How do these drives fail? I have heard that they will just suddenly die, no more writes or reads possible. What I would like to know is what happens when it dies? Do you lose all data? Just can't write anymore? How does the OS respond? Any early warnings? What about e.g. CRC? How does possibility of data corruption compare to traditional SSD? What about RAID? Since the drives are electrical, not mechanical, this reduces the number of failure vectors and environmental concerns (e.g., ambient temperature over lifetime of the drive). Won't SSDs therefore fail closer together in time in a RAID configuration? This reduces the window of opportunity for fixing an array and also decreases the applicability of RAID, however marginal.
I need to run HDDErase on an X25-M. No matter what bootable CD or flash drive I create, HDDErase does not see either of my SATA hard drives. I already disabled AHCI in BIOS. Also, I am using version 3.3. I know that 4.0 does not work with the X25-M.
Can someone help me troubleshoot this please? Thanks.
You point out that TRIM will only work on deletions, not on overwrites. But, couldn't a smart controller look at blocks that have a majority of invalid pages and "trim" them as well, recovering clean pages as a background process?
Regarding the shill tshen83 who claims that Anandtech cost the drive manufacturers millions of dollars in sales.
If that is true, Anandtech has saved customers millions of dollars.
Anandtech should care more about their readers losses than drive manufacturer losses. If Anandtech was a site for drive manufacturers and their shills we wouldn't be reading it.
To me, if the SSD drive manufacturers lose money, it's their own fault for building crap that has higher write latencies than old fashioned drives with metal discs spinning at 7200RPM or slower. Not anandtech's.
I can get higher sequential reads and writes by using RAID on old fashioned drives. It is much harder to get lower latency. So Anandtech did the right thing for OCZ.
Lastly, there might be a way of making your windows machine stutter less even with a crap SSD. Note: I haven't tested the actual effect on an SSD because I don't have an SSD.
Basically by default when Windows accesses a file on NTFS, it will WRITE to the directory the time of the access. Yep, it writes when it opens files and directories (which are just special files). That might explain the stuttering people see. For a lot of things, Windows has to open files.
Warning! There are reasons why some people or programs would want to know the last access time of files. Me and my programs don't (and I doubt most people would).
If you are sure that's true for you (or are willing to take the risk) set NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate=1 as per:
Brilliant article and very informative on these emerging technology. I wont be buying one anytime soon @ their prices, but good to know we'll FINALLY be replacing convential HDD which are the one component that have been pretty much the same since as far back as i can remember
"SSDs have +5 armor immunity to random access latency"
rofl that's the best analogy i've seen on a hardware review site. is every comp geek a RPG geek @ heart?
Great article. Realy made me understand what I need to look at before making the plunge. Mistakes and all, my compliments. As for value between the now seemingly drastically improved Vertex vs the X25-M, I compared prices between the two and per Gb, the Intell product for say an 80 Gb drive is Can $5.86/Gb, while the OCZ 60 Gb SSD is Can $6.81/Gb. Now that we are no longer comparing apples and oranges, I think we need to point out that the Intel product is not only faster and maintains it's performance edge better, but it is cheaper per Gb. At least in Canada. I have many OCZ products and I love the company and it's customer support. I can only hope that they will make their SSDs more competitive in the near future, because most consumers will pay the extra 70 bucks and go with the X25 when they pay attention to the numbers, both performance and price.
I could forsee a whole host of issues with encrypting SSD drives, not the least of which is essentially making the drive completely "used" outside of the drive slack space - which would be a temporary reprieve for the reasons discussed in this article. However, I could also see potential performance and lifetime issues since modern encryption uses streaming ciphers (e.g. an entire encrypted block - which may or may not conform to the physical block size will be changed for even one bit change within the block itself). Has anyone looked at the resultant effect on performance due to using encryption - it would be good to compare say Bitlocker, PGP, Checkpoint, and an open source encryption solution (Crypt or something like that?). This could actually become a real driver for moving to on-drive encryption where it would have the opportunity to optimize the encrpytion for the pro/cons of the SSD architecture.
Great article! I respect that OCZ made the necessary changes to make this drive work. I'd rather take a slightly slower drive if it meant consistent performance.
If my hard drive started to stutter I'd flip out! I'm glad that they took the feedback and instead of selling faulty drives, that would ultimately hurt their brand, they decided to go back to the drawing board and iron out the kinks. I'm not expecting them to compare to Intel's 25-M per price or performance. They don't have nearly the cash or manufacturing capacity to compete with Intel but they do have that small business feel with receiving feedback and making improvements, which is important to customers.
Lets hope they continue to utilize that aspect of their business and further improve on their products and bring us some reliable SSD's in the future.
I just purchased a Dell Latitude E6400 with a 64GB Ultra Performance Solid State Drive. Does anyone know what type of drive this is, and where it fits in the spectrum described in this article?
The Dells use the Samsung drives (you should see this on the bottom if you pull it out). However, as much as I wish this was one of the newer controllers (I have a few of these at work as well), the testing cycles demanded by Dell probably mean these are the older controllers.
Hi-- Do SLCs suffer from performance degradation, or are the controllers pretty agressive at erasing the data since they have far longer read-write cycles? Please help! Deciding between an X25E and X25M
I'm reading this about a day late - got my Patriot PE256GS25SSDR 2.5" 256GB yesterday since I'm bad about destroying hard drives. this drive, in a word, was excruciating. I'll be replacing it with one of your recommended drives today.
Long time reader, first time post.
I really liked the background story and appreciate how Anand delves deep into the the SSD's (as well as other products in other articles).
Thanks for looking out for the little guy!
Keep up the great work!
With Anand's excellent article, it's clear that the sequential read/write thoroughput doesn't matter so much - all SSDs, even the notorious JMicron series, can do a good job on that metric. What is relevant to our daily use is the random write rate. Latencies and IOs/second are the most important metric in the realm of SSD.
Based on that, I would suggest Anand (and other Tech reporters) to include a real world test of evaluating the Random Write performance for SSD. Because current real-world tests: booting windows, loading games, rendering 3D, etc. they focus on the random read. However, measuring how long it takes to install Windows, Microsoft Visual Studio, or a 4-GB PC Game would thoroughly test the Random Write / Latency performance. I think this is a good complementary of our current testing methodology
Just wanted to add my thanks to Anand for this article in particular and for the quality work he has done over the years; I am so grateful for Anandtech's quality and information and the fact that it has been maintained!
Anand, This is a great Article and a good story too.
The OCZ story caught my attention that a quick firmware upgrade make a big improvement. From my understanding that SSD system designers try to trade off Space, Speed, and Durability (Also SSD :)) due the nature of NAND flash.
We can clearly see the trade off of Space and Speed when SSD is getting more full the slower the speed (This is due to out-of-place write to increase the write operation and a block reclaim routine). However, Speed is also sacrificed to achieve the Durability (by doing wear leveling). Remember SLC nand's life time is about 100K write, while MLC nand has only about 10K write. Without considering doing wear leveling to improve the life cycle of the SSD, the firmware can be much simple and easy which will improve the write operation speed quite a bit.
I echo you that the performance test should reflect user's daily usage which can be small size files write and may not be 80% full.
However, users may be more concern about the Durability, the life cycle of the SSD.
Is there such a test? How long will the black box OCZ Vertex live?
How long will the regular OCZ Vertex live? and How long will the X25 live?
As i read the article, i'm thinking of ways to slow down the down the degrading process. Intel is gonna ship x-25m 320gb this year. If i buy this drive and use it as an OS drive, i will obviously won't need the whole 320GB. Say i would need only 40 to 50 GB. I can make a secure erase (if the drive isn't new), made a partition of 50GB, and leave the remaining space unpartitioned. Will that solve the problem in any way ?
Another way to solve the problem, would be a method inside the OS. The OS could use a user controlled % of the RAM memory, as a cache for those small 4kb files. Since ram reads and writes are way faster, i think it will also help. Say you got 8GB ram, and use 2gb for this purpose, and then the OS would only have 6gb ram for its use, while 2gb is used for these smaller files. That would increase also the lifespan of the SSD. Can this be possible ?
In reference to SSD's, I have read a lot of articles and comments about improved firmware and operating system support. I hope manufacturers don't forget about the on-board RAID controller.
From the articles and comments made by users around the web, who have tested SSD's in a Raid 0 configuration, I believe that two Intel X25-M SSD's in a RAID 0 configuration would more than saturate current on-board RAID controllers.
Intel is doing a die shrink of the NAND memory that is going into their SSD's come this fall. I would expect these new Intel SSD's to show faster read and write times. Other manufacturers will also find ways to increase the speed of their SSD's.
SSD's scale well in a RAID configuration. It would be a shame if the on-board RAID controller limited our throughput. The alternative would be very expensive add-in RAID cards.
Anand, once again you wrote an article that no one else could've written. This is why I'm reading this site since 2004 and will always do. Your articles and reviews are without exception unique and a must-read. Thank you for this thorough background, analysis and review of SSD.
I was looking a long time for a solution to make my desktop experience faster and I think I'll order a 60GB Vertex. 200€(germany) is still a lot of money but it will be worth it.
Very illuminating article, very well written and researched. It made me glad that I didn't pull the trigger on an SSD for my I7 machine and regret not buying OCZ memory! I'm interested in adding an SSD as the scratch disk for Photoshop CS4 to use. I don't really launch applications very often, say once a week on the weekly reboot and keep 6-8 apps open at all times. I have 12GB of memory for that. The benchmarks were very interesting, but what sort of activity does Photoshop scratch usage create? Large files or random writes? What type of SSD would be most cost effective here?
An SSD does sound better than a SSD!
wait for ddr3 to enter the mainstream and buy loads of memory.
use a ramdisk for your adobe scratch area. much faster than ssd and no wear to worry about (not that you would worry that much with modern ssds anyway).
I'll have to check when I get home, but I believe the recommended size for the scratch disk is upwards of 10GB. So would need a motherboard that supports a LOT of RAM to give enough to main memory plus a scratch disk.
I was wondering the same thing. I'd guess it would be a lot of writing/erasing, so an SSD might not be the best from a longevity standpoint, but if your system is hitting the scratch disk often then the speed might make it worthwhile.
I wanted to compliment you on what I think was an excellent article. This is the type of thing I really have always liked from Anandtech. The detailed background, the technical reasons for the issues and then a thorough review of the current state of things.
I just finished upgrading my desktop. The only remaining item I wanted to replace was the hard disk. I had been thinking about getting a Velociraptor but instead I just ordered a 60GB Vertex from Newegg.
That sure was a lot to take in! Fantastic article though, it has really opened my eyes to the possibilities that Solid State Drives provide. Probably wont be buying one in the immediate future given the so-called depression and such things, but i will certainly keep up with SSD progress.
Thanks again for your fantastic articles - im sure im not the only one who really appreciates them :)
Very nice and thorough article. I only lack more current status of TRIM command support in current operating systems. For example, Linux supports it since last year:
Outstanding article that really helped me understand SSD drives. I wonder how much of an impact the new SATA III standard will have on SSD drives? I believe we are still at the beginning stage for SSD drives and your article shows that much more work needs to be done. My respect for OCZ and how they responded in a positive and productive way should be a model for the rest of the SSD makers. Thank you again for such a concise article.
Respectfully,
Sinned
The first thing I thought of was Democracy. Don't know why. Maybe it was because a company listened to our common goal of performance. Thank you OCZ for listening, I'm sure it will pay off!!!
very nice read. the 4/512 issue seems a rather stupid design decision, or perhaps more likely a stupid problem to find this 4/512 solution as 'acceptable'.
although a great marketing choice, built in automatic life expectancy reduction.
sounds like the manufacturers want the hard drives to become a disposable medium like styrofoam cups.
perhaps when they narrow the disparity down to 4/16, i might consider buying an ssd. that, or when they beat the 'old school' physical platters in price.
until then, get back to the drawing board and stop crapping out these half arsed 'should be good enough' solutions.
araczynski: The 4/512 isn't done by accident. It's done to lower prices. The flash technology used in SSDs are meant to replace platter HDDs in the future. There's no way of doing that without cost reductions like these. Even with that the SSDs still cost several times more per storage space.
i understand that, but i don't remember original hard drives being released and being slower than the floppy drives they were replacing.
this is part of the 'release beta' products mentality and make the consumer pay for further development.
the 5.25" floppy was better than the huge floppy in all respects when it was released. the 3.5" floppy was better than the 5.25" floppy when it was released. the usb flash drives were better than the 3.5" floppies when they were released.
i just hate the way this is being played out at the consumer's expense.
What a great article. I usually have to skip forwards when things bog down, but they never did with this long, but very informative article. Your focus on what matters to users is why I always check anandtech first thing every morning.
The method for generating "used" drives is flawed. For creating a true used drive, the spare blocks must be filled as well. Since this was not done, the results are biased towards the Intel drives with their generous amount of spare blocks that were *not* exhausted when producing the used state. An additional bias is introduced by the reduction of the IOmeter write test to 8 GB only. Perhaps there are enough spare blocks on the Intel drives so that these 8 GB can be written to "fresh" blocks without the need for (time-consuming) erase operations.
Apart from these concerns, I enjoyed reading the article.
I also just created an account to post, very nice article!
Lots of good well thought out information, I'm so tired of synthetic benchmarks glad someone goes through the trouble to bench these things right (and appears to have the education to really understand them). Whats with the grammar police though? geez...
Also created an account just to post this comment.
Really impressive and well done article ! Will stay tune for further developments and reviews. Thank you so much :)
Also... very impressed by OCZ's respond and commitment upon end users needs and product quality assurance (unfortunately not so commun by large this days among other companies). Certanly will buy from them my next SSDs to reward and support their healty policy.
