TRIM, Firmware Updates and MORE!
TRIM and Firmware Update
At this time the firmware your Vertex will have is a bit of a dog’s breakfast and really depends on when it was manufactured. Our particular Vertex came with the lasted version of Indilinx controller chip but only version 1.1 (1370) firmware installed. We strongly recommend you check what version your new Vertex firmware is and if necessary update it to 1.1 (1370) and then to 1.3. Versions before 1.1 do not support the TRIM command and while there was an earlier beta “hot rodded” firmware the trade off in a bit of theoretical speed for no TRIM support is not worth it. To update your firmware to 1.1 we recommend you follow
this link and read the official guide carefully. After reading that guide but BEFORE following it we also recommend you
follow this link and read that it can take up wards of 30 minutes to flash. If you think it has hung….give it more time! If you do reboot or power down the system during this process your drive will be dead!. Period.
After you have successfully installed the 1.1 firmware, the
1.3 update is a breeze.
TRIM Program
The official thread for the TRIM program
can be found here. It contains a lot of information regarding the program itself as well as useful tips and tricks. We recommend you also stop by from time to time as the wiper.exe program is still beta and is being updated, tweaked and all round fine tuned before it becomes official.
To run the wiper program, the best thing is to have the Vertex be the OS drive and drive 0. To properly run, it needs the Vertex to be Drive 0 but it seemed more hit or miss when it was a data (aka D drive). Since using a Vertex (or any SSD) as a pure data drive is a little unlikely, this caveat is a minor one to say the least. The only other restriction is at this time it will not work on drives which have been placed in RAID.
To run it all you need to do is double click the wiper.exe file. It should be located at the root folder. When you double click it a DOS window opens up and asks you if your are sure you want to continue. Press Y for yes and N for no. Just remember, this is NOT going to wipe all your data; it is more like an old-fashioned disk defragmentation program. If you have made multiple partitions, you need not worry about running it for each partition as the program is smart enough to look for ALL Vertex drives and run it on all “drives”. While we only have one Vertex to play with we assume that as long as you have not RAID’ed multiple drives it will wipe any and all it can find. If you have multiple non Vertex drives you need not worry as it will simply tell you it can not run on XYZ drive and then continue on looking for the Indilinx based one, find it, clean it and then finish.
We think this program is a game changer as it (in a nutshell) does an erase on all the cells which have marked as not
in use BUT have been used (i.e. marked by the controller as containing deleted information) and thus frees up these blocks of cells which could have required a slow erase to happen in real time before they could be used for new data. In a perfect world as data is marked as deleted the SSD controller would in fact delete just the data in that cell and that would be that. Unfortunately, SSDs do not work that way as they can erase only at the BLOCK level and not the individual cell level (or group level and not the individual level). So what happens is the controller just marks it and leaves it and then continues on using up fresh blocks of cells until there are no fresh blocks left. It does this even when not all the cells in a given block are used for a write.
When all the fresh cells are gone and there are only partially full cells left, things get dicey. IF the data which is to be written is small there is no problem; however when it is large enough to use not only the fresh cells in the block but also the ones marked as used (but not IN use) the drive can become very slow. As we said, the controllers can only erase at the block level and not the cell level so in order to write fresh data so it first has to move the ENTIRE BLOCK into memory and then ERASE the entire block, put the data back in and then write in the new data. Needless to say, this is a very slow process and since it happens in real time it can cause stuttering.
This is where TRIM and by extension the wiper.exe work around comes in. An Indilinx drive works just like all the others and merrily goes along labeling cells as used and using fresh blocks until it runs out. HOWEVER, before it runs out you can run this simpl little program and it will go through the drive block by block erasing and moving until all the blocks are either being used or are clean again and ready for fast access. Samsung SSDs cannot do this, Intel SSDs can't either; only INDILINX SSDs can. As we have said in the past, this is not a true TRIM program because you have to manually run it from time to time BUT if you do your drive will never become slow. It is for this simple reason we put little to no faith in testing Indilinx SSDs in their "used" state (ie no free blocks) as it is naive at best to think you will never run this program.
For a more in depth look at TRIM and how SSDs work Anadtech has a great article which you can read
here (we have taken the time to fast forward to the longer explanation of what we are talking about with "used" blocks).
As we said, this is beta software coupled with new firmware and while the chances of data loss are slim, you should be aware of this possibility. If you are using a 64bit OS you may wish to wait a bit longer for results to trickle in on the newly released version by more "energetic" free beta testers. OCZ states the recently released 0525 is supposedly 100% safe on 32bit OSes and basically 90% on 64bit...but it still is BETA and thus is still risky!
Here is the is the reason why the original version was causing problems and what OCZ engineers have done to work around the issue:
“The reason why user data got corrupted was some device drivers (eg. Intel Matrix Storage) sent only 28bit LBA address to SSD while Wiper sent 48bit LBA address. Complete solution is not implemented yet, but this version has some avoidance code... In other words, performance may not be restored, but user data will be more likely to be preserved.”
While there have been some articles lately which ignore the TRIM program and dismiss it as nothing more than a defragmentation program, we can tell you from first hand expereice that this program does work. It restored all lost speed to the drive after we had finished torturing it with IOMeter. With Crystal DiskMark the scores were down right abysmal after running the benchmark, but after running the wiper program they were right back up where they were before….like nothing had happened.
Useful S.M.A.R.T. Information
While we refuse to comment on why anyone would overlook such a powerful tool as the wiper.exe program, we can see a reviewer wanting to level the playing field and ignore it. However, as this review was being updated to included 1.3 firmware testing OCZ and Indilinx pulled another big rabbit out of their hat....heck this rabbit is a
Flemish Giant of a "rabbit".
The biggest concern everyone has with SSDs is their inability to "know" how long the cells will last (and thus how long the DRIVE itself will last). Well, with Indilinx SSDs you no longer have to wonder! For the first time that we are aware of, you can not only find out how much "life" is left in the drive (in percentage of expected lifespan) but also the average erase count for the cells.
While the life expectancy is just an estimate (though one based on more acurate data than before) the average erase count tells you exactly how many times the cells as a whole have been used (remember that reading has for all intents and purposes NO effect on the life span of SSDs; its the number of erase cycles which are important). Which makes this ability even better is the fact that you do not need any proprietary software, all you need is a SMART reading program which can display the various SMART IDs. In the case of OCZ they use the example of CrystalDiskInfo.
As you can see in the above picture the Vertex spits out a whole bunch of data; of this data, D0 (AKA Spin Buzz) and D1(Offline Seek Performance) are the important ones. D0 is the Average Erase Count for the cells (in our case 74), and D1 is drive life left in % based upon the erase count (which in our case is 100%). This second number will give you a very good ball park estimate on how the cells look. While you can argue for and against the wiper.exe program being a game changer; you can not argue that this is not one. This literally gives you a powerful early warning system for your drive....something that a standard HDD can NOT give you.
Backing this up is the fact that OCZ recently announced that their Vertex drives now (retroactively) come with THREE year warranties. Which is the exact same as most HDDs. Amazing job OCZ; simply bloody amazing.
For more information on this here is a direct link to the OCZ forum thread which goes into greater detail:
Guide: Crystaldiskinfo has some secrets to tell