Thursday, February 19, 2009

My Highly Technical Reaction: Aw, Crap

From Engadget:
Intel's X25-M SSD drives have certainly shown themselves more than capable enough in the usual tests and various configurations, but a long-term test report from the folks at PC Perspective is now casting a bit of doubt onto their long-term effectiveness and speediness. More specifically, they found that the sector remapping and wear-leveling algorithms that are designed to increase performance and extend the drives' lifespans were actually doing quite the opposite as the drive became increasingly fragmented after extensive use.

Great.

At this point, any hardware recommendation I make is almost sure to be followed less than a week later by an article at Ars Technica or similar site confirming that the hardware in question sets housefires on purpose and eats children. And likes it.

The PC Perspective article is here, and if I allowed myself to have any perspective on this, I would admit that this article is a very, very good thing, because it exposes the problem in a very public way. In other words, Intel has to fix it with a firmware update.

Oh, and in case you're wondering: no slowdown for me yet. My X-25M is still obscenely fast.

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