Does Power-Saving Technology Kill SSD Performance?

We were in the middle of setting up a new storage test system to replace our aged platform when we noticed something really strange: Intel’s top-of-the-line X25-E flash solid state disk (SSD) delivered less throughput on the new test system than it did on the old one. It took us a few days to isolate the reason, and our findings are noteworthy, as they illustrate the first practical bottleneck for flash SSDs. Mainly, they cannot provide their maximum performance if you take advantage of processor and platform power saving features.