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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jasperjones - Monday, September 7, 2009 - link
Bit of a late reply to your question but a single overwrite with random data is fully secure. At least for HDDs there have been tests from academics that tried to recover data from a HDD after wiping it via "dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M" They weren't able to recover anything.smjohns - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
Great 3rd installment and I have learnt more about SSD's from this site than any other !!Whilst there is no doubt that Intel G2 definitely remains the SSD drive of choice (assuming you have the cash). Why did Intel choose not to address the poor sequential write speeds? In the above tests it seems no better than a standard 5400 hard disc....which is a little poor. I accept it is blisteringly fast for everything else but not sure why this was ignored / shelved?
Is it that it is currently impossible to build a drive that can be fast at both large sequential and small random file writes? Or is it that the G2 was always intended to be an incremental improvement over the G1 (fixing some of its short comings) rather than a complete top to bottom redesign of the unit, which may have lead to this being addressed? As such could a future firmware release improve these speeds....or is it definitely a hardware restriction?
I have to say I am personally torn between the OCZ Vertex and Intel G2 at the moment. Whilst I accept the G2 seems to be the quicker drive in the real world, I was disappointed that they did not improve the sequential write speeds and in addition to this, they do seem a little slow with support. The OCZ on the other hand seems a bit of an all rounder and not that much slower than the G2. In addition to this I REALLY like OCZ's approach to supporting these drives and they really seem to listen to their customers feedback.
One final question....when installing an SSD into a laptop with a fresh Windows 7 install, is there now any need for special formatting / OS settings to ensure best drive performance / life? There is a lot of stuff on the web but it all seems particularly relevant for XP and partially Vista but I was under the impression that Win7 was designed to work with SSDs out of the box?
derkurt - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
Then, there is another reason why SSDs are not covered extensively by the mainstream press: They are too complicated.Let's say you want to buy a hard disk. You could just buy any hard disk, since the difference between good and bad ones is fairly small. If you buy an ExcelStor, for example, you will still get something which works and delivers sufficient performance compared to faster models. Unless you are looking at the server market, there is not that much difference at all. Some models have larger caches, faster seek times and higher transfer rates due to higher rotational speeds, but the main difference is capacity, so the market is transparent.
Now look at the SSD market: The difference between good and bad ones is huge, incredibly huge. The Intel G2 is lightning fast while some old JMicron-based drives are much worse than a 5-years-old hard disk. You can't just go and buy "an SSD". You need to be informed:
What controller is the SSD using? Do I have to align my partitions, or is my operating system detecting the SSD and doing that for me? Does my OS support TRIM? Does my AHCI driver support TRIM? Does my SSD support TRIM? Does my current firmware revision support TRIM, and if so, do I need to flash a beta firmware which still has some serious flaws in it? How is the performance degradation after heavy use? What about random write access times (very big differences here which strongly affect real world performance)?
If you don't care about the above, chances are you will get a crappy drive. And even if you do, you'll have a hard time finding out some essential facts (thanks Anand!), since the manufacturers aren't exactly putting them on their webpages. They will tell you the capacity and the maximum linear transfer rates. That's all, basically. You will have to do some exhaustive googling to investigate what controller the drive is using, whether the firmware supports TRIM, and so on. Even Intel is holding back with detailed information, though they wouldn't have to, since they have nothing to hide as their drives are the fastest in nearly all aspects.
I don't know for sure why the manufacturers are making a secret out of essential information, even if they can shine there. But there's one thing I do know: Only when people don't need to care about controllers, OS support, firmwares etc. anymore, SSDs are ready to hit the mainstream.
smjohns - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
I fully agree with you here and it is one of the reasons why I have not taken the plunge yet. I am definitely holding out for Win7 and then upgrade my laptop with both that and an SSD.Even after reading these great articles, whilst I now know which drives support Trim and the fact that none of them have this functionality fully enabled and will require a future firmware update ("shudders"), the SSD market is indeed a confusing place to be. And thats before you consider having to align partitions (what the heck is this) and the various settings in the BIOS / OS you need to enable / disable to ensure your lovely new drive does not die within a few weeks / months / years.
If the industry really does want widespread adoption of these new drives, it needs to resolve these issues and come up with some easy and readily available standards we can all follow. I just hope Win7 is as SSD friendly as we are led to believe.
derkurt - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
AFAIK, "aligning" partitions means that the logical layout of blocks has to match the physical block assigment on the SSD in a certain way, otherwise writing one logical block on the filesystem level may result in an unnecessary I/O operation covering two blocks on the SSD (because the logical block spans the boundaries between two physical blocks). But don't ask me for details, I haven't dug into that yet.
According to MS, Windows 7 detects SSDs and applies a proper alignment scheme automatically during installation of the OS. If you'd like to install a Linux distribution or an older version of Windows, you'll probably have to take care of that by yourself, unfortunately.
