runs will be neither here nor there.

I don't have an OCZ drive so I can't test it to find out, but logic says that benchmarking will fragment the drive. Why not give it a try or ask OCZ what it is doing to the drive?

EDIT: It's not about the drive "running out" it's about the way that SDD's relocate data after a benchmark, which is causing the slow down. The PC Perspective review has already shown how badly benchmark performances are affected on the X25-M drive. The post I made with the extract from the Intel statement is explaining why that it happening. Maybe OCZ drives are not affected as badly in terms of how long they take to adapt back, but I think it is safe to say that benchmarking is not doing an SSD drive any short/ mid term favours if you continue to use it without formatting.