Thursday, May 7, 2009

X-25M update

Coming up on a month of living with the X-25M SSD... Right after my original post, Intel released a firmware update to address the slowdown issues. I, of course, applied it immediately, with no issues.

A month later, things are still going great. The one nasty side effect is that this drive has RUINED me for working on anyone else's computer (including my home PC). Everything else just feels like molasses when compared to my work laptop.

I also have to be really careful with SQL Server performance. I was writing a little tool that did some LINQ to SQL stuff recently, and the way it was doing a GroupBy() hid the fact that it was doing hundreds of queries on the DB. Normally, I'd notice such a thing because what should be a lightning fast query would cause the machine to grind for a few seconds. With the SSD though, even the hundreds of queries came back lightning fast. I had to run SQL profiler to see what it was really doing- glad I did, because I was able to tweak the query to run fast on "normal" machines with a single DB query and do the fancy grouping behavior in memory after the fact.

Anyway, I'm still giving this thing two big fat thumbs up!

2 comments:

Peter said...

Hi,

I was wondering if you have encrypted your new SSD with TrueCrypt, like you did in your september post, and if so, what your experiences are regarding performance?

Cheers!

Matt Davis said...

I haven't yet- I'm a little worried about negative effects on the drive life, and nobody seems to have a straight answer for that. I'm also a little worried about throughput- when it was IO-bound before, no problem, but now the CPU will have to work a lot harder to keep up with the data. I've seen some gripes from folks with better CPUs than mine make that complaint. TC 6.2's new read-ahead feature sounds like it could address some of the perf concerns, but I'm still kinda "wait and see". I'm using a different form of encryption on my sensitive data for now.