Sandforce Life Time Throttling

[groberts101]

here is my latest response to your cause here. Trying to help as I can but won't be puuled into heavy debates about the inner workings of this controller. Been there.. done that..and no offense whatsoever is intended but I don't have time to revist it everytime someone thinks they have it figured out and I'm wrong again. To me it's always been more about the "what".. than the "why" with these controllers. The 6G drives are much improved and should not be lumped together with these older gens algorithms for anything more than a reference point.
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...l=1#post650516

Here are my smart stats from the toolbox for one of my 6 V2 drives. Hope they can help anyone who has the time or intestinal fortitude to figure them out. I don't have either and wasted enough of my time(and drives life) to figure that gen controller out. lol



I will say this quickly though. There is MUCH confusion about the "time calculations" being used to determine when lifetime throttling will be implemented. Time has absolutley nothing to do with it(at least at this level of throttle, although "hammered states" may very well rely on the time/data size correlation). It has to do strictly with the capacity of the drive in question. EVERY first gen Sandforce drive WILL throttle IMMEDIATELY when all nand has been touched because the required GC map has been fully formed. Write compressible data?.. takes more to hit it all. Write incompressible data?.. takes nearly the same amount of logically written data to hit the same physical space. This is where some of the confusion from compression algorithms muck the result up for those trying to measure throttling by the amount of data written.

If you SE a drive that was previously throttled and the drive were to slow down before all capacity had been rewritten once more?.. then you have other issues at play. Won't even begin to speculate as to why that would occur(though I did a bit in the above link) BUT you would surely be sending the wrong man(Durawrite) to prison for that crime. Durawrites maps are extremely consistent and ALL blocks must be written(though, they do NOT have to be full blocks) for the throttling to be implemented again. Sandforce fact regardless of Sandforce model(first gen only) or capacity.

TRIM is also highly misunderstood on these controllers and anyone who see's benefits from its use on other controllers is easily confused when trying to relate it to these drives. It's VERY lazy and most of the blocks just get marked and set aside/mapped for later recovery during GC time. Surely not the smartest way to do it and MANY have complained in the past. This is one of the greatest advancements on the newer 6G controller along with a larger recycling engine which was surely needed for it(immediate TRIM released blocks) to even become a possibility.

Also worth a mention that I found the latest firmware revisions to have actually recalculated the lifespan based on Sandforce's own internal testing. So those who are comparing these metrics will want to be on the latest firmware revision(1.33). One of the rare occassions that Sandforce reps ever showed their faces in public by starting a thread/replying on the OCZ forums. I was even called "astute" for the catch in reported lifespan changes. Was nice to hear for a change as most just call me "astupid". LOL