The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
What's Wrong with Samsung?
The largest SSD maker in the world is Samsung. Samsung makes the drives offered by Apple in its entire MacBook/MacBook Pro lineup. Samsung makes the drives you get if you order a Lenovo X300. In fact, if you're buying any major OEM system with an SSD in it, Samsung makes that drive.
It's just too bad that those drives aren’t very good.
This is the 4KB random write performance of Samsung's latest SSD, based on the RBB controller:
4.4MB/s. That's 3x the speed of a VelociRaptor, but 1/3 the speed of a cheaper Indilinx drive.
Speedy, but not earth shattering. Now let's look at performance once every LBA has been written to. This is the worst case scenario performance we've been testing for the past year:
...and now we're down to mechanical hard drive speeds
Holycrapwtfbbq? Terrible.
Now to be fair to Samsung, this isn’t JMicron-terrible performance. It’s just not worth the money performance.
The Samsung RBB based SSDs are rebranded by at least two manufacturers: OCZ and Corsair.
The OCZ Summit and the Corsair P256 both use the Samsung RBB platform.
The Corsair and OCZ Samsung RBB drives.
The drive most OEMs are now shipping is an even older, lower performing Samsung SSD based on an older controller.
I talked to some of the vendors who ship Samsung RBB based SSDs and got some sales data. They simply can’t give these drives away. The Indilinx based drives outsell those based on the Samsung RBB controller by over 40:1. If end users are smart enough to choose Indilinx and Intel, why aren't companies like Apple and Lenovo?
Don't ever opt for the SSD upgrade from any of these OEMs if you've got the option of buying your own Indilinx or Intel drive and swapping it in there. If you don't know how, post in our forums; someone will help you out.
Samsung realized it had an issue with its used-state performance and was actually the first to introduce background garbage collection; official TRIM support will be coming later. Great right? Not exactly.
There’s currently no way for an end user to flash the firmware on any of these Samsung drives. To make matters worse, there’s no way for companies like OCZ or Corsair to upgrade the firmware on these drives either. If you want a new firmware on the drive, it has to go back to Samsung. I can’t even begin to point out how ridiculous this is.
If you’re lucky enough to get one of the Samsung drives with background garbage collection, then the performance drop I talked about above doesn’t really matter. How can you tell? Open up Device Manager, go to your SSD properties, then details, then select Hardware Ids from the dropdown. Your firmware version will be listed at the end of your hardware id string:
Version 1801Q doesn’t support BGC. Version 18C1Q (or later) does.
How can you ensure you get a model with the right firmware revision? Pick a religion and start praying, because that’s the best you can do.
Now the good news. When brand new, the Samsung drives actually boast competitive sequential write, sequential read and random write speeds.
These drives are also highly compatible and very well tested. For all of the major OEMs to use them they have to be. It’s their random write performance that’s most disappointing. TRIM support is coming later this year and it will help keep the drives performing fresh, but even then they are still slower than the Indilinx alternatives.
There’s no wiper tool and there’s currently no method to deploy end-user flashable firmware updates. Even with TRIM coming down the road, the Samsung drives just don’t make sense.
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albor - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
Hi,try RamDisk Plus 11 from SuperSpeed.
(http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php)
I use it on Xp pro 32 bit with 30 GB OCZ Vertex and 8 GB RAM. All above 3.2 GB is configured for swap and temp. Works perfectly and no visible SSD performance degradation after about 10 months.
Greetings.
jmr3000 - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
would explain to me how did you install it?the ssd as a second drive or did u install all the program on the ssd and use the hhd as a second?
thanks in advance!
jm
marraco - Friday, August 13, 2010 - link
SWAP file is one of the most important speed bottleneck on windows.it writes frequently to disk, so consumes the read write cicles of the disk, reducing his useful life.
But you are not buying space storage when you buy SSD. You are buying speed, so it makes nosense to buy an expensive SSD, and then remove from it all the activities that need the speed and are bottlenecks.
you buy a SSD to do the fastest SWAP. keep it on SSD.
Also, drive indexing permanently does a lot of reads, but it does not matter if the disk is fast. Drive indexing is like a little local google. If you disable it, and then search for all the files with a given text on it, searching the entire disk takes longer than just read an indexing.