This is one of the best tech articles I have ever read, I created an account just to post this comment. I've been a fan of Anandtech for years and articles like this (and the RV700 article from a while back) show the truly unique perspective and access that Anand has that simply no other tech site can match. GREAT WORK!!!
I just got the Apex. I'd probably cough up more dough for the Vertex after reading this. However, I've run it for two days as my system disk in MacPro and haven't noticed any issues, it's really fast. But I guess I'll get Vertex for my Windows 7 build.
What I find intriguing about this article is that these smaller manufacturers do not do real world internal testing for these things. They should not need 3rd parties like you to figure this shit out for them. Maybe now OCZ will learn what they need to do for the future.
It's too bad Windows and applications don't let you select where all the data that needs to be updated and saved to is stored. If that was an option a SSD could be used to only load data (EXE files and support files) and a HDD could be used to store files that are updated frequently, like a web browser for example, their constantly caching files, from the sound of this article that would kill the performance of a SSD in no time.
I bought a Vertex 120GB and it is NOT working on my Nvidia chipsets motherboard. Anyone met the same problem? I tried intel chipsets motherboard and seems ok.
I used HDtach to test the read/write performance 4 days ago, wow, it was amazing. 160MB/s in write. But today I felt it slower and used HDtach to test again, it downs to single digit MB per second. Can I recover it or I need to return it?
While I must admit I skipped over some of the more technical bits where SSD was explained in detail, I read the summaries and I've gotta admit this article was extremely helpful. I've been wanting to get one of these for a long time now but they've seemed too infantile in technological terms to put such a hefty investment in, until now.
After reading about OCZ's response to you and how they've stepped it up and are willing to cut unimportant statistics in favor of lower latencies, I actually decided to purchase one myself. Figured I might as well show my appreciation to OCZ by grabbing up a 60GB SSD, not to mention it looks like it's by far the best purchase I can make SSD-wise for $200.
Thanks for the awesome article, was a fun read, that's for sure.
Anand, I don't want to sound too negative in my comments. While I wouldn't call them unusable, there's no doubt that the random write performance of the JMicron SSDs sucks. I'm glad that you're actually running random I/O tests when so many other websites just run HDTune and call it a day.
That X25-M for $340 is looking mighty tempting, though.
Something crossed my mind when I saw the firmware-based trade-off between random writes and sequential transfer rates: couldn't that be adjusted dynamically to get the best of both worlds? Default to the current behaviour but switch into something resembling te old one when extensive sequential transfers are detected?
Of course this neccesiates that the processor would be able to handle additional load and that the firmware changes don't involve permanent changes in the organization of the data.
Maybe the OCZ-Team already thought about this and maybe nobody's going to read this post, buried deep within the comments..
That was kind of strange to me too. But I assume Anand really means the desktop market, not the server storage/business market. Since it's highly doubtful that the general consumer will spend many times as much money for 15k SAS drives.
I've always been someone who wants real clarify and truth to the information on the internet. That's a problem because probably 90% of things are not. But Anand is one man I feel a lot of trust for because of great and complete articles such as this. This is truly the first time that I feel like I really understand what goes into ssd performance and why it can be good or bad. Thank you so much for being the most inciteful voice in the hardware community. And keep fighting those damn manufacturers who are scared of the facts getting in the way of their 200MB/s marketing bs.
I just wanted to thank you for an amazing article. I am a very picky buyer and technology critic, so I always come to your site for the ‘real’ story on things. In fact for the amount of time, research, and (useful) testing methodologies you invest, I almost feel guilty receiving this information for free. Especially since your findings benefit the industry as a whole since it causes manufacturer’s to fix/improve their products (well at least the smart ones do). The i7 motherboard roundup was another great example of this. Seriously, if you have a place for donations I would send you $50 in a heartbeat. I know it’s not much but if others did the same it would add up to a decent token of appreciation.
Oh and please don’t take people’s grammar or nitpicky corrections the wrong way. Yes it can be annoying, but in the end it does help the article become closer to perfect since others catch little things overlooked by human error. In the end we are all grateful for these articles, otherwise we wouldn’t be here reading them!
You know, the JMicron SSDs really aren't so bad. Yes, you'd have to be crazy to spend $400 on one when there are better options like the X25-M (or the new Vertex series for that matter).
But I paid $65 for my 30GiB OCZ "Core" SSD. Yeah, random writes are piss slow. I knew this. The drive replaced the 5400.5 that came with my EEE PC.
I'm not going to be doing any 'extensive multitasking' on my EEE. I'm not running a file server, I certainly don't have antivirus in the background, and I don't spend all day installing new apps.
I'm running 7. Compared with the 5400.5, the system boots faster, Chrome loads faster, but Windows updates take longer. That's a trade-off I'm willing to deal with, considering that I get less noise and more battery life in return.
I can tell you this - the JMicron SSDs beat the pants off of the PCIe MLC SSDs that ship with many netbooks.
So, yeah, I guess this is a product that's "unfit for market". But it's perfect for some of us. If I wanted a boot drive for a Linux media/backup server (along with HDDs for storage), I could see choosing a $50 SSD over a $50 HDD.
It's all about your needs. No one is pretending that JMicron SSDs are fast, at least not at writing. But if your usage is mostly read-centric (or "nothing-centric", as is frequently the case on netbooks), and your chief criteria are low power and low price, the JMicron SSDs do quite well.
No it does not, it will help if the partition is properly aligned but it is not a cure, neither is the rest of the voodoo magic being spouted on the OCZ forums. They help, but do not cure the stuttering problem with the JMicron based drives. I just love the fact that OCZ wants to sell you a drive (Core series) that does not work properly, have you purchase third party software, and then hack the OS in order to improve the performance of the product. Glad to see it fixed with the Vertex and Summit drives though, but it will take a long time before I even think about using an OCZ product again. I was hoping to see the new ADATA and SuperTalent drives in this article, maybe those are coming in the next segment he mentioned.
Yes, it does.
I have a Core series 60GB OCZ drive. I bought it right before Newegg increased the price on the drives. The stuttering was horrible, and worthless even as a secondary drive if it was formatted with XP. Also, after using Diskpart and aligning the drive I could not install XP on the drive and have it bootable.. Which sucked.
But there's ways around that, and guess what, I have a stutter free flash drive for cheap that gets very good performance numbers, and boots Server 2008 in under 10 seconds.
OCZ's product works fine. You may not like the performance, but it's certainly not unusable.
The $65 I paid for my 30GiB OCZ "Solid" SSD is about what you'd pay for a USB flash drive. The disk I have has a USB interface, which is very convenient, plus it's plenty fast enough for my EEE PC.
I'm glad that Anand has done these reviews. People need to understand what they're getting into when they by a JMicron SSD. If you don't expect much, you won't be disappointed.
Arguably for a normal notebook/desktop you should buy a normal hard drive if your budget is under $100. But the JMicron SSDs do a good job in netbooks (which, again, aren't too fast to begin with) at a very low price.
I have aligned my partitions and disabled swap on my Windows 7 install (on my EEE). I also have 2GB of memory in my EEE. I haven't done any fancy tweaking on the OS.
Compared with the EEE 900A that I had briefly (PCIe SSD), my EEE 900HA is dramatically faster. You can't run XP or Vista on PCIe SSDs unless you have a lot of patience. You *can* run it on a JMicron SSD.
I honestly don't notice any stuttering. I don't run antivirus and I don't multitask much on this machine. If I demanded from my EEE what I demand from my desktop (Q9300 + 8GB + WD6400AAKS), I know that the SSD would choke up. But I'm not going to do that on a 1.6GHz single-core Atom anyway.
So, yeah, OK. I guess I think that trashing JMicron SSDs is a little like trashing USB flash drives for being slow. Paying $300 for a UFD would be stupid, as is paying $300 for a JMicron SSD. But in the sub-$100 category, you don't expect much.
When better SSDs drop below $100, maybe I'll upgrade. Until then, I'm enjoying 5 hours of battery life on my 900HA.
Well I think it's unusable for my needs if I'm running it as an operating system drive. I place a giant important on the latency of the drive at that point and it certainly includes random writes. Which is why I would never ever buy an ssd that's majorly below the Intel write performance. It's not worth the price premium or loss of storage size compared to the standard hard drive.
I have had some trouble replicating some of the Samsung SLC results...
Despite filling the drive up and emulating a well used drive as described in the article I cannot get my Sammy drive's performance to degrade as much as you managed to especially regarding random write performance...
Now my system used for testing is a socket 775 (qx9650) and I was testing on ICH9R and WINXP (SP3) but still I would expect to see similar figures ...
I do not have an X58 system to test on at the moment but I would be very interested if The Sammy SLC drives were shown to degrade faster / perform worse with a X58 / ICH10R / Vista x64 (SP1?) setup...
This is, very likely, the best article I have ever read, period. Online, in magazines, about any subject... this was an absolutely fantastic read. Suddenly, all smoke surrounding SSDs has cleared and the truth shines through in editorial brilliance. It's great to see that at least some computer news sites out there can still cut through the crap and get to the heart of the issue. My already high opinion of AnandTech has risen even further.
Thank you for taking the immense time it must have taken to compile and assemble all this information - this article is now a must-read for *anybody* considering purchasing an SSD, and it's just about all the background you could need in one place.
In addition to all the extremely useful general SSD information contained within, the detailing of the issues with the JMicron controllers as well as OCZ's efforts to address the concerns to produce the best product possible (despite the reduced marketability to the uninformed) is reassuring and comforting in a world where tech companies seem more concerned with how much they can deceive their customers instead of producing quality products.
In short, the article is a win on all fronts, thank you greatly for posting it. When I purchase my first SSD (which I'm considering doing reasonably soon) this article, its information and suggestions, and OCZs actions to resolve the issues with its drives will definitely be at the forefront of my mind.
I have to say, I really appreciate the effort and throughness with which you have covered the state of the SSD market today. As an engineer and scientist, I applaud your methods in tracking down and reporting the major issues with SSDs. As a consumer, I really appreciate the timeliness of this article as I was just thinking of putting an SSD in a netbook for a robotics application where mechanical drives are not ideal.
That said, one thing I would have like to have seen is some numbers on power consumption for these drives compared to average mechanical desktop and laptop drives.
Had a really good read here, thanks for the history and info, Anand. The only thing I don't understand is what the importance of random write is? What kind of task would benefit from high random write speeds (maybe copying many files at once)? I'm tempted to pick up a vertex drive but it depends on whether or not random write will be important for me. But the price... whoa, pretty damn expensive here in Canada.. http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=36023&a...">http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?...X120G&am... - $625 for a 120GB!!! I kind of want 2, for RAID0, I have a lot of games installed (steam folder alone is 100GB lol). Might even have to raid 3 of em.. but not for $1800 lol.
>I'm tempted to pick up a vertex drive but it depends on
>whether or not random write will be important for me.
Keep in mind, its random write is twice as fast as mechanical HDs.
I can tell a ton of work went into that, and all the history/details are greatly appreciated. I've been checking every week or so throughout February to see if it had been posted, but well worth the wait. As great as SSDs are, I can understand you not wanting to be near one for a while (-: Thanks for all the hard work...especially from the consumer standpoint. And kudos to OCZ for stepping up the way they did...that's (unfortunately) unheard of. Glad to see your no-compromise / report the facts no matter what attitude winning for the consumer. I'm glad at least one manufacturer was able to see (eventually) your intent wasn't to create a commotion, but to just plainly say what needed to be said.
An extremely (as always) informative article; comprehensive and no angle missed. Good stuff!
From an enthusiast's perspective, OCZ gained 10 levels of trust as a result of Ryan Peterson's response and handling of the Vertex' firmware. Ryan accepted the harsh reality expressed to him from an outside reviewer, risked marketability to rely on Anand's expertise (Anand is *absolutely* correct that 230MB/s is worthless if it comes with stuttering write latency), and resolved the problem in record time.
This is the rare kind of responsiveness and attitude that translate directly into sales (I'm on my way to price the Vertex now).
I am going to drill this into reviewer's head -> NTFS isn't designed for SSDs.
There are three problems for properly reviewing SSDs today:
FileSystem, RAID controller, and SSD controller.
Each of them can compensate for the SSDs, the question is which one SHOULD be responsible for optimizing random IOs.
It is very clear that Intel's SSDs have implemented all the nitty gritty stuff like copy on write onto the SSD controller itself. So the OS or FileSystem shouldn't be responsible for performance degradation, however the same cannot be said for other SSDs.
I am sure results would be difference if this were conducted on Solaris/OpenSolaris ZFS with Adaptec 5405(IOP348 based RAID card). Not to pump Solaris and ZFS, but it is the primary reason why IBM wants to buy SUN, because it is the only File System on the market that can properly operate SSDs and to do so without RAID controllers.
If Anand really wants to stick to windows still, I think benchmarking on Windows 7 Beta would be slightly better option that Vista. Windows had made a lot of optimizations for rotational based hard disks that it actually makes SSD perform worse.
The Vertex random write 4K IOPS benchmark doesn't look right at 2.6MB/sec, that is hardly 650 IOs. It should be much higher. It could be the ICH10R controller though.
I'd expect IBM's JFS to be pretty efficient on an SSD as well. Anything that appends and avoids overwriting existing sectors will perform better here.
Stepping back a bit, I still have a perfectly usable Dothan-based laptop with IDE. Any chance of getting an in-depth review on recent Transcend 128GB IDE SSDs? My new laptop is running fine with a G.Skill Titan 256GB SSD, but when I fire up the older laptop it's unbearable, even with that 7200rpm Hitachi 100GB drive inside.
