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Firmware, Trim & Self Maintenance Firmware, Trim & Self Maintenance The firmware which comes preloaded on the Phoenix is labeled as "305A13F0" which is the “mass production” firmware that is common referred to as “305” or “3.0.5”. As such, this firmware has the all the tweaks and bug fixes that go along with this latest firmware revision but also has the all the down sides to. As discussed in an earlier review, SandForce hobbled the small file IO/s performance of all but the Vertex 2. This means in theory that this drive should “only” be as fast as the Agility 2 and not a direct competitor for the Vertex 2. Well as we saw in the previous section, G.Skill was having none of that and has in theory negated at the very least SOME of the negative effects associated with SandForce’s move by adding higher-end NAND to their drive.  When it comes to the self-maintenance routines this drive has built in, one thing is for certain: they are extremely mild. After working with these drives on an older operating system -which by its very natures does not support the TRIM command- we can say it is pretty easy to get any SandForce controller based drive into a degraded state when TRIM is not a possibility. If you do not plan on using Windows 7 or another TRIM aware OS you really need to give these drives a lot of downtime to self clean or you will notice them getting slower. The same can be said of anyone wanting to RAID these drives: think long and hard before you do. It really is a shame, but they are just too damn easy to get into a degraded state and take too long to get out of it. SandForce really, really needs to spend some time and effort on improving its self-maintenance routines. To be completely fair and balanced, earlier Indilinx firmware didn’t even have any self cleaning algorithms built in so in time there is a good chance that SandForce will address this issue and fine tune their products.  For anyone interested in whether or not the upcoming OCZ Toolbox (0.6 beta) works on the Phoenix the answer is: yes it works. You can do a secure erase, set up an optimized partition alignment, even read the SMART information from the Phoenix via this nice little piece of software. This last bit is very nice, and much like you could read via Crystal DiskInfo (with Indilinx SSDs) the amount of read and writes that have been done on the cells, so too does the OCZ Toolbox show how many cells have been rated as bad, the number of writes that have occurred to the cells, etc. | ||||
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