10 April 2013

I've got a shiny new SSD which I'm playing with in FreeBSD. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to TRIM the device, other than using newfs -E -t, which leaves a UFS behind, so I wrote my own: trim.c

# ./trim /dev/ada4

Although the SSD reports a sector size of 512 bytes, it won't TRIM a block smaller than 4K, and it won't be efficient about it until about the 2MB mark.

I've also noticed that if I write a block, then immediately TRIM it, it doesn't work. Sleeping for a second and re-issuing the TRIM makes it work.

Sometimes, the SSD silently fails to TRIM. The tool I wrote verifies and reports this.

Here's the SMART data for my SSD:

# smartctl -i /dev/ada4
Model Family:     Intel 520 Series SSDs
Device Model:     INTEL SSDSC2CW120A3
Firmware Version: 400i
User Capacity:    120,034,123,776 bytes [120 GB]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
Rotation Rate:    Solid State Device
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-2 T13/2015-D revision 3
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 3.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

# camcontrol identify ada4
pass4: <INTEL SSDSC2CW120A3 400i> ATA-9 SATA 2.x device
pass4: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)

protocol              ATA/ATAPI-9 SATA 2.x
device model          INTEL SSDSC2CW120A3
firmware revision     400i
cylinders             16383
heads                 16
sectors/track         63
sector size           logical 512, physical 512, offset 0
LBA supported         234441648 sectors
LBA48 supported       234441648 sectors
PIO supported         PIO4
DMA supported         WDMA2 UDMA6
media RPM             non-rotating

Feature                      Support  Enabled   Value
read ahead                     yes      yes
write cache                    yes      yes
flush cache                    yes      yes
overlap                        no
Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ)   no       no
Native Command Queuing (NCQ)   yes              32 tags
SMART                          yes      yes
microcode download             yes      yes
security                       yes      no
power management               yes      yes
advanced power management      yes      yes     254/0xFE
automatic acoustic management  no       no
media status notification      no       no
power-up in Standby            yes      no
write-read-verify              no       no
unload                         yes      yes
free-fall                      no       no
data set management (TRIM)     yes

And some performance estimates:

# diskinfo -ctv /dev/ada4
/dev/ada4
        512             # sectorsize
        120034123776    # mediasize in bytes (111G)
        234441648       # mediasize in sectors
        0               # stripesize
        0               # stripeoffset
        232581          # Cylinders according to firmware.
        16              # Heads according to firmware.
        63              # Sectors according to firmware.

I/O command overhead:
        time to read 10MB block      0.045524 sec       =    0.002 msec/sector
        time to read 20480 sectors   0.863500 sec       =    0.042 msec/sector
        calculated command overhead                     =    0.040 msec/sector

Seek times:
        Full stroke:      250 iter in   0.024130 sec =    0.097 msec
        Half stroke:      250 iter in   0.029164 sec =    0.117 msec
        Quarter stroke:   500 iter in   0.056782 sec =    0.114 msec
        Short forward:    400 iter in   0.040810 sec =    0.102 msec
        Short backward:   400 iter in   0.040303 sec =    0.101 msec
        Seq outer:       2048 iter in   0.088492 sec =    0.043 msec
        Seq inner:       2048 iter in   0.087823 sec =    0.043 msec
Transfer rates:
        outside:       102400 kbytes in   0.432411 sec =   236812 kbytes/sec
        middle:        102400 kbytes in   0.431852 sec =   237118 kbytes/sec
        inside:        102400 kbytes in   0.422050 sec =   242625 kbytes/sec

Update (Apr 2021): smartctl reports the above SSD as having:

TRIM Command:     Available, deterministic

Whereas a newer Samsung has:

TRIM Command:     Available, deterministic, zeroed

And doesn't have the problem of ignoring TRIM commands sometimes.