By the way, I paid under $2/GB for the 256GB G.Skill Titan; for the work I do with it on Linux it performs fine most of the time. (Just make sure to maximize use of the FS cache.) I don't see the value proposition for the OCZ Vertex or Summit.
The random write 4K benchmark isn't right for the Vertex and other SSDs because of the test procedure:
"The write test was performed over an 8GB range on the drive, while the read test was performed across the whole drive."
It partially disables any write optimization algorithms on the Vertex. Intel wasn't affected as much.
Anand, your first article pumping X25-M literally screwed Samsung's SSD manufacturers big time: they lost hundreds of millions of dollars because of your blatant pumping. Yes the random write was a big problem, but so was testing it on a Windows OS with NTFS and integrated SATA controller like ICH9/10 with no ram cache and obviously lack of IO optimizations for SSDs.
Please redo the review with a proper OS, ie Windows 7 beta or OpenSolaris.
Yeah, who in their right mind uses Windows and integrated SATA controllers? Oh wait, nearly everyone.
Since its pretty obvious that you either work for Samsung or one of their partners, I think its laughable that you think this cost them hundreds of millions in sales. How big is the SSD market exactly, and how many potential buyers visit this site? Not enough to cause such an impact if you ask me.
And the fact remains - had you guys done what OCZ did, and optimized for real world use even if it cost you e-peen in the way of benchmarks, you would have been fine. Its only because you thought you could cheat and swindle consumers that you guys got a bad rep from Anand. Run an honest business, and your customers will thank you. I know that, if I ever considered an SSD, I would either buy Intel or an OCZ Vertex, nothing else. You know why? because they do what they say on the tin. You complain that the X25-M got a glowing review? Make a product as good as it and then Anand will sing your praises, but dont be upset when he tells it like it is.
Nearly everyone uses Windows and integrated SATA controllers. It still does not negate the fact that neither were optimized for SSD random IO patterns.
No, I don't work for Samsung or its partners. It didn't cost them hundreds of millions in sales, but it did cost them hundreds of millions in inventory markdowns. Just look at the free falling of price of JMicron and original Samsung based SSDs in the past few months, and multiply by the inventory, that's the loss I was mentioning.
I am not saying that Intel X25-M is a bad drive. It is good. but there is no reason to use crippled OS File Systems and crippled SATA controller to show off the X25-M's internal copy on write features. When windows 7 comes out of beta(soon), it will be the OS the majority of people will use, and I am just looking forward 6 months when SSD adoption rate will improve more. As to Solaris ZFS, you don't need it if you aren't mentally capable of understanding its elegance.(Most people won't and it is ok)
If they had also tested with Solaris/ZFS and reported that the drives worked well there, but 99.x% of users can't take advantage of that, would you have been happier? They may work perfectly well in that scenario, but it is meaningless to most users. Working properly in Vista and OSX is currently a requirement for selling to general consumers. Windows 7 was not even available in beta at the time of the last test, I would expect they will test with it once it launches but for now with the OS/FS they are likely to use most of the available SSDs fail.
Also, your economic analysis assumes they would have been able to sell all their inventory at the inflated prices they wanted to. Whether or not they received a negative review from sites like Anandtech, word would have gotten out from early adopters that they had problems. Also, they would have moved fewer units at those prices.
I could really careless if they did review SSD ZFS. I am using it right now and it kicks ass. Next Version of OSX will have ZFS so I guess Apple agrees that ZFS is the way to go here.
Vista is one of the crappiest OS Microsoft put out in recent memory, maybe besides the Windows ME release. Just look at Vista adoption rates, and you will see why.
You still don't understand my argument. My argument was that either File System, or RAID controller or SSD controller must implement copy on write.(basically if you have to erase a block to write to it, you are screwed) ZFS implements that in the file system. Adaptec 5 series or any Intel IOP RAID cards also help SSD performance greatly. If you don't use those two, then the SSD controller must implement it(X25-M is in this category.) You only need one of the three to properly handle SSDs to get greatly improved performance. Anandtech's review obviously skips file system optimization by picking Vista, and RAID controller optimization by picking ICH10R. What is left is the poor SSD controller that needs to virtualize the logical space, thus making the review entirely biased toward the X25-M for a good reason.
It is sad that this is supposedly a review for the Vertex units that OCZ sent to Anand, but it seems to me that it just turned out to be another article defending the X25-M. I know X25-M is a good SSD, but it does not explain why Anand should cripple the OS, Controller so much to do it and then test the SSDs with strange IO queue depth of 3 and during the random write IOPS test, tried to cap the write space to a 8GB confinement. Those settings greatly exaggerate X25-M's internal implementation advantages.
My economic analysis was based on SSD spot price published on dramexchange.com. Since the release of X25-M's review by Anandtech, all Samsung/JMicron MLC drives(Core, Core v2, Supertalent, etc) have been reduced to spot price of 2 dollars per GB to clear the inventories from the typical 4-5 dollars per GB that they used to command. The inventory markdown can be as high as 200+ dollar per drive and then you multiply that by the inventory that major vendors had, giving you hundreds of millions of dollars of aggregate damage sustained by the group of Samsung/JMicron partners.
I understand your point, but I am not sure you understand the point I (and others) are trying to make. The SSD makers (should) know their market. As they seem to be marketing these SSDs to consumers, they should know that means the vast majority are on Vista or OSX, so the OS won't be optimized for SSDs. It also means the majority will be using integrated disk controllers. Therefore, in choosing a SSD controller which does not operate properly given those restrictions, they chose poorly. The testing here at Anandtech shows that regardless of how the drives might perform in ideal circumstances, they have noticeable issues when used the way most users would use them, which is really all those users care about.
In the history of computing, it was always the case that software compensated for the new hardware, not the other way around. When new hardware comes out that obsoletes current generation of software, new software will be written to take advantage of the new hardware.
Think of it this way: you always write newer version of drivers to drive the newest GPUs. When is the last time newer GPUs work with older drivers?
Nobody should be designing hardware now that makes DOS run fast right? All file systems (except ZFS and soon BTRFS) are obsolete now for SSDs, so we write new file systems. I am not sure Intel X25-M's approach of virtualizing flash to the likings of NTFS and EXT3 is the correct one. It is simply a bridge to get to the next solution.
SSD makers right now are making a serious mistake pushing SSDs down consumer's throats during an economic crisis. They should have focused on the enterprise market, targeting DB servers. But in that space, Intel X25-E sits alone without competition. (Supertalent UltraDrive LEs should be within 25% of X25-E by my estimation)
Now I understand what you meant in the beginning. But still I don't agree with you, the system reviewed is the one 99% of SSD buyers will use(integrated mobo controller + NTFS). So, why optimize the benchmark to show the bad drives in a good light?
About the Vertex, I don't understand what you are complaining about. After reading this article most people got the idea that Vertex is a good drive and at half Intel's price (I know, I searched on google for comments about this article).
Professional people only look at two SSD benchmarks: random read IOPS at 4k and random write IOPS at 4k(Maybe 8K too for native DB pages).
The Vertex random write IOPS at 4K size is abysmal. 2.4MB/sec at 4K means it only does 600ish random write IOPs. Something was wrong, and Vista/ICH10R didn't help. The 8GB/sec write boundary Anand imposed on the random write IOPS test is fishy. So is the artificial io queue depth = 3.
The vertex random write IOPS should be better. The random read IOPS also should be slightly better. I have seen OCZ's own benchmark placing the Vertex very close to Intel X25-M at random read/ write IOPS tests.
I personally think that if you use NTFS, just ignore the SSDs for now until Windows 7 RTM. You can't hurt waiting for SSD price to drop some more in the next 6 months. Same thing for Linux, although I would argue that Linux is even in a worse position for SSDs right now than windows 7. EXT3/EXT4/JFS/XFS/REISERFS all suck on SSDs.
Anandtech should adopt the same comment system as Dailytech so that comments that don't make any sense can be rated down. Who would want to read a review of something using a beta OS, or worse an OS that is only used on servers? I think it would be interesting to see if Windows 7 beta offered any improvements, but that should not be the focus of the review.
Here's another vote for the Dailytech comments section. The ability to rate up down, but more importantly HIDE the comments below a threshold would make for much more enjoyable reading.
Why should Anand test with Windows 7b or *nix? What is the majority OS?
Kudos to Anand for testing real world performance on an OS that most use, and to Intel for tuning their drives for it. I'm happy the other manufacturers are losing business..maybe they will also tune their drives for real world performance and not synthetic benchmarks.
To the poster above: do you work for OCZ or Samsung?
tshen83 "A very thorough review by tshen83, an hour ago
BUT, still based on Windows Vista.
"
As long as these drives are marketed toward said OS, why would you not use it? Most of us wouldn't recognize Solaris if we saw it! And I believe you seriously overestimate yourself if your gonna drill anything into Anands head! You might need your own site, huh?
Great Job Anand! Don't forget to remind these CEO's that they also need to provide any software needed to configure and optimize these drives to work properly. ie go to OCZ Forums and try to figure out how to align, optimize and keep your drive running like it's supposed to, in less than 4 hours of reading! It would be nice if these companies would do their own beta testing and not rely on early adopters to do it for them!
Anand it would be really helpful to have a list of SSD companies blacklisting you so I know which ones to avoid. In general it would be nice to know who doesn't provide review samples to reputable sites.
Wow, excellent article and so much useful information in an easy to understand way. I have just recently been paying attention to SSDs and thanks to this article I am armed with the information to make the correct choice for my needs. Thanks AnandTech, its the deep and honest articles like these that keep me coming back for more.
Looking at the example you are giving with your self-manufactured SSD drive: If I save the DOC I use up a page. Based on what you are saying, if I make a change to that DOC, it would then be saved in the next page instead of overwriting the existing page? If that is true, then the File Allocation system (FAT or MFT) itself would contribute quite a bit to the 'filling up of pages' phenomena. Could you elaborate if the proposed file system for SSD addresses this?
Great even, but I've have to disagree with the significance of the passage that suggested the Indilinx controller makes data loss as bad on those SSD as on a conventional hard drive.
The primary cause of data loss is mechanical or component failure, not power loss. If we want to consider power loss, it's not just the drive which is prone to lose data, the entire system memory suffers far more data loss than that.
Further, a sufficiently sized supercapacitor should keep the drive operating for a period of time beyond when the rest of the system would be operational, it could be sufficient for the controller to finish writing to flash all received data (or just use an UPS, that's what they're for?).
Second, I can't believe that OCZ only tests designs with HDTach and Atto, I think it more likely they knew of the problem but didn't expect anyone to find it so quickly, and felt the higher sequential speeds made it more marketable. This makes me feel that manufacturers, then online sellers should differentiate their drives with a standardized random read/write score.
What would be really nice is if the Indilinx based SSDs had an application available, similar to a HDD acoustic management bit changing app, that lets the owner set their own preference for IO versus sequential read performance.
Don't they ever try using their own devices? One second of latency should slap any user in the face. It should be very easy for a manufacturer to build a system with their new technology put it in front of people and see what happens, but apparently they're not doing this.
They wait for reviewers to do the work for them and then get upset when they find a problem.
What the manufacturers should be taking away from this article is:
1) Try your competitor's products
2) Try your own products
3) Try them in real life as opposed to synthetic tests
4) Compare everything you've tried and market the performance that matters
That art is great. Finally someone done ssd test's right, and said loud what we, customers, can get for that hefty pricetags.
I've supposed that only choices are intel and new ocz's. Now I know, and big kudos for that.
Just need a bit more $$ for x25-m, it'll be ideal for heavy workstation use, and biggest vertex'll replace wd black in my aging 6910p :)
Great info. I'm looking to get an SSD but was put off by all these setbacks. Why should I put away my HDDS and get something a million times more expensive that stutters?
This article is why I visit AT first.
Anand, when you filled up the drives to simulate a full drive, did you also write to the extended area that is reserved? If you didn't, wouldn't the Intel SLC drive (as an example) not show as much of a performance drop, versus the MLC drive? As you stated, Intel has reserved more flash memory on the SLC drive, above the stated SSD capacity.
I also agree with GourdFreeMan, that the physical block size needs to be reduced. Due to the constant erasing of blocks, the Trim command is going to reduce the life of the drive. Of course, drive makers could increase the size of the cache and delay using the Trim command until the number of blocks to be erased equals the cache available. This would more efficiently rearrange the valid data still present in the blocks that are being erased (less writes). Microsoft would have to design the Trim command so it would know how much cache was available on the drive, and drive makers would have to specifically reserve a portion of their cache for use by the Trim command.
I also like Basilisk's comment about increasing the cluster size, although if you increase it too big, you are likely to be wasting space and increasing overhead. Surely, even if MS only doubles the cluster size for NTFS partitions to 8KB's, write cycles to SSD's would be reduced. Also, There is the difference between 32bit and 64bit operating systems to consider. However, I don't have the knowledge to say whether Microsoft can make these changes without running into serious problems with other aspects of the operating system.
I only wrote to the LBAs reported to the OS. So on the 80GB Intel drive that's from 0 - 74.5GB.
I didn't test the X25-E as extensively as the rest of the drives so I didn't look at performance degradation as closely just because I was running out of time and the X25-E is sooo much more expensive. I may do a standalone look at it in the near future.
Has anyone at Anandtech talked to Microsoft about when the "Trim" command will be supported in Windows 7. Also it would be great if you could include some numbers from Windows 7 beta when you do a follow-up.
