Firmware R211 release

@barrybgb wrote:

I am certainly glad this came out.  Better late than never.
Pretty sad that Sandisk had no comment while we all were ranting about any information.

I just downloaded the firmware but will wait until I get home so i can do a full backup on my work Leveno T410 laptop. I have a 480G in this one.
I also have 2x 240G at home sitting on the shelf. I wanted to make a Raid 0 with them until I found about the Trim issue.
All three of the drives came with R201 and I thought at the time I was good to go.
What a huge dissapointment.

I wanted to replace my 2x Vertex4 in Raid 0 at home with the Extreme 240G’s but have been waiting patiently for the update.
When I get home, I will image the drive, secure erase, do the update, then re-image and retest.

Here are the scores for the 480G now. I did one for each partition.

480G Partition C

Pretty sad 4K results indeed.

 

480G Partition D

 

AS SSD Partition C

 

Pretty sad benchmarks here, don’t you agree? I don’t have the original benchmark I did when I first got this drive but I know it was much better than this.

 

It took awhile to figure out how to upload images here.

 

As soon as I update the drive, I will post new benchmarks.

 

(BTW, I don’t think I will be buying Sandisk anytime soon after this fiasco on their part.)

 

Is there a reason all my images disappeared? Is there a size limit and what is the limit?

 

Wierd? One minute they are gone and the next they return. Gremlins.

Clearly a SATA II laptop, and add the fact that it is a laptop, with all its power saving options enabled, and you certainly do not have a benchmarking power house.Quite normal results for those circumstances. You’re also using msahci, not a high performance driver.

You did not use your other SanDisk EX SSDs in RAID 0 because of the TRIM bug? TRIM in RAID 0 is ONLY supported on Intel 7 series chipsets (except X79), with an IRST Option ROM of 11.0 or above (depends on your mother board’s UEFI/BIOS installing it) and an IRST driver of 11.0 or above. I’ve used SSDs in RAID 0 on systems with no TRIM for years, they work just fine, no performance loss at all. Of course, I use them normally, not the torture tests needed to show TRIM is not working.

Sigh, fiasco on SanDisk’s part? ALL SSD manufactures that used the 5.0 SandForce firmware had the partially working TRIM. FW 5.0 was a new/rewrite of the 3.x firmware, with improved performance, but alas, the TRIM bug. Now while we don’t know if SanDisk used SandForce 5.03, or 5.04, the 5.03 firmware  was a step backwards in some respects, since it is a mix of 5.0 and 3.x FW, for a quick fix of the TRIM bug using 3.x code. FW 5.04 is the true, full 5.0 FW, with a true TRIM fix. That took longer to produce, and is likely why SanDisk’s “delay” in providing an update occurred, they are probably using 5.04.

No SSD manufacture sets release dates on FW, they release it when it’s ready. If they do set a date, that’s because it is done and they decide to say it’s ready next week, for example.

ty parsec for pointing it out for barrybgb, he clearly has no idea why his bench score is so low, and obviously he has no clue about sandforce firmware.  Just as parsec stated, all other company uses sandforce have trim issue and that means Kingston, Corsair, SuperSSpeed etc, except for intel I think, and OCZ not releasing a 5+ firmware on their sandforced drive.  maybe people might want to know the bench results they see it on review sites do not have OS, ie not a primary boot drive.  When OS is installed on SSD and bench from it will result in a much lower score especially in the 4k read/write area, more so in the 4k read.  I’m not denying my reads have also gone down due to this new firmware but Sandisk might release another one soon, never know…

stop bashing this drive, its cheap and hella fast.

edit: @barrybgb, btw you might want to get to know more about your mobo, OROM, chipset version and your intel RST driver. all of the four I mentioned affects SSD performance in some way.

You might find that by installing your Intel RST driver the 4K performance will increase. It says you are using the MS driver. 

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@chrisram wrote:

You might find that by installing your Intel RST driver the 4K performance will increase. It says you are using the MS driver. 

Thanks guys for all the tips. I knew most of them anyways. I am using the msahci driver only on the laptop at work (leveno T410)  and have to check if it even has an intel chipset. I do use the intel drivers on my home desktop though, X79 Sabertooth.

I will be trying the Extreme drives in Raid 0 there now that the trim is working. I do have working trim in Raid 0 on the intel drivers 11.6 but didn’t want to use the Extreme drives until the trim was fixed. I have two boot drives on the home computer. One is a single and the other in raid 0. The raid 0 one is crazy fast. I have a second raid 0 set that I swap out once in a while.

