I have been using the excellent 80GB Intel X25-M SSD for about 3 months now. Performance-wise it was quite simply the single most noticeable hardware upgrade after upgrading to dual-core CPUs years ago. I use it in my Dell Studio 15 laptop. Now the laptop isn’t exactly a slow laptop (Intel P8600 Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM and ATI 4850 GPU) but I could definitely appreciate the near instantaneous loading of applications after upgrading to X25-M. The laptop booted to desktop in under 25 seconds and you could be browsing over wireless in just over 30 seconds. After a cold boot even resource hungry apps like Visual Studio launch as if they were just being restored from RAM. The system was just all-around snappy.
Now all is not well in the SSD land. Intel X25-M, like all the other SSDs out there suffer from performance degradation over time and it depends upon how much you use the drive. You can read about all the technical analysis in the excellent AnandTech article about SSDs. My usage is mostly programming using Visual Studio, building large projects and testing software under Virtual Machines, so I stress the drive a lot more than an average user would over 3 months.
During the past week or so I started noticing that the laptop was becoming slower, was beginning to freeze at random times and sometimes the boot took 4 minutes instead of usual 30 seconds. I have the generation 1 or G1 X25-M SSD. It is actually an A-Data rebranded X25-M but just the label is different. As far as I know the Intel X25-M SSDs are rebranded by A-Data, PQI and Kingston. I had already installed the official Intel firmware upgrade that addresses extreme slowdowns over a period of time. So I started looking for ways to fix the issue. First thing I did was reinstall Windows 7, which didn’t fix the issue, in fact it probably made things worse. Next a full format and reinstall, still no luck. A lot of people seem to think a full format will restore the SSD to factory performance but it just didn’t work in my case. Then I found that there is a utility called HDDErase, which was supposedly used by review sites to restore performance of their review units. I tried running various versions of HDDErase from a bootable CD but it just froze every time. I even tried the IDE mode instead of AHCI but it made no difference.
HDDErase would just not work on this laptop. While looking for a replacement to HDDErase I came across a few posts describing the ATA Secure Erase command to completely wipe SSD. After some searching I found this excellent ATA Secure Erase wiki article on Kernel.org that described in detail how to wipe the Intel X25-M using an in-built Linux utility – the utility was: hdparm. When a secure erase command is issued to an SSD all its cell are marked as free or empty. Just what I needed to restore performance of my SSD.
The haparm utility is part of most Linux distributions, so that part is easy. I used Kubuntu 9.04. There is just one problem using hdparm to secure erase SSDs: hdparm requires that disk that you want to wipe be a ‘non-frozen’ state – the 1st step in the Kernel.org wiki article. Almost all computer BIOSes will ask all attached disks to freeze themselves when your computer boots up. With the disks in frozen state you can’t use hdparm to secure erase. You can confirm this frozen state by following the 1st step in the Wiki article. The 1st step mentions unplugging and plugging your disks to workaround this issue.
What I did was open up the bottom plastic panel of my Dell Studio 15 laptop and removed the screws that hold the SSD in place. I then booted the laptop with Kubuntu 9.04 Live CD. I had to use the safe graphics option as Kubuntu doesn’t seem to like the ATI GPU in this laptop. Once I was at the desktop of the Kubuntu Live CD I unplugged the SSD by sliding it out gently and then plugging it back in a few seconds later. Since it’s a SATA disk, it is reinialized by the system and Linux detects it again as /dev/sda device but this time it is in unfrozen state, which will allow you to follow the rest of the steps in the above wiki article and restore the performance your SSD. Make sure your laptop is on AC power to avoid any low battery issues, when you are doing this. On my laptop the actual secure erase step took only 37 seconds. The SSD has now gained its performance back, it is just as fast as it was when I first installed Windows 7 on it after purchasing the disk.
Unfortunately this means that as good as the first generation Intel disk it is not immune from flash memory performance degradation even after the 045C8820 firmware upgrade. Once the disk is in a state when it has written to every flash memory block, it will slowdown. It still handles the slowdown better than any other SSDs out there but the problem is still there.
The newer 32nm X25-M G2 disks should improve this situation because they will support the ATA TRIM command via a firmware upgrade. The G1 owners, like myself, are out of luck, as Intel has has no plans to release any more firmware upgrades to for G1 disks. As an unfortunate owner of the Intel G1 disk, I will have to resort to doing the ATA Secure Wipe every few months. I will probably find myself taking a full disk image, doing the Secure ATA Erase and then restoring the disk image back to restore the performance. Thanks to the ata.wiki.kernel.org article, we will at least have the ATA Secure Erase as a last resort option.