One reason I ask is that I searched for "Windows 7 ssd trim" and I saw a presentation from WinHEC that made it sound like support for the trim command would be a requirement for SSD drives to meet the Windows 7 logo requirements. I would think if this were the case then Windows 7 would have support for trim. However, this article made it sound like support for Trim might not be included when Windows 7 is initially released, but would be added later.
I think it is obvious that Windows 7 will support TRIM. The bigger question this article points out is whether or not the current SSDs will be upgradeable via firmware- which is more important for consumers wanting to buy one now.
It took me an hour to read the whole thing, but I really enjoyed it. It reminded me of the time I spent testing circuitry and doing root cause analysis.
I think that it would be interesting if you were to be able to test the drives for the "desktop/laptop/consumer" front by writing a 8 GiB file using 4 kiB block sizes, etc. for the desktop pattern and also to test the drive then with a larger sizes and larger block size for the server/workstation pattern as well.
You present some very very good arguments and points, and I found your article to be thoroughly researched and well put.
So I do have to commend you on that. You did an excellent job. It is thoroughly enjoyable to read.
I'm currently looking at a 4x 256 GB Samsung MLC on Solaris 10/ZFS for apps/OS (for PXE boot), and this does a lot of the testing; but I would be interested to see how it would handle more server-type workloads.
If The implementation of the Trim command is as you described here, it would actually kind of suck.
"The third step was deleting the original 4KB text file. Since our drive now supports TRIM, when this deletion request comes down the drive will actually read the entire block, remove the first LBA and write the new block back to the flash:"
First of all, it would create a new phenomenon called Erase Amplification. This would negatively impact the lifetime of a drive.
Secondly, you now have worse delete performance.
Basically, an SSD 4kB block can be in 3 different states: erased, data, garbage. A block enters the garbage state when a block is "overwritten" or the Trim command marks the contents as invalid.
The way i would imagine it working, marking block content as invalid is all the Trim command does.
Instead the drive will spend idle time finding the 512kB pages with the most garbage blocks. Once such a page is found, all the data blocks from that page would be copied to another page, and the page would be erased. Doing it in this way maximizes the number of garbage blocks being converted to erased.
I'm sure that you can come up with fancier shell scripts and stuff that uses the random number generator for the offsets (and if you really want it to work well, partition it so that when it does it, it takes up the entire initial 74.5 GB partition, and when you're done "dirtying" the data using dd and offset in a random pattern, grow the partition to take up the entire disk again.)
Just as a suggestion for future reference.
I use parts of that to some (varying) degree for when I do my file/disk I/O subsystem tests.
I should think that most "performance" laptops will come with a Vertex drive in the near future.
Finally a performance SSD that comes near mainstream pricing.
Things are looking up, if more manufacturers get their heads out of the sand we should see prices drop as competition finally starts breeding excellence.
I just wanted to comment that the backstory portion to this article is simply the most interesting part to an article (or almost even an article inside the main article). On top of that, it is easily the most interesting article I have ever read simply because of that section. Really really must say that I enjoyed reading it!
I have been waiting for this one for a while and it was very informative. Thank you very much for it. I did pick up one of the patriot warp drives for my netbook. I was really happy until I installed avg free. So not running an antivirus on it anymore but I have drive image backup incase it goes bad. Overall pretty happy as it was only 80 bucks if I get my mir.
I think I'm going to wait until windows 7 till I upgrade my primary desktop. 2 of those vertexs in raid 0 would be sweet though.
They were one of the first SSDs you reviewed and they use their own controller. How does their random write performance compare to everything else out now?
These reviews made me totally reassess the purchase of the two Samsungs I bought. I had no idea the random writes on the Samsung drives were so bad. Other reviews show the Samsung drives doing better or at least near the X25-M in write tests: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15433/6">http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15433/6 However, those tests probably would have been somewhat sequential.
"so if you own one of these drives - you owned a fixed version."
The tense is incorrect (own/owned). I think "own a fixed version" is still awkward, perhaps "you have the fixed version", also the "so" may be superfluous. You can replace the ", so if" with a "; if". Here is how I might re-write the sentence:
"The old firmware never shipped thanks to OCZ's quick acting; if you own one of these drives - you have a fixed version."
(I am not an expert, so feel free to correct me if I am wrong.)
Awesome article btw, thanks for setting me straight on SSD, I have been steering clear of them. I hope soon you can review SSD's and most are good to excellent. :)
I almost didn't read this article, as everybody and their brother seems to want to explain SSDs these days and most of the articles aren't much more than glorified press releases. But, this one truly took the drives to task and presented some valid information and explanations about the state of the art and where it needs to go. Kudos, Anand. Awesome show. Good job.
"Needless to say, there was some definite fallout from that review. I’m used to negative manufacturer response after a GPU review, but I’m always a bit surprised when it happens in any other segment."
Obviously you can't make a business out of irritating manufacturers, but when there really are issues, the readers want to know about them. After all, that's why we come here!
You own Anand. Keep up the good work. I've seen you cited from many sites about the work you've done, in particular with SSDs. Best article I've read in months!
I've been waiting a long time for this review. It was certainly worth the wait! I would love to see some benchmarks with 2+ drives in RAID configurations via onboard and add-on controller cards. Maybe another follow up?
You missed out a VERY significant step that causes the greater part of the slowdown associated with your scenario. After the block is read out to cache the block has to be erased before it can be written to again and as you pointed out earlier an erase cycle, and thus the entire read/modify+erase/write cycle, takes a relatively LONG time, much longer than a simple read/modify/write.
I've worked in IT for 15 years and have played with very fast arrays and know a fair amount about storage. 2 months ago I replaced my Raptor boot/gaming drive with a GSkill Titan. In day to day use I have no stuttering. The only stutter I have seen was while installing a large patch, surfing with multiple windows/tabs open and using Outlook. It wasn't even a second. I did align the partition, turned off drive indexing and defragmentation, and turned on caching. In day to day use it simply kills the Raptor. Games and applications load in a fraction of the time. Vista boot time has decreased dramatically.
This isn't a case of purchase justification. If the drive was a dud I would have moved it to a secondary machine, reinstalled the Raptor, and chalked it up as a bad decision. I simply have not run into any scenario in daily use that it performs worse than the drive it replaced and I have not seen any real stuttering in daily use.
I have a GSkill Titan drive also and really like it. However, my experiences while positive overall, do not compare with yours when it comes to stuttering (yes, all optimizations have been done to the drive and OS). I still have significant stuttering problems when using multiple IM programs and having multiple windows/tabs open at the same time. I literally have to wait a few seconds when texting colleagues if more than two conversations are occurring at the same time as the system pauses, hitches, and stutters in this scenario. It is especially aggravating when on Skype and trying to text, speak, and transfer files at the same time. This does not occur on the Intel drive in my testing. Apparently, it is no longer a problem on the OCZ Vertex or Summit drives. Except for my example above, I would certainly use the Titan drive over my Raptor any day of the week.
That was the best review i have read in a long time. I originally bought an OCZ Core drive when they first came out. It was the worst piece of garbage i had ever used. Newegg wouldn't let me send it back and OCZ support forums told me all sorts of junk to get me to fix it but it was just a poorly designed drive. I eventually ended up getting the egg to take it back for credit and i wrote OCZ off as a company blinded by the marketing department. I currently own an Intel SSD and its wonderfull, everytime i see OCZ statements saying their drive competes with the Intel drive i would laugh and think back to the OCZ techs telling me i need to update my bios, or i need to install vista service pack 1 before it would work right.
I am thankful that you slapped that OCZ big wig around until they made a good product. All of us out there that wasted our time and money on Pre-vertex generation drives are greatfull to you and the whole industry should be kissing your butt right now.
One thing these companies need to learn is that marketing isn't the answer, creating solid products is. Hopefully OCZ has learned their lesson, and because of your article i will give them another chance.
I didn't want to worry about eventual failure of the Flash chips of an SSD, and went with an SDRAM based Ramdrive from Acard. These drives have no latency of any kind, since they use SDRAM, and no lifespan of write cycles. I've been using mine for a couple of weeks now, and I like it a lot. I put Ubuntu on mine, and had 2G left for my small home folder. The standard HDD is my long-term storage for data files, music, etc. As SDRAM gets more affordable over time, I can add DIMMs and bump up the size.
I've been eying these guys ever since the announced their first press release. Every time I always was drawn away by the constant need for power (4h max on battery scares the bejeezus out of me if I was to be gone on vacation during a storm), high power usage at all times, and high cost of entry (after factoring in all of the ram modules).
I really dislike that article as well, since I think the bottlenecks were much less apparent with such a horribly slow cpu. The majority of that review's data is extremely compressed. I mean a P4, and 1 gig of memory; are you F'ing kidding me? This article was written in Jan of this year!? Why didn't they just use my old 486DX?
What would a drive zeroing tool do to write performance, like if you used acronis privacy expert to zero only the "free space" regularly? Would it help write performance due to the drive not having to erase pages before writing?
I can kinda see that it wouldn't now.
Because there would still be states there regardless.
But if you could inform the drive that it is deleted somehow, hmm.
The subjective experiences with stuttering are more important to me than most of the test numbers. Other tests I have found of the G.Skill Titan and similar have looked pretty good, but left out mention of stuttering in use.
Too bad, as the 80GB Intel is too small and the ~$300 for a 120GB is about the most I am willing to pay. Maybe sometime this year the OCZ Vertex or similar will get there.
It seems rather premature to assume the ATA TRIM command will significantly improve the SSD experience on the desktop. If you were to use TRIM to rewrite a nonempty physical block, you do not avoid the 2ms erase penalty when more data is written to that block later on and instead simply add the wear of another erase cycle. TRIM, then, is only useful for performance purposes when an entire 512 KiB physical block is free.
A well designed operating system would have to keep track of both the physical and logical maps of used space on an SSD, and only issue TRIM when deletion of a logical cluster coincides with the freeing of an entire physical block. Issuing TRIMs at any other time would only hurt performance. This means the OS will have significantly fewer opportunities to issue TRIMs than you assume. Moreover, after significant usage the physical blocks will become fragmented and fewer and fewer TRIMs will be able to be issued.
TRIM works great as long as you only deal with large files, or batches of small files contiguously created and deleted with significant temporal locality. It would greatly aid SSDs in the "used" state Anand artificially creates in this article, but on a real system where months of web browsing, Windows updates and software installing/uninstalling have occurred the effect would be less striking.
TRIM could be mated with periodic internal (not filesystem) defragmentation to mitigate these issues, but that would significantly reduce the lifespan of the SSD...
It seems the real solution to the SSD performance problem would be to decrease the size of the physical block... ideally to 4 KiB, as that is the most common cluster size on modern filesystems. (This assumes, of course, that the erase, read and write latencies could be scaled down linearly.)
If you have extras Blocks on the drive (NOT PAGES, FULL BLOCKS) then there is no need for TRIM command.
1)Currently in use BLOCK is half full
2)More than half a block needs to be written
3)extra BLOCK is mapped into the system
4)original/half full block is mapped out of system.. can be erased during idle time.
You could even bind multiple continuous blocks this way (I assume that it is possible to erase simultaneously any of the internal groupings pages from Blocks on up...they probably share address lines...ex. erase 0000200 -> just erase block #200 ....erase 00002*0 -> erase block 200 to 290...btw, did addressing in base ten instead of binary just to simplify for some :)
Actually i think that the Trim command is merely used for marking blocks as free. The OS doesn't know how the data is placed on the SSD, so it can't make informed decision on when to forcefully erase pages. In the same way, the SSD doesn't know anything about what files are in which blocks, so you can't defrag files internally in the drive.
So while you can't defrag files, you CAN now defrag free space, and you can improve the wear leveling because deleted data can be ignored.
So let's say you have 10 pages where 50% of the blocks were marked deleted using the Trim command. That means you can move the data into 5 other pages, and erase the 10 pages. The more deleted blocks there are in a page, the better a candidate for this procedure. And there isn't really a problem with doing this while the drive is idle - since you're just doing something now, that you would have to do anyway when a write command comes.
This is basically what I am arguing both for and against in the fourth paragraph of my original post, though I assumed it would be the OS'es responsibility, not the drive's.
Do SSDs track dirty pages, or only dirty blocks? I don't think there is enough RAM on the controller to do the former...
Well, let's take a look at how much storage we actually need. A block can be erased, contain data, or be marked as trimmed or deallocated.
That's three different states, or two bits of information. Since each block is 4kB, a 64GB drive would have 16777216 blocks. So that's 4MB of information.
So yeah, saving the block information is totally feasible.
Actually the drive only needs to know if the page is in use or not, so you can cut that number in half. It can determine a partially full block that is a candidate for defragmentation by looking at whether neighboring pages are in use. By your calculation that would then be 2 MiB.
That assumes the controller only needs to support drives of up to 64 GiB capacity, that pages are 4 KiB in size, and that the controller doesn't need to use RAM for any other purpose.
Most consumer SSD lines go up to 256 GiB in capacity, which would bring the total RAM needed up to 8 MiB using your assumption of a 4 KiB page size.
However, both hard drives and SSDs use 512 byte sectors. This does not necessarily mean that internal pages are therefore 512 bytes in size, but lacking any other data about internal pages sizes, let's run the numbers on that assumption. To support a 256 MiB drive with 512 byte pages, you would need 64 MiB of RAM -- which only the Intel line of SSDs has more than -- dedicated solely to this purpose.
As I said before there are ways of getting around this RAM limitation (e.g. storing page allocation data per block, keeping only part of the page allocation table in RAM, etc.), so I don't think the technical challenge here is insurmountable. There still remains the issue of wear, however...
Substitute "allocated" for "dirty" in my above post. I muddled the terminology, and there is no edit function to repair my mistake.
