The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
All Indilinx Drives Are Built Alike
G.Skill, OCZ, Super Talent and Patriot all sent their Indilinx MLC drives in for review. If you take the drives apart you see that most are the very same on the inside, despite differences externally:
From Left to Right: OCZ Vertex Turbo, OCZ Agility, Patriot Torqx, G.Skill Falcon and Super Talent UltraDrive GX. Only the Super Talent drive uses a different PCB design.
Even the packaging doesn’t appear to vary much between manufacturers; that part I don’t really understand. All that seems to change is the artwork on the outside.
There are some minor differences between drives. Patriot ships its Torqx with a 2.5” to 3.5” drive bay adapter, a nice addition. The Torqx also comes with a 10 year warranty, the longest of any Indilinx based manufacturer. OCZ is next with a 3 year warranty, followed by Super Talent and G.Skill at 2 years.
Indilinx is still a very small company so it relies on its customers to help with validation, testing and even provide feedback for firmware development. As far as I can tell, every single Indilinx customer gets the same firmware revisions. Some vendors choose to rename the firmware revisions, while others do not. OCZ calls its latest stable firmware 1.30, while G.Skill, Super Talent and Patriot call it 1571.
The Indilinx Barefoot controller (right), powered by an ARM core.
Of all the Indilinxites, OCZ and Super Talent work closest with the controller manufacturer. In exchange for their help in manufacturing and validation, OCZ and Super Talent also get access to the latest firmwares earlier than the rest of the manufacturers. Ultimately all manufacturers will get access to the same firmware, it just takes longer if you’re not OCZ or Super Talent.
You no longer need to use a jumper to upgrade your firmware, provided that you’re already running fw revision 1275 or later. If you have a previous version you’re pretty much out of luck as you need to upgrade to 1275 first before upgrading to anything else, and none of the manufacturers make it easy to do. Some don’t even offer links to the necessary firmware you’d need to jump to 1275. Thankfully pretty much anything you buy today should come nearly up to date, so this mostly impacts the original customers of the drive.
Performance, as you’d expect, is the same regardless of manufacturer:
There's normal variance between drives depending on the flash/controller, that's why the OCZ Vertex is slower than the Patriot Torqx here but faster than the Super Talent UltraDrive GX. The manufacturer and size of the flash has more to do with determining performance. Samsung is used on all of these drives but the larger the drive, the better the performance. The 256GB model here will always be faster than a 128GB drive, which will always be faster than a 64GB, etc...
All of the drives here use the same firmware (1571) except for one of the Super Talent drives. That drive is using the beta 1711 firmware with TRIM support that was pulled.
When it comes to the best overall package, I’d say Patriot’s Torqx is the nicest for a desktop customer. You get a 3.5” adapter bracket and a 10 year warranty (although it’s difficult to predict what Patriot’s replacement strategy will be in 10 years).
The Patriot Torqx bundle, complete with a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter.
Prices vary a bit between manufacturers, although most of the more expensive drives here have a $30 rebate to bring their prices in line:
| Price for 128GB | |
| Corsair Extreme Series | $384.00 |
| OCZ Agility | $329.00 |
| OCZ Vertex | $369.00 |
| OCZ Vertex Turbo | $439.00 |
| Patriot Torqx | $354.99 |
OCZ does do some unique things that the other manufacturers don’t such as deliver an overclocked drive (Turbo) and a drive with slower flash (Agility). There’s a Mac Edition of the Vertex, unfortunately it’s no different than the regular drive - it just has a different sticker on it and a higher pricetag.
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nemitech - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
opps - not ebay - it was NEWEGG.Loki726 - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Thanks a ton for including the pidgin compiler benchmarks. I didn't think that HD performance would make much of a difference (linking large builds might be a different story), but it is great to have numbers to back up that intuition. Keep it up.torsteinowich - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
HiYou write that the Indilinx wiper tool collects a free page list from the OS, then wipes the pages. This sounds like a dangerous operation to me since the OS might allocate some of these blocks after the tool collects the list, but before they are wiped.
Have you received a good explanation for Indilinx about how they ensure file system integrity? As far as i know Windows cannot temporarily switch to read-only mode on an active file system (at least not the system drive). The only way i could see this tool working safely would be by booting off a different media and accessing the file system to be trimmed offline with a tool that correctly identifies the unused pages for the particular file system being used. I could be wrong of course, maybe windows 7 has a system call to temporarily freeze FS writes, but i doubt it.
has407 - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
It: (1) creates a large temporary file (wiper.dat) which gobbles up all (or most) of the free space; (2) determines the LBA's occupied by that file; (3) tells the SSD to TRIM those LBA's; and then (4) deletes the temporary file (wiper.date).From the OS/filesystem perspective, it's just another app and another file. (A similar technique is used by, e.g., sysinternals Windows SDelete app to zero free space. For Windows you could also probably use the hooks used by defrag utilities to accomplis it, but that would be a lot more work.)
cghebert - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Anand,Great article. Once again you have outclassed pretty much every other site out there with the depth of content in this review. You should start marketing t-shirts that say "Everything I learned about SSDs I learned from AnandTech"
I did have a question about gaming benchmarks, since you made this statement:
" but as you'll see later on in my gaming tests the benefits of an SSD really vary depending on the game"
But I never saw any gaming benchmarks. Did I miss something?
nafhan - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Just wanted to say awesome review.I've been reading Anandtech since 2000, and while other sites have gone downhill or (apparently) succumbed to pressure from advertisers, you guys have continued to give in depth, critical reviews.
I also appreciate that you do some real analysis instead of just throwing 10 pages of charts online.
Thanks, and keep up the good work!
zysurge - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Awesome amazing article. So much information, presented clearly.Question, though? I have an Intel G2 160GB drive coming in the next few days for my Dell D830 laptop, which will be running Windows 7 x64.
Do I set the controller to ATA and use the Intel Matrix driver, or set it to AHCI and use Microsoft's driver? Will either provide an advantage? I realize neither will provide TRIM until Q4, but after the firmware update, both should, right?
Thanks in advance!
ggathagan - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
From page 15 (Early Trim support...):Under Windows 7 that means you have to use a Microsoft made IDE or AHCI driver (you can't install chipset drivers from anyone else).
Mumrik - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
but I can't live with less than 300GB on that drive, and SSDs in usable sizes still cost more than high end video cards :-(I really hope I'll be able to pick up a 300GB drive for 100-200 bucks in a year or so, but it is probably a bit too optimistic.
Simen1 - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
This is simply wrong. Ask anyone over 10 years if they think this mathematical statement is true or false. 80 can never equal 74,5.Now, someone claims that 1 GB = 10^9 B and others claim that 1 GB is 2^30 B. Who is really right? What does the G and the B mean? Who defines that?
The answers is easy to find and document. B means Byte. G stands for Giga ans means 10^6, not 2^30. Giga is defined in the international system of units, SI.
No standardization organization have _ever_ defined Giga to be 2^30. But IEC, International Electrotechnical Commission, have defined "Gi" to 2^30. This is supposed to be used for digital storage so people wont be confused by all the misunderstandings around this. Misunderstandings that mainly comes from Microsoft and quite a few other big software vendors. Companies that ignore the mathematical errors in their software when they claim that 80GB = 74,5 GB, and ignore both international standards on how to shorten large numbers.