I guess there aren't that many, you should just turn on AHCI support - the drive will work without it, but you need it for enabling NCQ, which can give you a 5-10% performance boost. However, you need to do this before the OS installation, otherwise your OS might cease to boot. Oh, and also you may have to temporarily turn off AHCI support when flashing a new firmware, because some flashing tools are struggling of AHCI is turned on.
I hope that with the advent of Windows 7 going into public sale, SSD manufacturers will start to ship reliable, TRIM-enabled firmware revisions. If so, you shouldn't have to think about all these issues anymore as long as you are using Windows 7.
derkurt - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
I was one of the lucky guys to get an Intel G2 drive before they stopped shipping it for a while, and I can absolutely confirm everything Anand states about performance.However, I still wonder why there is relatively few competition out there. At least in theory, it takes far less know-how to produce a good SSD than is required to manufacture reliable hard disk drives - think about the expansive and complicated fine mechanics involved. Actually, there are some Chinese manufacturers most of us have never heard of, such as RunCore, which manage to deliver SSDs of at least usable quality.
Where is the Samsung drive that blows the competition away? What about Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi? Are they just watching from the sideways while SSDs from some young and small companies are cannibalizing their markets?
At the time the shift from CRTs to LCDs was taking place, German premium TV manufacturer Loewe estimated that it would take many years until CRTs became obsolete. But the change happened so fast it nearly blew off their business before they finally started to ship high-quality LCDs in response to market demand. It seems to me that the very same thing is happening again now.
The G2 is gorgeous, no doubt about it. But the price point is still way above being ready to hit the mainstream. Computers are simply not important enough to Joe Sixpack to spend 200+ USD for storage solutions only, even if it _really_ accelerates the machine (something most people won't believe until they experienced it themselves), and especially considering the low capacities offered by SSDs so far.
If something as great as the G2 can be offered for 240 USD while being sold to a relatively small audience, what prices can we expect to see if the mainstream is hit? If USB sticks can be sold for less than 5 USD, what is the fundamental problem at reaching a price point of 60 USD for high-quality SSDs? Of course, SSDs contain much more intelligence than USB pen drives: Multi-channel controllers with sophisticated strategies, caches, and so on, but the main difference should be the effort required to engineer these devices, rather than the cost for building them.
I am a bit frustrated that while there are SSDs available now which deliver superior performance, they still cover a small niche of enthusiasts (and there are probably a lot more people who would want to buy one if they only knew that these things exist), and the traditional hard drive manufacturers cease to join the game. The most important reason why Intel priced the G2 at a more affordable level is probably not the competition by Indilinx drives, but rather the idea that they can gain more profit by selling much more drives, even if they are sold at a lower price, as long as production costs are fairly small.
Is Samsung sleeping, or are they just fearing that the shift to SSDs might destroy their mechanical hard drive business? I doubt that they don't have engineers capable of creating SSDs which deliver a performance comparable to Intel's drives. Maybe the mediocre performance of their SSDs is part of a strategy, which says that SSD development shouldn't be pushed too fast until the rest of the market is really forcing them to do so.
Companies such as Apple need to sell good SSDs with their computers, by default. Why can't premium PC manufacturers like Apple sell their hardware with a G2 drive, while they are offering similarly expansive CPUs? If you are spending the 240 USD for a CPU upgrade instead, I'd take every bet that you were unable to feel a comparable performance gain. It's a shame that PC sellers are neglecting hard drive performance while at the same time stressing the CPU power of their systems in their advertisements. Only if Seagate & Co. realize that they are losing a large and growing market share by not joining the SSD race, prices will drop. So far, they just don't care about some hardware geeks like us.
pepito - Monday, November 16, 2009 - link
There are a bunch of companies selling SSD already, its just that you don't know where to find them, and most reviewers only care about big players, such as Intel or Samsung.If you check, for example, http://kakaku.com/pc/ssd/">http://kakaku.com/pc/ssd/ you can see there are currently 24 manufacturers listed there (use google translate, as its in japanese).
Some you probably never heard of: MTRON, Greenhouse, Buffalo, CFD, Wintec, PhotoFast, etc.
iwodo - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
I have trouble understanding WHY Apple, uses Samsung CRAPPY SSD like everyone else when they could easily make their own.And SSD drive, like all Indlinx drive, are nothing more then Flash Chip soldered on to PCB with Indilinx Core. Apple is already the largest Flash buyer in the world, they properly buy the cheapest Flash memory in the market. ( Intel and Samsung of coz don't count since they make the flash themselfs. ) Building an SSD themself would be adding $20 dollars on top of 8 Chips 64Gb Flash.
Why they dont build one and use it accross its Mac is beyond me. Since even the firmware is the same as everyone else.
pepito - Monday, November 16, 2009 - link
For the same reason that Dell doesn't make their own batteries, its not their business.Borski - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
How does G.skill Falcon compare with the reviewed units? I've seen very good reviews (close to Vertex) elsewhere but they don't mention things like used vs new performance, or power consumption.I'm considering buying the G.Skill Falcon 64G, which is cheaper than Agility in some places.