Those activities consume the useful life of the disk, but at the time the disk gonna need replacement, (5 years, maybe), this disk gonna need replacement anyways, and new SSD gonna be dirty cheap, so it makes no sense to disable swap, temp files, and indexing.
On other side, prefetch, superfetch and defrag most probably are better disabled under SSD.
jimlocke - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link
Pehu, I know this much after your posting, but I was curios what you ended up doing for swap.8GB of RAM almost seems like swap may not be needed, unless you have several memory-hogging apps open.
Hope you still like your SSD. I'm looking at getting one soon, and agree this was an excellent article!
-Jim
krumme - Friday, October 9, 2009 - link
First: I submit to the importance of random 4k for ssd.Second: Over the years I have highly valued the articles of Anand. It is remarkable to see such detailed and enthusiastic information.
Now I have a few questions, following the general impact of this work.
Some observations first:
Following an article at Toms of a ssd article the 6 of September. The author was called a “Moron”, primarily as the random 4k synthetic bm was missing. The author was giving a different opinion on the indilinx vs intel, in the desktop sector, compared to Anand, giving more weight to transfer vs iops.
In an discussion about a Kingston V-series review, one said that he would take the indilinx ssd any day because it was “750 times faster” – an argument based on iops.
Another remark I have read several times is: “The Intel x25-M g2 is the only drive to get”.
Another is: “I would like to buy the Dell xx, but it has an Samsung controller so its of no use”.
I think it is time to stop, and make sure there is reason in what is happening for normal desktop use.
Do we have blind test where to tell the difference between the Intel, Samsung and Indilinx?
What is the actual real world bm fx. Win7 boot times for the 3 controlers?
There is something called good enough. When is 4k random read/write time enough, to not notice any subjective improvement afterwards in win7? Could it be fx. 10M/s?
The ssd is the best thing happening since 3d gfx, but I think we should enjoy what is happeing right now, because this time, could be the turning point where we soon are focusing on small differences.
Anyone knows what´s the next big thing?
bebby - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
Random 4k and its relevance for desktop use is really the main topic for me, too.If I assume that I only use the SSD for the OS and software and save my data on other, much less expensive HDDs, I doubt very much that this discussion is worth it. The Samsung SSD then suddenly looks not so bad at all and much cheaper...
The next big thing for me would be an OS starting up in 5 seconds, like the OS we had in the 90s...making SSD obsolete.
bebby - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
Random 4k and its relevance for desktop use is really the main topic for me, too.If I assume that I only use the SSD for the OS and software and save my data on other, much less expensive HDDs, I doubt very much that this discussion is worth it. The Samsung SSD then suddenly looks not so bad at all and much cheaper...
The next big thing for me would be an OS starting up in 5 seconds, like the OS we had in the 90s...making SSD obsolete.
marraco - Friday, August 13, 2010 - link
I agree completely. I think that human beings can nottice the difference between a hard disk, and a non bad SSD, because the difference is too large, but over "good enough", it does not matter much if the SSD is 2X or 4X faster in 4Kb random R/W.But mine is just an opinion, and I don't have good data to test it. I would like to read an article with repeatable testing on human perception.
SimesP - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
I haven't read all 254 comments (yet) but I'd like to add my thanks to everyone elses for the comprehensive and illuminating article. This, along with the previous AnandTech SSD articles have increased my understanding of SSD's immensely.Thanks again!
ClemSnide - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
Anand,A couple of guys from HotHardware.com pointed me at your SSD article, and it allowed me to make an informed decision. Thanks!
I wanted to speed up one game in particular (World of Warcraft) as well as routine OS tasks and web browsing. I think an SSD will do a bang-up job on at least the first two. The one I decided upon was the OCZ Agility 60 GB, which offers some growth room; I currently have 40 GB on my system drive. I know the Intel has better numbers, but I was able to get the OCZ for $156 after a rebate, which translates to decent performance at a price I can justify. (For the curious, it's available from TigerDirect for $184, and OCZ is giving a $30 rebate.)
Even though my system build is still months away, this should be usable on my old clunker as well. Very nifty!