The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
PCMark Vantage: Used Drive Performance
Immediately after finishing my PCMark Vantage runs on the previous page, I wrote one large file sequentially to the rest of the drive. I then deleted the file, rebooted and re-ran PCMark Vantage. This gives us an idea of the worst case desktop performance of these drives as you create, delete and generally just use these drives.
The biggest difference here is that the Samsung based OCZ Summit drops from 5th to 9th place. All of the drives get slower but the Indilinx drives hardly show it. When it comes to dealing with write speed, SLC flash does have the advantage and we see the X25-E and Vertex EX rise to the top of the pack. The G2 is slightly faster than the G1 and the Indilinx drives follow in close pursuit.
The mechanical drives don't change in performance since they don't get slower with use, only as they get more full.
Again we see the two SLC drives at the top, this time followed by a mixture of Indilinx/Intel drives, and the Samsung based Summit is at the bottom of the pack before we get to the HDDs.
The spread in SSD performance here is only 10% between the slowest non-Samsung drive and the fastest. That tells me that we're mostly CPU bound, but the worst performers other than the Samsung drive are the two Intel X25-Ms. That part tells me that we're at least somewhat bound by sequential write speeds. Either way, the Indilinx drives have a good showing here.
Intel followed by Indilinx SLC with Samsung in league with the MLC Indilinx drives. This is an SSD's dream.
Despite the improvements, the G2 can't touch the much lower write latency of SLC flash here. The Indilinx and Intel G1 drives intermingle while the Samsung drive pulls up the rear. All are faster than a regular hard drive of course.
In the multitasking test we once again see Intel rise to the top. The Samsung drive does surprisingly well and the Indilinx drives continue to perform admirably.
The breakdown between SSDs here is almost linear. The X25-E leads the pack, followed by OCZ's SLC drive. The G2 and G1 are next, then a ton of Indilinx MLC drives. The slowest SSD? The Samsung based Summit of course.
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GourdFreeMan - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Yes, rewriting a cell will refill the floating gate with trapped electrons to the proper voltage level unless the gate has begun to wear out, so backing up your data, secure erasing your drive and copying the data back will preserve the life (within reason) of even drives that use minimalistic wear leveling to safeguard data. Charge retention is only a problem for users if they intend to use the drive for archival storage, or operate the drive at highly elevated temperatures.It is a bigger problem for flash engineers, however, and one of the reasons why MLC cannot be moved easily to more bits per cell without design changes. To store n-bits in a single cell you need 2^n separate energy levels to represent them, and thus each bit is only has approximately 1/(2^(n-1)) the amount of energy difference between states when compared to SLC using similar designs and materials.
Zheos - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Man you seem to know a lot about what you're talking about :)Yeah now i understand why SSD for database and file storage server would be quite a bad idea.
But for personal windows & everyday application storage, seems like a pure win to me if you can afford one :)
I was only worried about its life-span but thankx to you and you're quick replys (and for the maths and technical stuff about how it realy work ;) im sold on the fact that i will buy one soon.
The G2 from Intel seems like the best choice for now but I'll just wait and see how it's going when TRIM will become almost enable on every SSD and i'll make my decision there in a couple of months =)
GourdFreeMan - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - link
It isn't so much that SSDs make a bad storage server, but rather that you can't neglect to make periodic backups, as with any type of storage, if your data has great monetary or sentimental value. In addition to backups, RAID (1-6) is also an option if cost is no object and you want to use SSDs for long term storage in a running server. Database servers are a little more complicated, but SSDs can be an intelligent choice there as well if your usage patterns aren't continuous heavy small (i.e. <= 4K) writes.I plan on getting a G2 myself for my laptop after Intel updates the firmware to support TRIM and Anand reviews the effects in Windows 7, and I have already been using an Indilinx-based SLC drive in my home server.
If you do anything that stresses your hard drive(s), or just like snappy boot times and application load times you will probably be impressed by the speeds of a new SSD. The cost per GB and lack of long term reliability studies are really the only things holding them back from taking the storage market by storm now.
ninevoltz - Thursday, September 17, 2009 - link
GourdFreeMan could you please continue your explanation? I would like to learn more. You have really dived deeply into the physical properties of these drives.GourdFreeMan - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Minor correction to the second paragraph in my post above -- "each bit is only has" should read "each representation only has" in the last sentence.philosofool - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Nice job. This has been a great series.I'm getting a SSD once I can get one at $1/GB. I want a system/program files drive of at least 80GB and then a conventional HDD (a tenth of the cost/GB) for user data.
Would keeping user data on a conventional HDD affect these results? It would seem like it wouldn't, but I would like to see the evidence.
I would really like to see more benchmarks for these drives that aren't synthetic. Have you tried things like Crysis or The Witcher load times? (Both seemed to me to have pretty slow loads for maps.) I don't know if these would be affected, but as real world applications, I think it makes sense to try them out.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Personally I keep docs on my SSD but I keep pictures/music on a hard drive. Neither gets touched all that often in the grand scheme of things, but one is a lot smaller :)In The SSD Anthology I looked at Crysis load times. Performance didn't really improve when going to an SSD.
Take care,
Anand
Eeqmcsq - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
I would have thought that the read speed of an SSD would have helped cut down some of the compile time. Is there any tool that lets you analyze disk usage vs cpu usage during the compile time, to see what percentage of the compile was spent reading/writing to disk vs CPU processing?Is there any way you can add a temperature test between an HDD and an SSD? I read a couple of Newegg reviews that say their SSDs got HOT after use, though I think that may have just been 1 particular brand that I don't remember. Also, there was at least one article online that tested an SSD vs an HDD and the SSD ran a little warmer than the HDD.
Also, garbage collection does have one advantage: It's OS independent. I'm still using Ubuntu 8.04 at work, and I'm stuck on 8.04 because my development environment WORKS, and I won't risk upgrading and destabilizing it. A garbage collecting SSD would certainly be helpful for my system... though your compiling tests are now swaying me against an SSD upgrade. Doh!
And just for fun, have you thought about running some of your benchmarks on a RAM drive? I'd like to see how far SSDs and SATA have to go before matching the speed of RAM.
Finally, any word from JMicron and their supposed update to the much "loved" JMF602 controller? I'd like to see some non-stuttering cheapo SSDs enter the market and really bring the $$$/GB down, like the Kingston V-series. Also, I'd like to see a refresh in the PATA SSD market.
"Am I relieved to be done with this article? You betcha." And I give you a great THANK YOU!!! for spending the time working on it. As usual, it was a great read.
Per Hansson - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Photofast have released Indilinx based PATA drives;http://www.photofastuk.com/engine/shop/category/G-...">http://www.photofastuk.com/engine/shop/category/G-...
aggressor - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
What ever happened to the price drops that OCZ announced when the Intel G2 drives came out? I want 128GB for $280!