Category: Geeks r Us
JMicron is one of the largest manufactures of hard drive controlers, notably for flash cells. Many brands of ssds (solid state disks) use the JMicron controler to record data and randomly write the data throughout the various cells. Some of this include patriot, ocz, and samsung. Intel makes their own cells and their own in house controlers.
There is a major bug that occurs with all older ssds and even some newer ones, as JMicron is working on its solution. Intel however, has already addressed the issue with their 2nd generation 25m model ssds. What bug is this?
Over a period of time, your OS, you, and other programs write lots of small files on the hd of your computer. This includes log files, your word documents, mp3s, recordings, etc. After a time, the files become broken and scattered(fragmented) throughout the hard drive. therefore, you were told to defrag your hard drive in order to gain some speed back, launching programs, opening documents, etc. However, on ssds, defragging is a big no no. So contrary to platter based hard drives, one is not to defrag a hard drive. Yes, you may have seen some tech do it just to brag on its speed, but doing so will degrade its performance.
The issue of fragmented files still exists on ssds. After a time, your initial read and write speed is reduced to as much as 30% of when you first receive the hd. So, what is the solution?
Intel has solved this fragmented issue by writing in scripted commands directly in to the controler to check the fragmentations and resolve it before writing new data on to the hd. This may seem longer, but in real world use, you will not notice any change. Furthermore, the drive will not slow down and suffer the affects of fragmentation.
JMicron has gone with 8 channels of traffic from their 4 channel affecting a much higher throughput, but some brands of not yet solved the fragmentation issue. However, there are some drives that have a trim program wich will in affect do what defragging does for platter based drives.
Windows 7 is suppose to aid ssds in that it has built in solutions for ssds to auto arrange data to help prevent fragmentation. I can't wait to test that.
So when shopping for ssds, do a little more research on what controler it uses. Sure one can find ssds for about 1.5 U.s dollars on the gig, but is it worth spending say $100 on a 64 gig hd and find out that 4 months down the line you are reading and writing much much slower than the day you got the drive?
If I could afford it, I'd go for the intel 2nd gen ssd. It may cost 4 dollards per gig, but in the ways of ssds, what you pay is truely what you get.