Intel X25-M SSD: Intel Delivers One of the World's Fastest Drives
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 8, 2008 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The Killer App: Multitasking Performance
Here's where things get interesting. I ran two tests, in one I extracted a 5GB archive and tried to run Photoshop after 30 seconds of extraction and in the second test, I extracted a 5GB archive and tried to scan my system for viruses using NAV 2008. Simple enough, right? I'm reporting the times of each task individually.
The extraction task took the longest to complete but the standings speak for themselves:
Here's one area where the Samsung SLC based devices actually come out ahead, by a good margin. The Samsung SLC SSD finished the extraction in 102 seconds, compared to 161 seconds for the X25-M. Even the VelociRaptor did better here at 116 seconds, but remember you need to look at both tasks for a complete picture:
Launching Photoshop took 5.2 seconds for the Samsung SLC SSD, it was like we weren't even running another test in the background. The X25-M did fine at 12.2 seconds and the VelociRaptor was much slower at 27.3 seconds. The JMicron based MLC drives didn't do too bad here either, although they were a little slower than Intel's MLC offering.
The real stress test was this next multitasking scenario. Quite possibly one of the most annoying thing about viruses is having to run real time scanning and protection software all the time, especially with a traditional HDD in your system. The extraction task is the same as before, but the other task is a full system scan in Norton Anti-Virus 2008. I timed both:
The WD 1TB drive would always complete the extraction task quicker than all of the other drives, but paid the penalty in the scan test (which is why you have to look at both charts for a full analysis). The Samsung SLC drive is still the overall winner here, followed closely by Intel's X25-M. The JMicron based MLC drives do horribly here, taking over twice as long to complete as Intel's MLC.
The mechanical disks however do a lot worse. While the Intel X25-M took 3.5 minutes to extract the 5GB archive, the VelociRaptor took over 17 minutes. The Seagate Momentus 7200.2 took over 23 minutes!
Let's look at the NAV results:
The X25-M took around 5.3 minutes, the Raptor needed more than 23 minutes and Seagate Momentus made me wait over 40 minutes. It's these sorts of usage scenarios that really make SSDs worthwhile, and they are the most realworld you can get. When we started looking at real world performance the PCMark Vantage numbers may have looked a bit ridiculous, but by now you should see that they are more of the middle ground when looking at performance of these drives.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
96 Comments
View All Comments
mindless1 - Thursday, September 11, 2008 - link
Sometimes the cure is worse than the problem.Gannon - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
Don't worry derek I still heart you guys! :PHere's some cool software to check out (they have free trial version)
http://www.whitesmoke.com/landing_flash/free_hotfo...">http://www.whitesmoke.com/landing_flash...otforwor...
Maybe it will help escape complaints from the grammar nazi's, I think a lot of grammar is BS anyway. Language evolves constantly. It's a flexible tool to communicate.
Nihility - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
An excellent review. The benchmark results were always confusing in the past. No one would try to explain why an SSD with seemingly superior specs can't outperform a 7200 drive in media test. Thanks for putting the time in to resolve this issue.As for buying a drive like that, the price is still too steep for me to consider and you definitely made it clear that buying a jmicro SSD is out of the question.
As for further testing, I'm very interested in seeing how a good SSD performs as an external drive over USB. The robustness and sturdiness of the drive is very important for something you lug around. We all know how bad bandwidth is over USB but I wonder how the latency will fair.
Keep up the good work.
kmmatney - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
One of the other reviews I read said this SSD's controller will learn hard drive usage patterns, and get faster over time. Any tests of this feature?leexgx - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
not sure how thay can lerni did wunder why thay never put any DRAM buffer on SSD drives as i was expecting SSD to suffer badly from lack of buffer any MLC drives basicly suck (16kb buffer per flash chip) unless its the intel MLC drive lol or an SLC drive seem mostly ok, but an intel SLC going to rock when thay get tested
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
The Intel drive will learn hard drive usage patterns however it does so over an extremely long period of time, not something I could develop a test for in my time with the drive.Take care,
Anand
whatthehey - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
...that doesn't think too much about HDD performance, particularly when we're talking about insane prices. Sure, rebooting and reloading all of your apps will feel much faster. Personally, when I reboot I walk into the kitchen or bathroom, walk back a few minutes later, and I don't notice the delays. Not to mention, I only reboot about once a month (usually when nVidia releases a new driver that I need to install).Another major problem I have is the tests as an indication of the "real world". Take the whole antivirus thing. I hate AV software and software firewalls, which is why I don't use Norton, AVG, Avast, McAfee or any other product that kills performance, sucks up memory, and only prevents virii/trojans after an update. AV software is just a BS excuse to pay a $60/year subscription and get nags every time your subscription expires. So there's on "real" scenario I don't ever encounter.
Archive extraction can be pretty disk intensive as well, but how often do you need to extract a 5GB archive? Okay, so let's say you're a pirate and you do that daily... great. Now you can extract faster, but you have an SSD that can only hold 14 or so large archives. It's a nice illustration of SSDs being faster, but it's completely impractical. I have a 1TB drive just for all the movies, images, music, and disc images I have floating around.
The tests show that SSDs can help a lot, but I for one use capacity far more. Between several games, my standard apps, and Vista I think I would use most of the 80GB. Then I think of the price and I could grab a couple VelociRaptors or even four 1TB Samsung F1 drives. I'll be truly impressed when I can get at least 320GB of SSD for less than $200. Actually, it's more like I want a good SSD with a reasonable capacity for under $100. Until then I'll just stick with my slower drives and avoid worst-case situations where HDD performance is a problem as much as possible.
The article was good, and I appreciate the info on the MLC issues with JMicron. That confirms my suspicion that inexpensive flash drives are worse than standard mechanical drives. Intel has addressed the problem, but price is now back to where we were last year it seems. I guess the real problem is that I'm just not enough of an "enthusiast" to spend this much money on 80GB of storage... not counting stuff like that old 4GB hard drive back in the day that set me back over $200. Give it a few more cycles and I think I'll be ready for SSDs.
PS - Also, who cares about $600 CPUs when you can buy $200 CPUs and overclock to higher performance levels? I don't think we'll ever see overclocked SSDs or HDDs.
DerekWilson - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
i wouldn't be so sure about not seeing overclocked SSD ...as this article points out, intel puts a focus on reliability ... but to do so they do sacrifice performance. the voltage applied to the transistors to store data is calibrated to write the cells quickly while maintaining a good life span. a higher voltage could be applied that would allow the cells to be written faster but would reduce the number of writes that a cell could handle.
if intel says 100gb a day for 5 years ... i don't need that by a long shot. i would be very willing to sacrifice a lot of that for more speed.
i actually spoke with intel about the possibility of overclocking their ssd drives at idf -- it is something that could be done as it is controlled via the firmware of the drive. if intel doesn't convolute their firmware too much or if they allow enthusiasts to have the necessary control over settings at that level we could very well see overclocked SSDs ...
which would be very interesting indeed.
shabby - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
I was so close in buying one of those ocz drives, in fact the reason i didnt buy it was because it was a special order that took 2 weeks.Excellent write up, especially about the jmicron/mlc "glitch".
OCedHrt - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
Any reason why the WD GP drive does so well in the multitasking test? Even better than the VelociRaptor?