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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Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
I believe OCZ cut prices to distributors that day, but the retail prices will take time to fall. Once you see X25-M G2s in stock then I'd expect to see the Indilinx drives fall in price. Resellers won't give you a break unless they have to :)Take care,
Anand
bobjones32 - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Another great AnandTech article, thanks for the read.Just a head's-up on the 80GB X-25m Gen2 - A day before Newegg finally had them on sale, they bumped their price listing from $230 to $250. They sold at $250 for about 2 hours last Friday, went back out of stock until next week, and bumped the price again from $250 to $280.
So....plain supply vs. demand is driving the price of the G2 roughly $50 higher than it was listed at a week ago. I have a feeling that if you wait a week or two, or shop around a bit, you'll easily find them selling elsewhere for the $230 price they were originally going for.
AbRASiON - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Correct, Newegg has gouged the 80gb from 229 to 279 and the 160gb from 449 to 499 :(Stan Zaske - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Absolutely first rate article Anand and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Get some rest dude! LOLJaramin - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
I'm wondering, if I were to use a low capacity SSD to install my OS on, but install my programs to a HDD for space reasons, just how much would that spoil the SSD advantage? All OS reads an writes would still be on the SSD, and the paging file would also be there. I'm very curious about the amount of degradation one would see relative to different use routines and apps.Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Putting all of your apps (especially frequently used ones) off of your SSD would defeat the purpose of an SSD. You'd be missing out on the ultra-fast app launch times.Pick a good SSD and you won't have to worry too much about performance degradation. As long as you don't stick it into a database server :)
Take care,
Anand
swedishchef - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
What if you just put your photoshop cache on a pair of Velociraptors? Would it be the same loss of benefit?I have the same question regarding uncompressed HD video work, where I need write speeds well over the Intel x25-m ( over 240Mb/s). My assumption would be that I could enjoy the fast IO and App. launch of an SSD and increase CPU performance with the SSD while keeping the files on a fast external or internal raid configuration.
Thank you again for a a brilliant Article Anand.
I have been waiting for it for a long time. Yours are the only calm words out on the net.
Grateful Geek /Also professional image creator.
creathir - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Great article Anand. I've been waiting for it...My only thoughts are, why can't Intel get their act together with the sequential business? Why can the others handle it, but they can't? To have such an awesome piece of hardware have such a nasty blemish is strange to me, especially on a Gen-2 product.
I suppose there is some technical reason as to why, but it needs to be addressed.
- Creathir
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
If Intel would only let me do a deep dive on their controller I'd be able to tell you :) There's more I'd like to say but I can't yet unfortunately.Take care,
Anand
shotage - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Awesome article!I'm intrigued with the cap on the sequential reads that Intel has on the G2 drives as well. I always thought it was strange to see even on their first gen stuff.
I'm assuming that this cap might be in place to somehow ensure the excellent performance they are giving with random read/writes. All until TRIM finally shows up and you'll have to write up another full on review (which I eagerly await!).
I can't wait to see what 2010 brings to the table. What with the next version of SATA and TRIM just over the horizon, I could finally get the kind of performance out of my PC that I want!!