Also, I suppose the SSD could store some per block data about page allocation appended to the blocks themselves at a small latency penalty to get around the RAM issue, but I am not sure if existing SSDs do such a thing.
My concerns about added wear in my original post still stand, and doing periodic internal defragmentation is going to necessitate some unpredictable sporadic periods of poor response by the drive as well if this feature is to be offered by the drive and not the OS.
I think your concerns parallel mine, allbeit we have different conclusions.
Parag.1: I think you misunderstand the ERASE concept: as I read it, after an ERASE parts of the block are re-written and parts are left erased -- those latter parts NEED NOT be re-erased before they are written, later. If the TRIM function can be accomplished at an idle moment, access time will be "saved"; if the TRIM can erase (release) multiple clusters in one block [unlikely?], that will reduce both wear & time.
Parag.2: This argument reverses the concept that OS's should largely be ignorant about device internals. As devices with different internal structures have proliferated over the years -- and will continue so with SSD's -- such OS differentiation is costly to support.
Parag 3 and onwards: Herein lies the problem: we want to save wear by not re-writing files to make them contiguous, but we now have a situation where wear and erase times could be considerably reduced by having those files be contiguous. A 2MB file fragmented randomly in 4KB clusters will result in around 500 erase cycles when it's deleted; if stored contiguously, that would only require 4-5 erase cycles (of 512KB SSD-blocks)... a 100:1 reduction in erases/wear.
It would be nice to get the SSD blocks down to 4KB in size, but I have to infer there are counter arguments or it would've been done already.
With current SSDs, I'd explore using larger cluster sizes -- and here we have a clash with MS [big surprise]. IIRC, NTFS clusters cannot exceed 4KB [for something to do with file compression!]. That makes it possible that FAT32 with 32KB clusters [IIRC clusters must be less than 64KB for all system tools to properly function] might be the best choice for systems actively rewriting large files. I'm unfamiliar with FAT32 issues that argue against this, but if the SSD's allocate clusters contiguously, wouldn't this reduce erases by a factor of 8 for large file deletions? 32KB clusters might ham-string caching efficiency and result in more disk accesses, but it might speed-up linear reads and s/w loads.
The impact of very small file/directory usage and for small incremental file changes [like appending to logs] wouldn't be reduced -- it might be increased as data-transfer sizes would increase -- so the overall gain for having fewer clusters-per-SSD-block is hard to intuit, and it would vary in different environments.
RE Parag. 1: As I understand it, the entire 512 KiB block must always be erased if there is even a single page of valid data written to it... hence my concerns. You may save time reading and writing data if the device could know a block were partially full, but you still suffer the 2ms erase penalty. Please correct me if I am mistaken in my assumption.
RE Parag. 2: The problem is the SSD itself only knows the physical map of empty and used space. It doesn't have any knowledge of the logical file system. NTFS, FAT32, ext3 -- it doesn't matter to the drive, that is the OS'es responsibility.
RE Parag. 3: I would hope that reducing the physical block size would also reduce the block erase time from 2ms, but I am not a flash engineer and so cannot comment. One thing I can state for certain, however is that moving to smaller physical block sizes would not increase wear across the surface of the drive, except possibly for the necessity to keep track of a map of used blocks. Rewriting 128 blocks on a hypothetical SSD with 4 KiB blocks versus 1 512 KiB block still erases 512 KiB of disk space (excepting the overhead in tracking which blocks are filled).
Regarding using large filesystem clusters: 4 KiB clusters offer a nice tradeoff between filesystem size, performance and slack (lost space due to cluster size). If you wanted to make an SSD look artificially good versus a hard drive, a 512 KiB cluster size would do so admirably, but no one would use such a large cluster size except for a data drive used to store extremely large files (e.g. video) exclusively. BTW, in case you are unaware, you can format a non-OS partition with NTFS to cluster sizes other than 4 KiB. You can also force the OS to use a different cluster size by first formating the drive for the OS as a data drive with a different cluster size under Windows and then installing Windows on that partition. I have a 2 KiB cluster size on a drive that has many hundreds of thousands of small files. However, I should note that since virtual memory pages are by default 4 KiB (another compelling reason for the 4 KiB default cluster size), most people don't have a use for other cluster sizes if they intend to have a page file on the drive.
Hey anand, page 3, the random read latency graph, they are mixed up. it is listed as the WD Velociraptor having a .11ms latency, I think you might want to fix that. :)
Fantastic article. Definitely one of the best I've read in a long time. Incredibly informative. Everyone who reads this article is a little bit smarter afterwards.
All the great information about SSDs aside, I think the best part though is how OCZ is willing to take blame for failure earlier and fix the problems. Companies like that are the ones who will get my money in the future especially when it is time for me to move from HDD to SSD.
"Intel ships its X25-M with 80GB of MLC flash on it, but only 74.5GB is available to the user"
It's a mistake. 80 GB of Flash look like 74.5GB for the user because 80,000,000,000 bytes of flash is 74.5 Go for the user point of view (with 1 KB = 1024 byte).
You did'nt point out the other problem of the X25-M : LBA "optimisation". After doing a lot of I/O random write the speed in sequential write can get down to only 10 MB /s :/
Did you bother reading the article? He pointed out that you can get any SSD (NOT just Intel's) stuck into a situation when only a secure erase will help you out. The problem is not specific to Intel's SSD, and it doesn't occur during normal usage.
The problem i've pointed out has nothing to do with the performance dregradation related to the write on a filled page, it's a performance degradation related to an LBA optimisation that is specific to Intel SSD.
So where would Corsair's SSD fit into this mix? It uses a Samsung MLC controller... so would it be comparable to the OCZ Summit? I would expect not since the rated sequential speeds on the Corsair are tremendously lower than the Summit, but the Summit is the closest match in terms of the internals.
The Summit is optimized for sequential performance at the cost of random I/O, as per the article. That is clearly not the case with the Corsair drive, so how does the Corsair hold up in terms of random I/O? That's what I'm interested in, since the sequential on the Corsair is "fast enough" if the random write performance is good.
A detailed description of how SSDs operate makes me wonder: Imagene hypothetically I have a SSD drive that is filled from more than 90% (e.g., 95%) and those 90% are read-only things (or almost read-only things such as exe and other application files). The remaining 10% is free or frequently written to (e.g., page/swap file). Then the use of drive results - from what I understood in the article - in very fast aging of those 10% of the SSD disk because the 90% are occupied by read-only stuff. If the disk in question has for instance 32GB, those 10% are 3.2 GB (e.g., a size of a usual swap file) and after writing it approx. 10000 times, the respective part of the disk would become dead. Being occupies by a swap file, this number of reads/writes can be achieved in one or two years... Am I right?
@AT
This is why i come to AT to read up on the developments.
@OCZ
Well played :0)
The ruler of the roost are the Intels however I will be able to afford one of those when there are cows enjoying themselfs by dancing on the moon. My next upgrade will be a Vertex - not only bc its Valu for money but equally much bc. OCZ obviously takes care of thier customers and listens to reason.
Thx for this article Anand, I have been in a hotly contested debate over OCZ vs Samsung with my "Asperger Enhanced" nemisis/close friend...
(In all fairness, I should mention I use the BiPolar SSE instruction set myself)
He was only looking at Samsung, I said he should look into what OCZ has now.
His reply was "I don't know them, and don't want to be disapointed"
(Long story behind that...He's from the Server/Workstain/HPC crowd, I am from the hardcore OC/Gamer/Desktop group, so he is not familiar with OCZ)
Looks like the Samsung (And alot of others) has "Issues" with performance degrading over time that are somewhat solved by Intel and OCZ (Plus maybe a few other companies that use the Rev B JMicron controller on there low cost SSD's)
I agree the OCZ Vertex offers the best bang for low buck SSD today, and I am tempted to grab one. But a year from now, anyone that bought a current gen MLC SSD will be saying "I coulda had a V-8" if that TRIM technology does what it promises!!!
As people continue to try and push the envelope of storage performance in a variety of ways, and as 6gbps SATA becomes available, the performance of SSD's will only go up.
As always, I wanted to say thanks for the great article and keep them coming. It's the only way the rest of us can keep pace with what's happening out there in the world of performance storage.
Is there any benefit in using 2 SSD's in a Raid 0 configuration?
And: any differences between motherboard Intel Raid vs. a Raid controller card from Areca, for example. Also: can the "Trim" command work while in Raid mode? Probably not, I'm guessing...
Raid0 is really the holy grail for SSD's. The low risk of failure of SSD's which normally makes Raid0 with typical mechanical HD's more dangerous is very appealing. My personal storage-size goal is ~120-160gigs. Once they reach that size for under $300 I think I'm going to jump in. But I'm more likely to grab 2 60's or 2 80's and Raid0 them than get a single large SSD. The added performance will outweigh the higher power draw of 2 drives, and should make them extremely competitive with Intel's offerings (or whatever holds the crown at the time).
I figure it will be about a year or so until the prices are in that range, as 2 60gig Vertex drives will currently run you about $400 after rebate.
I can't wait to jump on that upgrade and will then put my current 250gig mechanical drive as the storage drive (I don't use a ton of space in general as I have a 320gig external backup).
The problem with doing that is if you want to move your drives to another system they won't work, so upgrading is a pain. You could image them I guess, but plugging one drive in is much simpler. I had an older XP install that made it through 3-4 different systems.
I would also question real world results, if you're going at 250MB/s or 500MB/s its not even going to be noticeable unless you are doing some massive video editing or some other huge file operations, and as Anand says, SSDs don't fill this role right now as they are super expensive per GB. So if you really are editing video a lot, you are going to need a hell of a lot more space than SSDs can offer you.
RAID is a universal standard so if you take two RAID0 drives out and move them to another computer with a RAID controller, it SHOULD just work if the original RAID was doing it correctly.
Yes I run a pair of MTRON 7500s in a raid 0 stripe for my OS and Gaming (wow). I don't recall numbers off the top of my head but tests were better on the raid 0 than a single drive configuration.
I just wanted to state how much I loved the combination of technical and real world information in this article.
What is the possibility of having different page sizes built into a drive? I.e. you could have a drive with many 1k page packages on one die, 2k on another, and most others 4k. Could that theoretically help? Could the controllers work with that (or would you need to combine multiple 1k's into a 4k transfer size)?
PS One note on page 3, the VelociRaptor and Intel in the first chart (responce time) are switched, however the text is correct.
the ugly truth is that an SSD won't let you do anything that you couldn't do without it, and due to its cost and small capacity, it's not a replacement drive, it's an extra drive: not less power consumption but more, not less noise but just the same. You just gain a bit of time when booting up and lauching apps... which I do about 1/week and 1/day, respectively. Assuming your system has enough RAM (and if it doesn't, buy RAM before buying an SSD !), you won't feel much difference once the apps are launched.
For the same cost, I'd rather buy a bigger screen.
It's urgent to wait for prices to come down. But I'm all for lots of people buying them now and help get the price down for us wiser buyers.
I've already decided my next system in a few months will have one, after you go through 5 hard drive failures (over several years) lets see how much your willing to pay to not have to put up with it anymore. If you use your PC for anything useful (work) then an SSD is a no brainer even at $1000/64GB IMO if the data security is there, speed is secondary for me.
When you already have the best screen, video card, memory, why not have the best drive? And your argument is pretty dumb, almost any upgrade won't let you do anything that you couldn't do without it, not just SSDs.
You get lower power due to the lower power use of the SSD and the fact that the other drive is not stressed with difficult access patterns (small random reads/writes). Remember that idle power of a SSD drive is very low
No, his comment was accurate for most users. Due to the small capacities and high cost these will be used as boot drives primarily with maybe a single heavily used program (say the current game or program you are playing/using), the rest will be on an additional drive. So while the power consumption of the SSD would be less than the old drive, the aggregate power usage of both (even when the larger storage drive is primarily at idle) will be higher than the single HD.
And I believe you meant to say traditional HD for idle power?
If all you were going to throw on the drive is the OS and a game, a 32GB drive should be plenty. The reason the 80GB and up range is important is so general consumers can load all their programs on it.
But yes, in consumer usage other than a laptop, some people who were previously using one drive for both boot and storage would likely need a mechanical HDD is addition to the SSD. OTOH, those who were using a Velociraptor (or RAID array) for boot and another drive for storage will see their power consumption decrease.
I would state that it is not a luxary product, it is a premium product. The price difference you pay WILL translate to faster performance (if you choose correctly). More RAM only helps upto a point.
Remember performance is based on a system of parts...
CPU
RAM
NORTHBRIDGE
GPU
SOUTHBRIDGE
I/O INTERFACE
HDD/SDD
Microsoft's Windows Experience Index has specific flaws, but the concept is sound... The system can only go a fast as the slowest component in the system (relative to the amount of time used by that component).
... there's also Supertalent's Ultradrive ME (MLC) and LE (SLC) and Photofast's G-Monster v3
At least the Supertalent drives are quite a bit cheaper with the same drive layout/controller than the Vertex drives and only differ in the firmware (which isn't bad either).
It's however possible at least with the Ultradrive ME currently to provoke a kinda timeout error after they've been fully filled once and then still beeing written on. I don't own a Vertex so I can't test that there but if it was a controller issue, it should pop up there sooner or later as well (if you take a look in their suppport forum some error reports seem very similar).
Intels have their 80% bug, Indilinx drives have their issues too it seems - let's hope that firmware can cure it!
If you get Newegg's specials, one of the codes is for the 30GB for $103 with a $20MIR, so $83 with shipping if the rebate comes through. At the size I would want (~120) the Super Talent undercuts the OCZ slightly.