After I get the two Extreme 240 in raid 0 on that computer, I will run a test and compare the two raid sets. Since I have a Thermaltake Level 10 GT case and 5 extra drive caddies, it is easy to swap out arrays and drives.

I have finished updating the 480G and the 2 240G Extreme drives and only tested the 480G so far.

Here are the results:

It looks like the performance dropped somewhat but to be honest, it is not the entire 480G, only the C partition,  and I will need to let it run in idle for several hours or days to allow the GC and trim to take effect. And yes, I know it is SataII.

When I run the raid test, I will be imaging the current raid set. Just so I won’t be comparing apples to oranges.

And BTW, my main disappointment with Sandisk is not that they didn’t deliver the firmware faster, it is that they never bothered to inform their customers as to what was going on. I have only seen that in few companies and usually try to stay away from those if I can.  That is just my personal opinion.

Well, unless the RAID driver for X79, RSTe, which is only used by X79 platforms, now has TRIM, and it was not among the chipsets and drivers that have RAID 0 TRIM when Intel confirmed that on select platforms, unfortunately you still don’t. X79 users are not pleased with this, for obvious reasons.

The X79 chipset, which actually seems to be an Intel 6 series chipset, since current socket 2011 CPUs are Sandy Bridge die based, in contrast to Ivy Bridge CPU/7 series chipsets, was left out of RAID 0 TRIM. So are the other 6 series chipsets, like P67, etc. That seems to be, given what I have read, an intentional move on Intel’s part. I read there is no hardware specific reason that the 6 series chipsets cannot allow TRIM in RAID 0, and the IRST driver actually disables RAID 0 TRIM when it detects a 6 series chipset. Whether or not that is true I don’t know, but so far 6 series chipsets do not have TRIM.

@unityole wrote:

ty parsec for pointing it out for barrybgb, he clearly has no idea why his bench score is so low, and obviously he has no clue about sandforce firmware.  Just as parsec stated, all other company uses sandforce have trim issue and that means Kingston, Corsair, SuperSSpeed etc, except for intel I think, and OCZ not releasing a 5+ firmware on their sandforced drive.  maybe people might want to know the bench results they see it on review sites do not have OS, ie not a primary boot drive.  When OS is installed on SSD and bench from it will result in a much lower score especially in the 4k read/write area, more so in the 4k read.  I’m not denying my reads have also gone down due to this new firmware but Sandisk might release another one soon, never know…

 

stop bashing this drive, its cheap and hella fast.

 

 

@edit: @barrybgb, btw you might want to get to know more about your mobo, OROM, chipset version and your intel RST driver. all of the four I mentioned affects SSD performance in some way.

Thanks for that, and for further explaining the questionable way some SSD reviews are done, on raw, empty drives.

Intel and OCZ have not used the SF 5.0 FW. Intel spent about a year tweaking the SF 3.0 FW, and the result is considered unique among SSDs.

AS SSD is the worst case situation for SF based SSDs. AS SSD uses all non-compressible data, which SF based SSDs do not deal with well. The usual mix of compressible vs non-compressible data for most users is ~70%/30%, which is why SF SSDs perform very well in actual use. OS files and programs are almost all compressible.

It’s not unusual for large capacity SSDs, of 480GB - 512GB capacity, to actually have some lower specs than smaller SSDs. The specs for the 480GB SanDisk EX show random write IOPs of 46K, while the 240GB and 120GB drives are 83K IOPs. Again, a laptop of SATA II or SATA III capability is not the best platform for revealing the best performance of a SSD. The inevitable performance and power limits are the compromise for mobility.

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@parsec wrote:

Well, unless the RAID driver for X79, RSTe, which is only used by X79 platforms, now has TRIM, and it was not among the chipsets and drivers that have RAID 0 TRIM when Intel confirmed that on select platforms, unfortunately you still don’t. X79 users are not pleased with this, for obvious reasons.

 

The X79 chipset, which actually seems to be an Intel 6 series chipset, since current socket 2011 CPUs are Sandy Bridge die based, in contrast to Ivy Bridge CPU/7 series chipsets, was left out of RAID 0 TRIM. So are the other 6 series chipsets, like P67, etc. That seems to be, given what I have read, an intentional move on Intel’s part. I read there is no hardware specific reason that the 6 series chipsets cannot allow TRIM in RAID 0, and the IRST driver actually disables RAID 0 TRIM when it detects a 6 series chipset. Whether or not that is true I don’t know, but so far 6 series chipsets do not have TRIM.

