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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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!!