Does anyone know if you can install the firmware of one maker to another maker's SSD? For example, assuming both the Ultradrive ME and the Vertex use the same Indilinx controller, and say Super Talent chose to release it with the firmware which optimizes for higher sequential speeds, would the user be able to choose the firmware which optimizes for less latency?
Yes, *but* SSD could also be read as "Solid State Drive" instead of "ess ess dee", in which case you would say "a SSD". I tend to read it as "ess ess dee", but Anand thinks of those letters as "Solid State Drive".
Potato, potato, tomato, tomato... let's call the whole thing off!
When reading acronyms you're supposed to think of them as the letters, i.e. when you see RAM, you think "ram" straight off not Random Access Memory. When you see "IBM" you think "eye bee emm" not International Business Machines etc etc. It would take ages to read an article if you had to stop and think out all the full wording of acronyms as you're reading them.
I'm going with the correction of "Anatomy of an SSD". Correct English fullstop.
By your comment, you suggest two different things, and that's really okay. That was my point: when you see "RAM" you probably thing "ram" as in the animal... not "Are A Em". You say "a RAM stick" not "an RAM stick". I'd guess most people think of SATA as "Ess A Tee A", but if you talk to most computer techs that are in the know, it's "say-te" so you would say "a SATA drive".
And you know, I'm sure plenty of people will agree with the correct way of saying SATA, and that's perfectly okay. English really is a very flexible thing - particularly in the tech world - and rarely is there an "always right" way of saying things. If Anand wants to say "a SSD" and others want to say "an SSD", I'm not going to try to declare one group or the other correct. They both are, depending on your viewpoint.
"I believe the world is neither black nor white, but only shades of gray."
I tested with the shipping firmware for this article (0122). I've been playing around with 1199 in the lab and will most likely have an update in a couple of weeks once I've done a thorough evaluation of it. By then I should also have the final version of the new Samsung drive and maybe even some other interesting things.
For now, I've got to get to work on the new Mac Pro and the updated Ion article :) I need a small break from SSDs por favor :)
Awww, don't you have some underlings to do your SSD-related will?
Would love to see an update, and would love to see Corsair's SSD drive tested as well (it's based on Samsung's last generation MLC controller, and doesn't seem to emphasize sequential like the Summit does).
Page 29: "Not all applications will launch faster than a VelociRaptor on a SSD, but let's not forget that the VelociRaptor is the world's fastest hard drive."
Really? What about the nice and speedy enterprise-level 15k SAS/SCSI drives everyone neglects to acknowledge? :)
I believe it refers to consumer drives. While SAS drives are beginning to be a possibility on the desktop with newer motherboards supporting them natively, the drives themselves are too expensive and too noisy for most consumers to actually want them.
hi would like to know what you pros think of the;
Golden Leopard ASAX-ZIF1.8-SSD? what would you add to it?
And how would you rate it against other ssd?
Specifications:
product description
ASAX-ZIF1.8-SSD is a high-performance design solid state drive based on the high-end micro-control IC with flash memory storage medium integrated advantaged of high speed,convenient ,aseismatic,energy-saving etc.
specification
Model
Size
Interface
Material
ASAX-ZIF1.8-SSD
1.8inch 70×54×6mm
ZIF
Aluminum-magnesium alloy appearance ,drawbench and colorful oxidation surface,elegant temperament
performance
read speed:80- 96Mbytes/second write speed:50- 60Mbytes/second
support ATA-7 V3 PIO/multi word/ultra DMA MODES
Low power TFBGA,4 channel of flash controller,masked ROM and data SRAM
SAMSUNG flash keeps the data faster on reliability and endurance
Dynamic and static wear-leveling prolong NAND FLASH and SSD for longer life
8/16 bit BCH ECC data error correction ability effectively guarantee the data read security.
Design consideration
Capacity
16G/32G/64G/128G/256G
Average access time
<0.25MS
operating temperature
0-85°
power consumption
DC Input Voltage(3.3V or 5 V ± 10%)Read and write:135mA/194Ma wait:70mA
shock
1500G
Application
the Laptop, pc, server,workstation,portable media player,digital collection apparatus and any computer equipment which need consecutive read and write speed and high reliability storage.
"The chart above shows how much faster these affordable MLC SSDs were than the fastest 3.5” hard drive in sequential transfers. But now look at random write performance:"
chart 1 on page 2 now shows sequential read but the paragraph is changed to mention random read ;)
page 21: As far as I know, this is THE one of THE only reviews
Some very surprising benchmark results for the ocz vertex, I thought the new firmware tanked sequential read speeds (to 80-90) based on the explanation beforehand, but not according to the actual graphs.
I have just replaced the hard drive in this 3 year old Dell Inspiron 9400 notebook computer with a new and very quick OCZ SSD, manually configured the partition with a 1024 offset, freshly installed the OS, freshly downloaded all of the latest and greatest drivers from Dell, and applied all currently available OS updates from Msft.
The problem is that when the machine resumes from Standby, it will /reliably/ (4 out of 4 attempts) produce a BSOD 0xF4 after the power button is pressed to resume the machine from standby.
Here's the sequence to recreate the problem:
0) Machine is booted normally into Windows, and log in to an account which has administrative privs. 1) Click on Start -> Shut Down -> Standby. 2) See display turn black, disk I/O light flashes then stops, then the power indicator light begins to flash on and off slowly. 3) Wait until the power light has made 2 slow flashes. 4) Press the power button. 5) See the Dell Bios splash screen, then disappear 6) Boom: See the BSOD 0xF4
The values reported after the STOP are: (0x00000003, 0x865b3020, 0x865b3194, 0x805d2954)
Note that I've been in contact with OCZ before about this SSD+computer, because the previous BSOD that was produced was 0x77. Their recommendation was to create the partition with an offset with a 64 interval, and to reflash the SSD with their modern firmware. This was done, the OS was reinstalled as described, and now I'm getting a different BSOD code. Another mention was a question whether the notebook computer uses a SATA2 controller (definitely compatible) or SATA1 (which may have troubles).
I've run Spinrite on the SSD, and there are lots of ECC errors being reported. I've been in contact with Spinrite, and they chalk this up to the SSD being chatty (which they like), but since SSD's are new and magnetic disks are common, they want to stay focussed on magnetic disks.
When the machine boots back up, the OS reports that a serious error has occurred, and asks that a problem report be submitted, which I do. Then an attractive but somewhat generic page is displayed with common causes (Aging or failing hard disks, large file transfers from secondary media to local hd, loss of power to a hard drive, hard disk intensive processes (eg: antivirus scanners), recently installed hardware that might have compatibility and performance problems)
Has anyone else encountered this kind of problem, and do you have any suggestions?
As a medical student I can appreciate a well researched and analytical article when I see it. This is by far the best computer hardware review I have ever read! Thank-you for your time and effort in producing what is clearly a thoroughly researched and detailed analysis.
Thank you for the lesson and helping me understand SSD drives. May I just ask for your advice...
For everyday use designing and generating prototypes for websites and running typical office s/w like word and excel for long documentations while listening to music or just having some video play in the background, then the occasional gaming of, say Star Craft 2 and Dead Space 3, and lets assume I do this on a 5 hours a day average for 365 days in a year, how long before I need to replace an OCZ Vertex/Summit SSD? And does format/reinstall help in prolonging the life of an SSD just as it does for my old hard drives (from a computer that's 6 years old and counting)? Or there's no stopping the SSD's death after reaching 10,000 times of being erased and rewritten on? I'm not one who keeps upgrading or buying new computer systems for every new thing that comes out, i'm more of a keeper and maintainer for as long as the system servers my needs... but when I make a purchase, I make sure it will be enough to last me another 6-12 years IF possible! Which is why I'm still considering SATA for my next purchase late this year or early next year (and I'm only buying a new PC just because I made a mistake buying a foxconn motherboard that can't support anything higher than XP, not even Vista... weird, anyway I found that out too late).
Also, would you know of a motherboard that supports SSD, Windows 8, Nvidea, third gen i5/i7, and up to 64GB ram?
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250 Comments
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KadensDad - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
How do these drives fail? I have heard that they will just suddenly die, no more writes or reads possible. What I would like to know is what happens when it dies? Do you lose all data? Just can't write anymore? How does the OS respond? Any early warnings? What about e.g. CRC? How does possibility of data corruption compare to traditional SSD? What about RAID? Since the drives are electrical, not mechanical, this reduces the number of failure vectors and environmental concerns (e.g., ambient temperature over lifetime of the drive). Won't SSDs therefore fail closer together in time in a RAID configuration? This reduces the window of opportunity for fixing an array and also decreases the applicability of RAID, however marginal.adsmith82 - Monday, September 14, 2009 - link
I need to run HDDErase on an X25-M. No matter what bootable CD or flash drive I create, HDDErase does not see either of my SATA hard drives. I already disabled AHCI in BIOS. Also, I am using version 3.3. I know that 4.0 does not work with the X25-M.Can someone help me troubleshoot this please? Thanks.
gallde - Thursday, June 11, 2009 - link
You point out that TRIM will only work on deletions, not on overwrites. But, couldn't a smart controller look at blocks that have a majority of invalid pages and "trim" them as well, recovering clean pages as a background process?forsunny - Thursday, August 13, 2009 - link
Why not just make the SSDs capable of individual page erases instead of blocks? Problem solved.Ron White - Sunday, August 31, 2014 - link
Erasing the NAND transistor in an SSD requires such a large jolt of voltage that it would affect surrounding transistors.lyeoh - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Good and informative article.Regarding the shill tshen83 who claims that Anandtech cost the drive manufacturers millions of dollars in sales.
If that is true, Anandtech has saved customers millions of dollars.
Anandtech should care more about their readers losses than drive manufacturer losses. If Anandtech was a site for drive manufacturers and their shills we wouldn't be reading it.
To me, if the SSD drive manufacturers lose money, it's their own fault for building crap that has higher write latencies than old fashioned drives with metal discs spinning at 7200RPM or slower. Not anandtech's.
I can get higher sequential reads and writes by using RAID on old fashioned drives. It is much harder to get lower latency. So Anandtech did the right thing for OCZ.
Lastly, there might be a way of making your windows machine stutter less even with a crap SSD. Note: I haven't tested the actual effect on an SSD because I don't have an SSD.
Basically by default when Windows accesses a file on NTFS, it will WRITE to the directory the time of the access. Yep, it writes when it opens files and directories (which are just special files). That might explain the stuttering people see. For a lot of things, Windows has to open files.
Warning! There are reasons why some people or programs would want to know the last access time of files. Me and my programs don't (and I doubt most people would).
If you are sure that's true for you (or are willing to take the risk) set NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate=1 as per:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc75856...">http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc75856...
poohbear - Sunday, April 26, 2009 - link
Brilliant article and very informative on these emerging technology. I wont be buying one anytime soon @ their prices, but good to know we'll FINALLY be replacing convential HDD which are the one component that have been pretty much the same since as far back as i can remember"SSDs have +5 armor immunity to random access latency"
rofl that's the best analogy i've seen on a hardware review site. is every comp geek a RPG geek @ heart?
Gootch - Sunday, April 19, 2009 - link
Great article. Realy made me understand what I need to look at before making the plunge. Mistakes and all, my compliments. As for value between the now seemingly drastically improved Vertex vs the X25-M, I compared prices between the two and per Gb, the Intell product for say an 80 Gb drive is Can $5.86/Gb, while the OCZ 60 Gb SSD is Can $6.81/Gb. Now that we are no longer comparing apples and oranges, I think we need to point out that the Intel product is not only faster and maintains it's performance edge better, but it is cheaper per Gb. At least in Canada. I have many OCZ products and I love the company and it's customer support. I can only hope that they will make their SSDs more competitive in the near future, because most consumers will pay the extra 70 bucks and go with the X25 when they pay attention to the numbers, both performance and price.Baffo - Saturday, April 11, 2009 - link
I could forsee a whole host of issues with encrypting SSD drives, not the least of which is essentially making the drive completely "used" outside of the drive slack space - which would be a temporary reprieve for the reasons discussed in this article. However, I could also see potential performance and lifetime issues since modern encryption uses streaming ciphers (e.g. an entire encrypted block - which may or may not conform to the physical block size will be changed for even one bit change within the block itself). Has anyone looked at the resultant effect on performance due to using encryption - it would be good to compare say Bitlocker, PGP, Checkpoint, and an open source encryption solution (Crypt or something like that?). This could actually become a real driver for moving to on-drive encryption where it would have the opportunity to optimize the encrpytion for the pro/cons of the SSD architecture.brandensilva - Friday, April 10, 2009 - link
Great article! I respect that OCZ made the necessary changes to make this drive work. I'd rather take a slightly slower drive if it meant consistent performance.If my hard drive started to stutter I'd flip out! I'm glad that they took the feedback and instead of selling faulty drives, that would ultimately hurt their brand, they decided to go back to the drawing board and iron out the kinks. I'm not expecting them to compare to Intel's 25-M per price or performance. They don't have nearly the cash or manufacturing capacity to compete with Intel but they do have that small business feel with receiving feedback and making improvements, which is important to customers.
Lets hope they continue to utilize that aspect of their business and further improve on their products and bring us some reliable SSD's in the future.
