The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Why You Absolutely Need an SSD
Compared to mechanical hard drives, SSDs continue to be a disruptive technology. These days it’s difficult to convince folks to spend more money, but I can’t stress the difference in user experience between a mechanical HDD and a good SSD. In every major article I’ve written about SSDs I’ve provided at least one benchmark that sums up exactly why you’d want an SSD over even a RAID array of HDDs. Today’s article is no different.
The Fresh Test, as I like to call it, involves booting up your PC and timing how long it takes to run a handful of applications. I always mix up the applications and this time I’m actually going with a lighter lineup: World of Warcraft, Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Firefox 3.5.1.
Other than those three applications, the system was a clean install - I didn’t even have any anti-virus running. This is easily the best case scenario for a hard drive and on the world’s fastest desktop hard drive, a Western Digital VelociRaptor, the whole process took 31 seconds.
And on Intel’s X25-M SSD? Just 6.6 seconds.
A difference of 24 seconds hardly seems like much, until you actually think about it in terms of PC response time. We expect our computers to react immediately to input; even waiting 6.6 seconds is an eternity. Waiting 31 seconds is agony in the PC world. Worst of all? This is on a Core i7 system. To have the world’s fastest CPU and to have to wait half a minute for a couple of apps to launch is just wrong.
A Personal Anecdote on SSDs
I’m writing this page of the article on the 15-inch MacBook Pro I reviewed a couple of months ago. I’ve kept the machine stock but I’ve used it quite a bit since that review thanks to its awesome battery life. Of course, by “stock” I mean that I have yet to install an SSD.
Using the notebook is honestly disappointing. I always think something is wrong with the machine when I go to fire up Adium, Safari, Mail and Pages all at the same time to get to work. The applications take what feels like an eternity to start. While they are all launching the individual apps are generally unresponsive, even if they’ve loaded completely and I’m waiting on others. It’s just an overall miserable experience by comparison.
It’s shocking to think that until last year, this is how all of my computer usage transpired. Everything took ages to launch and become useful, particularly the first time you boot up your PC. It was that more than anything else that drove me to put my PCs to sleep rather than shut them down. It was also the pain of starting applications from scratch and OS X’s ability to get in/out of sleep quickly that made me happier using OS X than XP and later Vista.
It’s particularly interesting when you think of the ramifications of this. It’s the poor random read/write performance of the hard disk that makes some aspects of PC usage so painful. It’s the multi-minute boot times that make users more frustrated with their PCs. While the hard disk helped the PC succeed, it’s the very device that’s killing the PC in today’s instant-on, consumer electronics driven world. I challenge OEMs to stop viewing SSDs as a luxury item and to bite the bullet. Absorb the cost, work with Intel and Indilinx vendors to lower prices, offer bundles, do whatever it takes but get these drives into your systems.
I don’t know how else to say this: it’s an order of magnitude faster than a hard drive. It’s the difference between a hang glider and the space shuttle; both will fly, it’s just that one takes you to space. And I don’t care that you can buy a super fast or high flying hang glider either.
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Mr Perfect - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Probably demand. When I saw that price, I shopped around to see what was going on. Answer? Everyone else seems to be out of stock.Naccah - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
I've been waiting to get an SSD till Win 7 released hoping that the prices would have stabilized somewhat by that time. The recent price fluctuation is disturbing as well as the availability of the X25 G2. When the G2 first hit Newegg I was surfing the site and could have grabbed one for $230, but like I said I was content to wait. Now I'm having second thoughts! and wondering if I should grab one if the price goes down again.gfody - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
That doesn't explain the 160gb - it's not even in stock yet. I have been waiting a month for this drive to be in stock and here they more than double the price one day before the ETA date! It's an outrage.. if I'd known the drive was $1000 I would have bought something else.Way to screw your customers Newegg
araczynski - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
A) your intro has the familiar smell of tomshardware, you'd do to be without that, its unbecoming.B) your final words smell of the typical big corp establishment mentality; bigger, faster, more expensive, consumers want! while if the market is any indication, is completely the opposite of the truth. people want 'good enough' for cheap, as the recent Wired magazine article more or less said. granted, Wired isn't the source for indepth technical reading, but it is a good source sometimes of getting the pulse of things...sometimes, still, more often than anything coming out of the mouths of the big corps.
