3 ms·

Do you have any links that would show that an SSD was tuned solely for benchmark purposes? I know people have found such things in GPU market but I've never hea

Do you have any links that would show that an SSD was tuned solely for benchmark purposes? I know people have found such things in GPU market but I've never heard about such claims in SSD market.

ugexe 12y ago
I assume he states "potential" because he sees how it could be possible, not because he has proof of it.
Kurtz79 12y ago
"Back in the days many SSD vendors were only focusing on high peak performance, which unfortunately came at the cost of sustained performance. In other words, the drives would push high IOPS in certain synthetic scenarios to provide nice marketing numbers, but as soon as you pushed the drive for more than a few minutes you could easily run into hiccups caused by poor performance consistency. Once we started exploring IO consistency, nearly all SSD manufacturers made a move to improve consistency." http://www.anandtech.com/show/9144/crucial-bx100-120gb-250gb-500gb-1tb-ssd-review/3 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9144/crucial-bx100-120gb-250gb...
baruch 12y ago
I've had that much acknowledged from SSD vendors, each one blames the others for the benchmark wars but they all know that benchmarks are out there and customers will chose the SSD based on the published benchmarks so they tune the firmware to make sure they don't look bad in the benchmarks. I was even told that an SSD was made to work consistently over the life span but drop some of these consistency work (i.e. slow downs at start of life) and only kick them in after so many power-on-hours so that it will not look bad in benchmarks. It's a fact of life that customers rely on benchmarks and that vendors cannot educate all customers so the masses out there need to see a good benchmark so that's what gets optimized for.
pixpop 12y ago
Sorry I can't provide links. But I work for a large tech company, currently qualifying SSDs for a new project. We ran into serious bugs with drives from a particular well-known SSD manufacturer (certain workloads cause drives to become unresponsive until power is cycled) and were able to demand detailed root cause analysis. In at least two cases they uncovered new bugs in code that had been inserted purely to improve the numbers for 4k random writes on certain benchmarks. These are consumer drives, not enterprise, and are current production.

Do you have any links that would show that an SSD was tuned solely for benchmark purposes? I know people have found such things in GPU market but I've never heard about such claims in SSD market.

ugexe 12y ago

I assume he states "potential" because he sees how it could be possible, not because he has proof of it.

Kurtz79 12y ago

"Back in the days many SSD vendors were only focusing on high peak performance, which unfortunately came at the cost of sustained performance. In other words, the drives would push high IOPS in certain synthetic scenarios to provide nice marketing numbers, but as soon as you pushed the drive for more than a few minutes you could easily run into hiccups caused by poor performance consistency. Once we started exploring IO consistency, nearly all SSD manufacturers made a move to improve consistency." http://www.anandtech.com/show/9144/crucial-bx100-120gb-250gb-500gb-1tb-ssd-review/3 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9144/crucial-bx100-120gb-250gb...

baruch 12y ago

I've had that much acknowledged from SSD vendors, each one blames the others for the benchmark wars but they all know that benchmarks are out there and customers will chose the SSD based on the published benchmarks so they tune the firmware to make sure they don't look bad in the benchmarks. I was even told that an SSD was made to work consistently over the life span but drop some of these consistency work (i.e. slow downs at start of life) and only kick them in after so many power-on-hours so that it will not look bad in benchmarks. It's a fact of life that customers rely on benchmarks and that vendors cannot educate all customers so the masses out there need to see a good benchmark so that's what gets optimized for.

pixpop 12y ago

Sorry I can't provide links. But I work for a large tech company, currently qualifying SSDs for a new project. We ran into serious bugs with drives from a particular well-known SSD manufacturer (certain workloads cause drives to become unresponsive until power is cycled) and were able to demand detailed root cause analysis. In at least two cases they uncovered new bugs in code that had been inserted purely to improve the numbers for 4k random writes on certain benchmarks. These are consumer drives, not enterprise, and are current production.