Hrel - Thursday, April 9, 2009 - link
although, I have some issues which I have put in an e-mail sent to Anand; can't wait for you response.Hrel - Thursday, April 9, 2009 - link
Instead of making me dinner can you send me that test system instead??? Please!!!Hrel - Thursday, April 9, 2009 - link
I was wondering what controller the OCZ solid Series is based on??? Will I experience hiccups with that drive or not? Is the point of my question.sfisher64 - Wednesday, April 8, 2009 - link
I just purchased a Dell Latitude E6400 with a 64GB Ultra Performance Solid State Drive. Does anyone know what type of drive this is, and where it fits in the spectrum described in this article?Baffo - Saturday, April 11, 2009 - link
The Dells use the Samsung drives (you should see this on the bottom if you pull it out). However, as much as I wish this was one of the newer controllers (I have a few of these at work as well), the testing cycles demanded by Dell probably mean these are the older controllers.marraco - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - link
This article is popular :)BLHealthy4life - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
Intel 9.1.1.1010 (Intel) Where are these drivers? I can only find version 1007 and not 1010....Thanks
BLHealthy4life - Sunday, April 12, 2009 - link
found it....Intel obviously keeps the X58 chipset drivers current for their own boards, just not other mfgs boards....
They installed fine on my R2E..
BL
irondukes - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Hi-- Do SLCs suffer from performance degradation, or are the controllers pretty agressive at erasing the data since they have far longer read-write cycles? Please help! Deciding between an X25E and X25Mmdavies - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
I'm reading this about a day late - got my Patriot PE256GS25SSDR 2.5" 256GB yesterday since I'm bad about destroying hard drives. this drive, in a word, was excruciating. I'll be replacing it with one of your recommended drives today.Thanks
sotoa - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Long time reader, first time post.I really liked the background story and appreciate how Anand delves deep into the the SSD's (as well as other products in other articles).
Thanks for looking out for the little guy!
Keep up the great work!
siliq - Wednesday, April 1, 2009 - link
With Anand's excellent article, it's clear that the sequential read/write thoroughput doesn't matter so much - all SSDs, even the notorious JMicron series, can do a good job on that metric. What is relevant to our daily use is the random write rate. Latencies and IOs/second are the most important metric in the realm of SSD.Based on that, I would suggest Anand (and other Tech reporters) to include a real world test of evaluating the Random Write performance for SSD. Because current real-world tests: booting windows, loading games, rendering 3D, etc. they focus on the random read. However, measuring how long it takes to install Windows, Microsoft Visual Studio, or a 4-GB PC Game would thoroughly test the Random Write / Latency performance. I think this is a good complementary of our current testing methodology
Sabresiberian - Tuesday, March 31, 2009 - link
Just wanted to add my thanks to Anand for this article in particular and for the quality work he has done over the years; I am so grateful for Anandtech's quality and information and the fact that it has been maintained!Sabresiberian - Tuesday, March 31, 2009 - link
Oops didn't proof, sorry about the misspell Anand!hongmingc - Saturday, March 28, 2009 - link
Anand, This is a great Article and a good story too.The OCZ story caught my attention that a quick firmware upgrade make a big improvement. From my understanding that SSD system designers try to trade off Space, Speed, and Durability (Also SSD :)) due the nature of NAND flash.
We can clearly see the trade off of Space and Speed when SSD is getting more full the slower the speed (This is due to out-of-place write to increase the write operation and a block reclaim routine). However, Speed is also sacrificed to achieve the Durability (by doing wear leveling). Remember SLC nand's life time is about 100K write, while MLC nand has only about 10K write. Without considering doing wear leveling to improve the life cycle of the SSD, the firmware can be much simple and easy which will improve the write operation speed quite a bit.
I echo you that the performance test should reflect user's daily usage which can be small size files write and may not be 80% full.
However, users may be more concern about the Durability, the life cycle of the SSD.
Is there such a test? How long will the black box OCZ Vertex live?
How long will the regular OCZ Vertex live? and How long will the X25 live?
antcasq - Sunday, April 5, 2009 - link
This article was excellent, explaining several issues regarding performance.It would be great if the next article abou ssd addresses durability and reliability.
My main concert is the swap partition (Linux) or virtual memory file (Windows). I found an post in another website saying that this is not an issue. Is it true? I find it hard to believe. Maybe in a real world test/scenario the problem will arise.
http://robert.penz.name/137/no-swap-partition-jour...">http://robert.penz.name/137/no-swap-partition-jour...
I hope AnandTech can take my concerns into consideration.
Best regards
stilz - Friday, March 27, 2009 - link
This is the first hardware review I've read from start to finish, and the time is well worth the information you've provided.Thank you for your honest, professional and knowledgeable work. Also kudos to OCZ, I'll definitely consider the Vertex while making purchases.
Bytales - Friday, March 27, 2009 - link
As i read the article, i'm thinking of ways to slow down the down the degrading process. Intel is gonna ship x-25m 320gb this year. If i buy this drive and use it as an OS drive, i will obviously won't need the whole 320GB. Say i would need only 40 to 50 GB. I can make a secure erase (if the drive isn't new), made a partition of 50GB, and leave the remaining space unpartitioned. Will that solve the problem in any way ?Another way to solve the problem, would be a method inside the OS. The OS could use a user controlled % of the RAM memory, as a cache for those small 4kb files. Since ram reads and writes are way faster, i think it will also help. Say you got 8GB ram, and use 2gb for this purpose, and then the OS would only have 6gb ram for its use, while 2gb is used for these smaller files. That would increase also the lifespan of the SSD. Can this be possible ?
Hellfire26 - Thursday, March 26, 2009 - link
In reference to SSD's, I have read a lot of articles and comments about improved firmware and operating system support. I hope manufacturers don't forget about the on-board RAID controller.From the articles and comments made by users around the web, who have tested SSD's in a Raid 0 configuration, I believe that two Intel X25-M SSD's in a RAID 0 configuration would more than saturate current on-board RAID controllers.
Intel is doing a die shrink of the NAND memory that is going into their SSD's come this fall. I would expect these new Intel SSD's to show faster read and write times. Other manufacturers will also find ways to increase the speed of their SSD's.
SSD's scale well in a RAID configuration. It would be a shame if the on-board RAID controller limited our throughput. The alternative would be very expensive add-in RAID cards.
FlaTEr1C - Wednesday, March 25, 2009 - link
Anand, once again you wrote an article that no one else could've written. This is why I'm reading this site since 2004 and will always do. Your articles and reviews are without exception unique and a must-read. Thank you for this thorough background, analysis and review of SSD.I was looking a long time for a solution to make my desktop experience faster and I think I'll order a 60GB Vertex. 200€(germany) is still a lot of money but it will be worth it.
Once again, great work Anand!
blackburried - Wednesday, March 25, 2009 - link
It's referred to as "discard" in the kernel functions.It works very well w/ SSD's that support TRIM, like fusion-io's drives.
Iger - Wednesday, March 25, 2009 - link
This is the best review I've read in a very long time.Thank you very much!
BailoutBenny - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 - link
Great in depth article on flash based SSDs. I'm waiting for PRAM though.orclordrh - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 - link
Very illuminating article, very well written and researched. It made me glad that I didn't pull the trigger on an SSD for my I7 machine and regret not buying OCZ memory! I'm interested in adding an SSD as the scratch disk for Photoshop CS4 to use. I don't really launch applications very often, say once a week on the weekly reboot and keep 6-8 apps open at all times. I have 12GB of memory for that. The benchmarks were very interesting, but what sort of activity does Photoshop scratch usage create? Large files or random writes? What type of SSD would be most cost effective here?An SSD does sound better than a SSD!
semo - Wednesday, March 25, 2009 - link
wait for ddr3 to enter the mainstream and buy loads of memory.use a ramdisk for your adobe scratch area. much faster than ssd and no wear to worry about (not that you would worry that much with modern ssds anyway).
http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/14/use-a-ramdisk-to-...">http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/14/use-a-ramdisk-to-...
there is also a paid for and more feature rich ramdisk out there. can't remember the name
strikeback03 - Wednesday, March 25, 2009 - link
I'll have to check when I get home, but I believe the recommended size for the scratch disk is upwards of 10GB. So would need a motherboard that supports a LOT of RAM to give enough to main memory plus a scratch disk.strikeback03 - Wednesday, March 25, 2009 - link
I was wondering the same thing. I'd guess it would be a lot of writing/erasing, so an SSD might not be the best from a longevity standpoint, but if your system is hitting the scratch disk often then the speed might make it worthwhile.mikepers - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 - link
Anand,I wanted to compliment you on what I think was an excellent article. This is the type of thing I really have always liked from Anandtech. The detailed background, the technical reasons for the issues and then a thorough review of the current state of things.
I just finished upgrading my desktop. The only remaining item I wanted to replace was the hard disk. I had been thinking about getting a Velociraptor but instead I just ordered a 60GB Vertex from Newegg.
Thanks again for all the work.
Mike P.
ameatypie - Monday, March 23, 2009 - link
That sure was a lot to take in! Fantastic article though, it has really opened my eyes to the possibilities that Solid State Drives provide. Probably wont be buying one in the immediate future given the so-called depression and such things, but i will certainly keep up with SSD progress.Thanks again for your fantastic articles - im sure im not the only one who really appreciates them :)
coopchennick - Monday, March 23, 2009 - link
Hey Anand, I just finished reading through this whole article and I'm very impressed with the thoroughness and how informative it was.You just acquired a new regular reader.
zdzichu - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
Very nice and thorough article. I only lack more current status of TRIM command support in current operating systems. For example, Linux supports it since last year:http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_28#head-a1a9591...">http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_28#h...a9591f48...
Sinned - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
Outstanding article that really helped me understand SSD drives. I wonder how much of an impact the new SATA III standard will have on SSD drives? I believe we are still at the beginning stage for SSD drives and your article shows that much more work needs to be done. My respect for OCZ and how they responded in a positive and productive way should be a model for the rest of the SSD makers. Thank you again for such a concise article.Respectfully,
Sinned
529th - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
The first thing I thought of was Democracy. Don't know why. Maybe it was because a company listened to our common goal of performance. Thank you OCZ for listening, I'm sure it will pay off!!!araczynski - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
very nice read. the 4/512 issue seems a rather stupid design decision, or perhaps more likely a stupid problem to find this 4/512 solution as 'acceptable'.although a great marketing choice, built in automatic life expectancy reduction.
sounds like the manufacturers want the hard drives to become a disposable medium like styrofoam cups.
perhaps when they narrow the disparity down to 4/16, i might consider buying an ssd. that, or when they beat the 'old school' physical platters in price.
until then, get back to the drawing board and stop crapping out these half arsed 'should be good enough' solutions.
IntelUser2000 - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
araczynski: The 4/512 isn't done by accident. It's done to lower prices. The flash technology used in SSDs are meant to replace platter HDDs in the future. There's no way of doing that without cost reductions like these. Even with that the SSDs still cost several times more per storage space.araczynski - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 - link
i understand that, but i don't remember original hard drives being released and being slower than the floppy drives they were replacing.this is part of the 'release beta' products mentality and make the consumer pay for further development.
the 5.25" floppy was better than the huge floppy in all respects when it was released. the 3.5" floppy was better than the 5.25" floppy when it was released. the usb flash drives were better than the 3.5" floppies when they were released.
i just hate the way this is being played out at the consumer's expense.
hellcats - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
Anand,What a great article. I usually have to skip forwards when things bog down, but they never did with this long, but very informative article. Your focus on what matters to users is why I always check anandtech first thing every morning.
juraj - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
I'm curious what capacity is the OCZ Vertex drive reviewed. Is it an 120 / 250g drive or supposedly slower 30 / 60g one?Symbolics - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
The method for generating "used" drives is flawed. For creating a true used drive, the spare blocks must be filled as well. Since this was not done, the results are biased towards the Intel drives with their generous amount of spare blocks that were *not* exhausted when producing the used state. An additional bias is introduced by the reduction of the IOmeter write test to 8 GB only. Perhaps there are enough spare blocks on the Intel drives so that these 8 GB can be written to "fresh" blocks without the need for (time-consuming) erase operations.Apart from these concerns, I enjoyed reading the article.
unknownError - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
I also just created an account to post, very nice article!Lots of good well thought out information, I'm so tired of synthetic benchmarks glad someone goes through the trouble to bench these things right (and appears to have the education to really understand them). Whats with the grammar police though? geez...
Erickffd - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Also created an account just to post this comment.Really impressive and well done article ! Will stay tune for further developments and reviews. Thank you so much :)
Also... very impressed by OCZ's respond and commitment upon end users needs and product quality assurance (unfortunately not so commun by large this days among other companies). Certanly will buy from them my next SSDs to reward and support their healty policy.
Be well ! ;)
Gasaraki88 - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
This truly was a GREAT article. I enjoyed reading it and was very informative. Thank you so much. That's why Anandtech is the best site out there.davidlants - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
This is one of the best tech articles I have ever read, I created an account just to post this comment. I've been a fan of Anandtech for years and articles like this (and the RV700 article from a while back) show the truly unique perspective and access that Anand has that simply no other tech site can match. GREAT WORK!!!Zak - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
I just got the Apex. I'd probably cough up more dough for the Vertex after reading this. However, I've run it for two days as my system disk in MacPro and haven't noticed any issues, it's really fast. But I guess I'll get Vertex for my Windows 7 build.Z.
Nemokrad - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
What I find intriguing about this article is that these smaller manufacturers do not do real world internal testing for these things. They should not need 3rd parties like you to figure this shit out for them. Maybe now OCZ will learn what they need to do for the future.JonasR - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Thanks for an excellent article. I have one question does anyone know which controller is beeing used in the new Patriot 256GB V.3 SSD?
tgwgordon - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Anyone know if the Vertex Anand used had 32M or 64M cache?Dennis Travis - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Excellent and informative article as always Anand. Thanks so much for posting the truth!!IsLNdbOi - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Can't remember what page it was, but you showed some charts on the performance of SSDs at their lowest possible performance levels.At their lowest possible performance levels are they still faster than the 300GB Raptor?