You are absolutely correct about trim on a X79 board. I was wrong about the trim on X79. The GC works just fine on my raid system on the X79.

I know that Intel is going to be releasing a working trim RSTe driver for the X79 chipset… soon. Whenever that may come. Since I built this system in May, by the time they release it, I may have already upgraded to the next latest board and chip.

 

 

It is odd that Intel seems to be taking their time implementing RAID 0 TRIM for X79/RSTe. X79/socket 2011 CPUs are their premier PC platform, and RSTe apparently the onboard RAID driver for their enterprise boards with the Xeon equivalent CPUs.

Then again, Intel is nothing if not conservative, and they may be even extra careful with a driver used in enterprise applications. They may even have it soon, and do the same non-announcement they did with RAID 0 TRIM in IRST. The first hint about it was in the Help section of the IRST Windows GUI. If you clicked Help, a new GUI opened, and if you read the overview section, there was one sentence that basically said, “TRIM works in RAID 0 now”. That was there since the first IRST version 11.0 was released. I thought it might be an oversight in the text. Finally some PC review sites asked Intel so many times, they released a statement about it, which was characterized by one web site as “terse”. The last time I checked Intel’s web site, they had not posted anything about it. Not a grand announcement or celebration, but barely a FYI. Weird…

X79 users should monitor each release of RSTe, and check if Intel slips TRIM in RAID 0 in there. I guess that is to exotic for the marketing people to do anything with, since most people don’t know what RAID is, much less TRIM.

I hope you get it soon.

Just as parsec said, no raid0 trim on x79… yet.  larger SSD gives poorer results, kind of odd its opposite of a hard drive and this issue is only improved with SSDs from samsung, marvel and indilinx because they use DRAM as write cache. Ever wondering why it’s faster in the beginning during file transfer then start to slowing down, from USB drive to Hard drive? probably it’s write cache. If the write cache fills up on these non sandforce drive it’ll probably be hella slow, and sandforce drive do not have DRAM, so it’s cheaper and prevent data loss during power loss.

As for SSD performance in a laptop, it’s not going to look good. I own a alienware m18x considered to be the best performing laptop but I’ve touched most of it’s hardware and they are far from the best. Hardware raid, motherboard, and chipset details from intel. It uses HM67 (similar to H67?) but if its not the same, performance will be different than H67. Built in raid isnt superb, even window 7 ultimate software raid could do better. I do not know where DELL AW gets their motherboard from or built it themselves or maybe from Lian Li, but it fails in comparison to MSI gaming laptop and I could probably guess why. If you looking for high performance on SSD inside a lappy, you’ll need to tweak power/battery in window power management, registry tweaks need to be done too, and more so in the BIOS, but chances are laptop BIOS are ■■■■, so tough luck.

I hope so as well. Another reason I may upgrade sooner is the PCIe 3.0 problem. When I first purchased the Sabertooth X79, it said in the specs that it was PCIe 3.0 ready. It was with the original video drivers, but with each updated driver it was disabled.

I did get to work with the japanese hack but would prefer a driver from Asus or Evga that did work. I think the Z77 drivers all work but not sure at this time.

Anyways, to the topic. I am about to image my two Extreme 240G in a raid and check them out.

best of luck and hope you get near max performance, x79 should be able to do it! here again is the raid0 performance done by Jon at RWLabs “http://www.rwlabs.com/article.php?cat=articles&id=604” on two empty SSD drives. hopefully you’ll get similar performance, and not to trust too much on AD SSD and the read results on CDM.  CDM picks the best results and shows it to you which is where drive is empty, so when data present on drive it’ll obviously have lower read performance which is why I prefer HD Tune, it holds true for all SSDs.

ps. how do you quote? I’m still failing to see how to quote =(

@unityole wrote:

 

ps. how do you quote? I’m still failing to see how to quote =(

Simple. Click “Reply” button of the post to which you wish to reply, then click “Quote” button located top right of reply box (next to “Spell Check” button). Trust this helps.

@chrisram wrote:

You might find that by installing your Intel RST driver the 4K performance will increase. It says you are using the MS driver. 

