SSD Flash Drive Reviews

JMicron JMB322 Controller Cache Performance Issues

It is not very often that I purchase a computer component that puts such a bitter taste in my mouth that I need to announce to the world just how bad it is. After buying a G.SKILL FM-25S2S-64GB Solid State Disk (SSD) drive based on the JMicron JMB322 Controller I felt extremely let down. Solid state disk drives were suppose to be the new cutting edge technology largely eliviating latency issues while drastically increasing drive data rates.

Personally I am an extremely heavy system user with up to 30+ applications / windows open at a time while doing web development, downloading, playing music, and having multiple IM applications open. Although the G.SKILL FM-25S2S-64GB drive initial impressed me (average read speed of 132.6MB/s sustained, and 0.2MS access time) after migrating from a traditional rotation hard drive, I soon started to notice a few issues. The issues included the system becoming laggy, freezing for a few seconds at a time, and making Windows Vista stutter.

For a while I didn't put much thought into the performance issues as my machice was stil noticably faster then it had been. But after reading a review of an Indilinx controller based SSD which they mentioned not having the issues they had seen with the JMicron JMB322 Controller based SSDs. After doing a bit of Googling I found out that the JMicron JMB322 had only a 16Kb cache! To put things into perspective both the Indilinx Controller, and Intel Controller sport 256Kb of cache (16 times the cache!).

Performance Tips & Tweaks

• Perform Windows performance tweaks such as disabling the pre and super fetch features, disable 8.3 filenames, disable last accessed timestamps, and Windows indexing (guide coming soon, for now Google Windows Vista SSD Tweaks and look at the OCZ website).
• If you download from Usenet, P2P, Bittorrent, or any other multiple threaded download application make sure you use a seperate drive

Conclusion

If you already have an SSD based on the JMicron JMB322 Controller make sure you do as many performance tweaks as possible to reduce the amount of drive IO calls. If you are looking to buy an SSD for the first time avoid the JMicron JMB322 SSD Controller like the plague.