SSD Drive Toolkit

OCZ Technology has announced the release of 3,5 ” SSD Colossus series. New line of Solid State Drives supposed to be used in high-performance segment, which requires a large amount of disk space. It is assumed that target audience of these flash drives are enthusiastic and corporate level customers. Senior model has a capacity of 1 TB.

In addition to the increased capacity Colossus SSDs with SATA II interface have high speed parameters due to the internal RAID0 architecture. According to OCZ, the new series of drives are excellent with such tasks as moving small files while working with email, web surfing, file transferring. Test results to confirm this information are not provided, but the specification of the solid sate drives is promising: maximum read speed is 260 Mb/s, write – 260 Mb/s, long continuous recording – 220 Mb/s (for 128-GB model -140 Mb/s).

Series is represented by four models: 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB and 1 TB. Maximum number of IOPS operations (input/output per second) in random write access for 4 Kb file equals to 14280, 16100, 12300 and 13300 respectively. For comparison: for a  160 GB X25-M Intel SSD this parameters is 8600. OCZ Colossus based on multilevel flash memory cells (MLC), has 128 Mb cache and are equipped with two controllers. Other characteristics are: seek time is less than 1 ms, the maximum impact power – 1500 G, mean time between failures (MTBF) – 1,5 million hours. Devices are enclosed in aluminum shell measuring 146 x 101,6 x 25,4 mm. Price of Colossus 500 GB (OCZ refers to Amazon.com) – $ 1770.

In September HP has begun shipping of the second generation Solid State Drives for HP Proliant servers. In the past year since first introduction of SSD in HP servers,  there appeared several solutions to shortcomings of the SSD technology.

The first flaw – per gigabyte price of solid state drives today is much higher than that of traditional hard drives. This disease can be treated only one way – increasing production volume and information density on each disk. And we went this way: now you have opportunity to install 60 GB and 120 GB disks.

The second nowadays drawback of SSD – it has lower maximum number of read/write cycles than magnetic hard drives have. It can strongly affect system which intensively works with data processing. In order to resolve this problem and delay degradation of SSD manufacturers implement special algorithms on microcode level for load balancing of the physical memory cells. It is also recommended to buy SSDs with redundant capacity and use it mostly for tasks requiring data reading (financial data real-time analysis, CAD, 3D modeling, etc.).

Adhering to these recommendation HP also switched to 3-Gbit SATA interface. This, in addition to a significant data read/write rate increasing, allows to use hot swap disks. Now HP’s servers with SSD can be applied in mission-critical applications without fear of data loss.

The new drives are available in the standard HP ProLiant Universal Drive Carrier (UDC) shell, 2.5 or 3.5-inch form factor, so they can be applied not only in blade servers, but in most other models HP ProLiant G6 and G5, supporting UDC, as well as  in some models of HP Integrity.

HP ProLiant G5

Actual manufacturer of SSD is Samsung Electronics, but as HP sends it in market under its own brand, HP’s engineers had been thoroughly testing all electronics for several months. Therefore today the reliability of Solid State Drives is near high-speed SAS disks. At the same time SSDs have unique advantages, which provide greater scope in terms of using environment: extended operating temperature range (0-60° C instead of the usual 10-35° C), lower heat production and excellent resistance to shock and vibration.

Once Intel has released a new version firmware for the X25-M solid state drives, she began to receive complaints from consumers, to Score stated that new dress broke their device.
The representative of Intel’s NAND Solutions Group at the customer support forum said the company plans to release fixed firmware by the end of  November.

Firmware upgrade was also designed to expedite the work speed of X25-M SSD. It is necessary part for of Intel SSD Toolbox, which monitors and manages the X25-M on operating systems Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. New firmware and the Intel SSD Optimizer enable using of special command from the Windows 7 ATA Data Set Management (known as TRIM), which helps sustain good performance of solid state disk. TRIM physically removes files from the disk, which were previously marked for removal. For owners of the 160GB SSDs updated firmware will also increase thesequential write speed to 100 MB/s, it is 40% higher than current values.

The Intel Company has released special software called SSD Toolbox, which includes updated firmware for it’s advanced solid-state drives X25-M series and SSD Optimizer, which will improve performance of the SSD. New firmware in conjunction with SSD Optimizer and SSD Toolbox allows you to use a special ATA-command  to ensure continued high performance. This command, called Trim, synchronize list of actually deleted files with list of files, which are deleted but still physically exist on drive. Trim command tells SSD what exactly blocks became available. In other operating systems new tools for optimization are not yet available because the Trim command is part of Windows ATA Data Set Management Command and is only implemented in Windows 7. So Intel SSD will work faster only in Windows 7 for now.

Drives X25-M series are relatively new and are manufactured by the most modern 34 nanometer technology. Despite the novelty, these drives are affected of the general SSD problem – “degradation” after rewriting a large amount of data. According to the developers, the gain in speed from the new firmware and optimizing utility can be different. For 160 Gb Solid State Disk write speed is increased from 70 Mb/s to 100 Mb/s.

Intel SSD Toolbox Screenshot

It should be noted that experts from WindowsITPro reported that the Trim improves drive performance not in all cases, but only after complete removal of files. If you just  rewrites existing files, the level of degradation of the drive remains the same as before the using Trim command.

In any event, if you are using Intel X25-M SATA drives, you should be sure to download and install updated firmware and a set of utilities SSD Optimizer and SSD Toolkit to optimize the placement of files on the SSD-drive. You can use this link: http://www.intel.com/go/ssdtoolbox/