Which version of the RST driver is everyone using? I installed the latest AHCI RST driver and all my speeds dropped. Went back to the M$ and speeds came back up.

Overall, speeds dropped quite a bit with this frimware for me.

The latest IRST driver, which is classified as a RAID driver, although it works great in AHCI mode, is 11.6.0.1030. That one is a bit finicky on some systems, in RAID mode Window sees it as a SCSI driver, and the IRST Windows GUI does not work when third party SATA controllers (Marvell, ASMedia) are enabled with their standard drivers.

I would suggest IRST 11.2.0.1006, which you can get direct from Intel here:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=21407&lang=eng&OSVersion=Windows%207%20%2864-bit%29*&DownloadType=

What mother board or Intel SATA chipset are you using?

I have an Alienware Laptop with a 3rd gen Ivy Bridge Proc. and the HM77 Chipset. That was the driver I installed, but I opted for the driver only and no utility. Any other utility that can give link speeds and such? Maybe CPU-Z or similar? I hate bloat…

This is PreFirmware

 

Post Firmware

 

IASTOR installed

 

Performance goes right back up reverting back to MSAHCI, but I want the first numbers back!

 

Any advice greatly appreciated.

 

parsec wrote:

The latest IRST driver, which is classified as a RAID driver, although it works great in AHCI mode, is 11.6.0.1030. That one is a bit finicky on some systems, in RAID mode Window sees it as a SCSI driver, and the IRST Windows GUI does not work when third party SATA controllers (Marvell, ASMedia) are enabled with their standard drivers.

 

I would suggest IRST 11.2.0.1006, which you can get direct from Intel here:

 

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=21407&lang=eng&OSVersion=Windows%207%20%2864-bit%29*&DownloadType=

 

What mother board or Intel SATA chipset are you using?

I’m using a Z77 chipset desktop board.

Your benchmark results clearly show you are running at SATA III speeds, otherwise your sequential read speed would not be over ~270MB/s. Ironically, the Intel IRST Windows UI will show the actual link speed, but that is not a question anymore.

If you’re just looking at the final “score”, then AS SSD needs some explanation. Your actual read and write speeds have not changed that much. AS SSD gives more points for high 4K-64Thrd speeds, lose a little there and you lose more points. That test puts 64 I/O requests in a group and sends them to the drive all at once. NO PC user does anything that creates that workload, so it is a worthless test.

Check your read and write sub-score in each benchmark. The Read score went down by 1, and then 2. The Write score dropped by almost 40 with FW R211. Note the 4K-64 Thrd Write speed in each, it dropped. That is what lowers the final score the most.

I also wonder, when using the iaStor driver, if Write Caching is enabled on your SSD. Check it in Device Manager, in the Policy tabs. Actually, if it is checked, uncheck it and click Ok. Then go right back in, check Write caching, and click Ok.

Finally, AS SSD is the toughest benchmark to run on a SandForce based SSD. Try ATTO or CrystalDiskMark, with the test data set to all 0 or 1.

Hi,  Just created a the firmware update on USB flash drive and about to upgrade the firmware.  I have a problem though.  No keyboard function after booting from the USB drive with the firmware on.  Only got USB ports on my PC no PS/2 on the mobo at the back…  Tried 2 keyboards, current KB Blackwidow Ultimate and Logi G11, both don’t work on the firmware upgrade screen.

Using z77x UP5 TH mobo if that’s any help to anyone that could help me if there’s some setting in the BIOS is need to enable for keyboard funtionality on the FW upgrade screen.

Your fancy keyboards require very specific drivers that are not part of the firmware update. You could try enabling “Legacy USB support” in your BIOS, but that might do nothing for you. A very basic USB keyboard will work, but anything wireless will not.

Also be sure you are using the USB2.0 ports on the rear I/O panel of your board.

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You’re quite right, plugged Kb into a USB 2.0 port and it stayed powered up on the firmware update screen.  Didn’t think ti mattered tbh as USB 3 ports are backward compatible but guess it does matter…

Cheers anyway.

@dazuk wrote:

You’re quite right, plugged Kb into a USB 2.0 port and it stayed powered up on the firmware update screen.  Didn’t think ti mattered tbh as USB 3 ports are backward compatible but guess it does matter…

 

Cheers anyway.

USB 3.0 is a different driver so that would make sunce if the 3.0 driver is not in the linux kernal used for the ssd update tool.