C) everything in between A and B is great though :) Please leave the opinions/spins to the PR machines.
Personally, the cost of these things is still more than i'm willing to pay for, for any speed increase. the idiotic shenanigans of firmwares and features only present after special downloads/phases of the moon make me just blow off the whole technology for a few more years. I'll revisit this in say 2 or 3 years, perhaps the MLC's will finally die off and the SLC's (unless i have the 2 backwards) or something better rolls out with a longer lifespan.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
A) My intention with the intro was to convey how difficult it was for me to even get to the point where I felt remotely comfortable publishing this article. I don't like posting something that I don't feel is worthy of the readership's reception. My sincere apologies if it came off as arrogant or anything other than an honest expression of how difficult it was to complete. I was simply trying to bring you all behind the scenes and take you into the crazy place that's my mind for a bit :)B) I agree that good enough for cheap is important, hence my Indilinx recommendation at the end. But we can't stifle innovation. We need bigger, better, faster (but not necessarily more expensive, thank you Moore's Law) to keep improving. I remember when the P3 hit 1GHz and everyone said we don't need faster CPUs. If we stopped back then we wouldn't have the apps/web we have today since developers can count on a large install base of very fast processors.
Imagine what happens in another decade when everyone has many-core CPUs in their notebooks...
Take care,
Anand
DynacomDave - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 - link
First - Anand thanks for the good work and the great article.I too have an older laptop that has a PATA interface that I'd like to upgrade with an SSD. I contacted Super Talent about their MasterDrive EX2 - IDE/PATA. Their response was; We only use Indilinx controller for SATA drives, like UltraDrive series. We use Phison controller for EX2/IDE drives.
I want to improve performance not degrade it. I don't know if this will perform like the Indilinx or like the old SSDs. Can anyone help me with this?
bji - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
There are a few more smaller players in the SSD controller game that don't ever show up in these reviews. They are Silicon Motion and Mtron. The reason I am interested in them is because I have a laptop that is PATA only (it's old I know but I love it and I want to extend its life with an SSD), and I am trying to get an SSD that works in it.Turns out the Mtron MOBI SSDs are not compatible with this laptop. I have no idea why. So I have put an order into eBay for an SSDFactory SSD and am crossing my fingers that it will work.
Mtron makes SATA SSD drives so they could be included in these reviews, and I don't know why they are excluded. It would be interesting to see how their controllers stack up. I personally own two Mtron SSD drives (both 32 GB SLC drives) that I tried to get to work in my laptop and failed to - so one is now the system disk in my desktop and it is very fast (at least compared to platter drives, maybe not compared to newer SSDs). The other one I am still trying to find a use for.
The only Silicon Motion controller drives I have seen are PATA drives so they clearly are a different beast than the SATA drives typically reviewed in these articles. But I would still be interested in seeing the numbers for the Silicon Motion controller just to get an idea of how well they stack up against the other controllers, especially for the 4K random writes tests. The PATA interface ought not to be the limiting factor for that test at least.
paesan - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
I see NewEgg has a Patriot Troqx and a Patriot Torqx M28. What is the difference in the 2 drives.paesan - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
After reading thru the Patriot forum I found the differences. The M28 has 128MB cache compared to 64MB cache on the non M28. The biggest difference is the M28 uses a Samsung controller instead of the Indilinx controller on the non M28. I wonder why they switched controllers.valnar - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
It seems to be that using trim would make a "used" SSD faster, no doubt, but is it required? Would it be okay to buy an SSD for a Windows XP box and just set and forget it? Even used and fragmented, it appears to be faster than any hard drive. My second question is longevity. How long would one last compared to a hard drive?