Edgemeal - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
It's too bad Windows and applications don't let you select where all the data that needs to be updated and saved to is stored. If that was an option a SSD could be used to only load data (EXE files and support files) and a HDD could be used to store files that are updated frequently, like a web browser for example, their constantly caching files, from the sound of this article that would kill the performance of a SSD in no time.Great article, I'll stick to HDDs for now.
Luddite - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
So even with the TRIM command, when working with large files, say, in photoshop and saving multiple layers, the performance will stil drop off?proviewIT - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
I bought a Vertex 120GB and it is NOT working on my Nvidia chipsets motherboard. Anyone met the same problem? I tried intel chipsets motherboard and seems ok.I used HDtach to test the read/write performance 4 days ago, wow, it was amazing. 160MB/s in write. But today I felt it slower and used HDtach to test again, it downs to single digit MB per second. Can I recover it or I need to return it?
kmmatney - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Based on the results and price, I would say that the OCZ Vertex deserves a Editor's choice of some sort (Gold, Silver)...Tattered87 - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
While I must admit I skipped over some of the more technical bits where SSD was explained in detail, I read the summaries and I've gotta admit this article was extremely helpful. I've been wanting to get one of these for a long time now but they've seemed too infantile in technological terms to put such a hefty investment in, until now.After reading about OCZ's response to you and how they've stepped it up and are willing to cut unimportant statistics in favor of lower latencies, I actually decided to purchase one myself. Figured I might as well show my appreciation to OCZ by grabbing up a 60GB SSD, not to mention it looks like it's by far the best purchase I can make SSD-wise for $200.
Thanks for the awesome article, was a fun read, that's for sure.
bsoft16384 - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Anand, I don't want to sound too negative in my comments. While I wouldn't call them unusable, there's no doubt that the random write performance of the JMicron SSDs sucks. I'm glad that you're actually running random I/O tests when so many other websites just run HDTune and call it a day.That X25-M for $340 is looking mighty tempting, though.
MrSpadge - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Hi,first: great article, thanks to Anand and OCZ!
Something crossed my mind when I saw the firmware-based trade-off between random writes and sequential transfer rates: couldn't that be adjusted dynamically to get the best of both worlds? Default to the current behaviour but switch into something resembling te old one when extensive sequential transfers are detected?
Of course this neccesiates that the processor would be able to handle additional load and that the firmware changes don't involve permanent changes in the organization of the data.
Maybe the OCZ-Team already thought about this and maybe nobody's going to read this post, buried deep within the comments..
MrS
Per Hansson - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Great work on the review AnandI really enjoyed reading it and learning from it
Will there be any tests of the old timers like Mtron etc?
tomoyo - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
That was kind of strange to me too. But I assume Anand really means the desktop market, not the server storage/business market. Since it's highly doubtful that the general consumer will spend many times as much money for 15k SAS drives.Gary Key - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
The intent was based it being the fastest for a consumer based desktop drive, the text has been updated to reflect that fact.tomoyo - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
I've always been someone who wants real clarify and truth to the information on the internet. That's a problem because probably 90% of things are not. But Anand is one man I feel a lot of trust for because of great and complete articles such as this. This is truly the first time that I feel like I really understand what goes into ssd performance and why it can be good or bad. Thank you so much for being the most inciteful voice in the hardware community. And keep fighting those damn manufacturers who are scared of the facts getting in the way of their 200MB/s marketing bs.ryedizzel - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Anand,I just wanted to thank you for an amazing article. I am a very picky buyer and technology critic, so I always come to your site for the ‘real’ story on things. In fact for the amount of time, research, and (useful) testing methodologies you invest, I almost feel guilty receiving this information for free. Especially since your findings benefit the industry as a whole since it causes manufacturer’s to fix/improve their products (well at least the smart ones do). The i7 motherboard roundup was another great example of this. Seriously, if you have a place for donations I would send you $50 in a heartbeat. I know it’s not much but if others did the same it would add up to a decent token of appreciation.
Oh and please don’t take people’s grammar or nitpicky corrections the wrong way. Yes it can be annoying, but in the end it does help the article become closer to perfect since others catch little things overlooked by human error. In the end we are all grateful for these articles, otherwise we wouldn’t be here reading them!
bsoft16384 - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
You know, the JMicron SSDs really aren't so bad. Yes, you'd have to be crazy to spend $400 on one when there are better options like the X25-M (or the new Vertex series for that matter).But I paid $65 for my 30GiB OCZ "Core" SSD. Yeah, random writes are piss slow. I knew this. The drive replaced the 5400.5 that came with my EEE PC.
I'm not going to be doing any 'extensive multitasking' on my EEE. I'm not running a file server, I certainly don't have antivirus in the background, and I don't spend all day installing new apps.
I'm running 7. Compared with the 5400.5, the system boots faster, Chrome loads faster, but Windows updates take longer. That's a trade-off I'm willing to deal with, considering that I get less noise and more battery life in return.
I can tell you this - the JMicron SSDs beat the pants off of the PCIe MLC SSDs that ship with many netbooks.
So, yeah, I guess this is a product that's "unfit for market". But it's perfect for some of us. If I wanted a boot drive for a Linux media/backup server (along with HDDs for storage), I could see choosing a $50 SSD over a $50 HDD.
It's all about your needs. No one is pretending that JMicron SSDs are fast, at least not at writing. But if your usage is mostly read-centric (or "nothing-centric", as is frequently the case on netbooks), and your chief criteria are low power and low price, the JMicron SSDs do quite well.
petersterncan - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Anand,That was an awesome article... and good for you to give OCZ to do the right thing... and they did!
Kudos also to OCZ for actually listening to feedback and doing something about it.
Adul - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Good work Anand :)SSDMaster - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
The stuttering problem with SSD's can be fixed with diskpart. Go do some research before you post an article this massive and convoluted.goinginstyle - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
No it does not, it will help if the partition is properly aligned but it is not a cure, neither is the rest of the voodoo magic being spouted on the OCZ forums. They help, but do not cure the stuttering problem with the JMicron based drives. I just love the fact that OCZ wants to sell you a drive (Core series) that does not work properly, have you purchase third party software, and then hack the OS in order to improve the performance of the product. Glad to see it fixed with the Vertex and Summit drives though, but it will take a long time before I even think about using an OCZ product again. I was hoping to see the new ADATA and SuperTalent drives in this article, maybe those are coming in the next segment he mentioned.SSDMaster - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Yes, it does.I have a Core series 60GB OCZ drive. I bought it right before Newegg increased the price on the drives. The stuttering was horrible, and worthless even as a secondary drive if it was formatted with XP. Also, after using Diskpart and aligning the drive I could not install XP on the drive and have it bootable.. Which sucked.
But there's ways around that, and guess what, I have a stutter free flash drive for cheap that gets very good performance numbers, and boots Server 2008 in under 10 seconds.
bsoft16384 - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
OCZ's product works fine. You may not like the performance, but it's certainly not unusable.The $65 I paid for my 30GiB OCZ "Solid" SSD is about what you'd pay for a USB flash drive. The disk I have has a USB interface, which is very convenient, plus it's plenty fast enough for my EEE PC.
I'm glad that Anand has done these reviews. People need to understand what they're getting into when they by a JMicron SSD. If you don't expect much, you won't be disappointed.
Arguably for a normal notebook/desktop you should buy a normal hard drive if your budget is under $100. But the JMicron SSDs do a good job in netbooks (which, again, aren't too fast to begin with) at a very low price.
I have aligned my partitions and disabled swap on my Windows 7 install (on my EEE). I also have 2GB of memory in my EEE. I haven't done any fancy tweaking on the OS.
Compared with the EEE 900A that I had briefly (PCIe SSD), my EEE 900HA is dramatically faster. You can't run XP or Vista on PCIe SSDs unless you have a lot of patience. You *can* run it on a JMicron SSD.
I honestly don't notice any stuttering. I don't run antivirus and I don't multitask much on this machine. If I demanded from my EEE what I demand from my desktop (Q9300 + 8GB + WD6400AAKS), I know that the SSD would choke up. But I'm not going to do that on a 1.6GHz single-core Atom anyway.
So, yeah, OK. I guess I think that trashing JMicron SSDs is a little like trashing USB flash drives for being slow. Paying $300 for a UFD would be stupid, as is paying $300 for a JMicron SSD. But in the sub-$100 category, you don't expect much.
When better SSDs drop below $100, maybe I'll upgrade. Until then, I'm enjoying 5 hours of battery life on my 900HA.
tomoyo - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Well I think it's unusable for my needs if I'm running it as an operating system drive. I place a giant important on the latency of the drive at that point and it certainly includes random writes. Which is why I would never ever buy an ssd that's majorly below the Intel write performance. It's not worth the price premium or loss of storage size compared to the standard hard drive.Bikerskummm - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Fantastic article Anand!Just a few thoughts:
I have had some trouble replicating some of the Samsung SLC results...
Despite filling the drive up and emulating a well used drive as described in the article I cannot get my Sammy drive's performance to degrade as much as you managed to especially regarding random write performance...
Now my system used for testing is a socket 775 (qx9650) and I was testing on ICH9R and WINXP (SP3) but still I would expect to see similar figures ...
I do not have an X58 system to test on at the moment but I would be very interested if The Sammy SLC drives were shown to degrade faster / perform worse with a X58 / ICH10R / Vista x64 (SP1?) setup...
siberx - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
This is, very likely, the best article I have ever read, period. Online, in magazines, about any subject... this was an absolutely fantastic read. Suddenly, all smoke surrounding SSDs has cleared and the truth shines through in editorial brilliance. It's great to see that at least some computer news sites out there can still cut through the crap and get to the heart of the issue. My already high opinion of AnandTech has risen even further.Thank you for taking the immense time it must have taken to compile and assemble all this information - this article is now a must-read for *anybody* considering purchasing an SSD, and it's just about all the background you could need in one place.
In addition to all the extremely useful general SSD information contained within, the detailing of the issues with the JMicron controllers as well as OCZ's efforts to address the concerns to produce the best product possible (despite the reduced marketability to the uninformed) is reassuring and comforting in a world where tech companies seem more concerned with how much they can deceive their customers instead of producing quality products.
In short, the article is a win on all fronts, thank you greatly for posting it. When I purchase my first SSD (which I'm considering doing reasonably soon) this article, its information and suggestions, and OCZs actions to resolve the issues with its drives will definitely be at the forefront of my mind.
jkua - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
I have to say, I really appreciate the effort and throughness with which you have covered the state of the SSD market today. As an engineer and scientist, I applaud your methods in tracking down and reporting the major issues with SSDs. As a consumer, I really appreciate the timeliness of this article as I was just thinking of putting an SSD in a netbook for a robotics application where mechanical drives are not ideal.Cheers!
jkua - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
That said, one thing I would have like to have seen is some numbers on power consumption for these drives compared to average mechanical desktop and laptop drives.aamsel - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Anyone have a link to the Intel HDD ERASE program that Anand referred to?HolyFire - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html">http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html (includes HDD erase 3.1)http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.sht...">http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.sht... (version 4.0)
AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
AWESOME ARTICLE.The huge difference in read/write flash performance looks a lot like this article: http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=257...">http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=257...
wind glider - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Thanks for the orgasmic review.wicko - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Had a really good read here, thanks for the history and info, Anand. The only thing I don't understand is what the importance of random write is? What kind of task would benefit from high random write speeds (maybe copying many files at once)? I'm tempted to pick up a vertex drive but it depends on whether or not random write will be important for me. But the price... whoa, pretty damn expensive here in Canada.. http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=36023&a...">http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?...X120G&am... - $625 for a 120GB!!! I kind of want 2, for RAID0, I have a lot of games installed (steam folder alone is 100GB lol). Might even have to raid 3 of em.. but not for $1800 lol.strikeback03 - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
As mentioned in the article, the OS in general makes lots of random writes. Send an IM, it writes to a log. Load a website, it caches some images.AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
>I'm tempted to pick up a vertex drive but it depends on>whether or not random write will be important for me.
Keep in mind, its random write is twice as fast as mechanical HDs.
>But the price...
It's only $110USD/32GB.
OCedHrt - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Excellent article. One of the best I've seen.cliffa3 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I can tell a ton of work went into that, and all the history/details are greatly appreciated. I've been checking every week or so throughout February to see if it had been posted, but well worth the wait. As great as SSDs are, I can understand you not wanting to be near one for a while (-: Thanks for all the hard work...especially from the consumer standpoint. And kudos to OCZ for stepping up the way they did...that's (unfortunately) unheard of. Glad to see your no-compromise / report the facts no matter what attitude winning for the consumer. I'm glad at least one manufacturer was able to see (eventually) your intent wasn't to create a commotion, but to just plainly say what needed to be said.sngbrdb - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
An extremely (as always) informative article; comprehensive and no angle missed. Good stuff!From an enthusiast's perspective, OCZ gained 10 levels of trust as a result of Ryan Peterson's response and handling of the Vertex' firmware. Ryan accepted the harsh reality expressed to him from an outside reviewer, risked marketability to rely on Anand's expertise (Anand is *absolutely* correct that 230MB/s is worthless if it comes with stuttering write latency), and resolved the problem in record time.
This is the rare kind of responsiveness and attitude that translate directly into sales (I'm on my way to price the Vertex now).
tshen83 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
BUT, still based on Windows Vista.I am going to drill this into reviewer's head -> NTFS isn't designed for SSDs.
There are three problems for properly reviewing SSDs today:
FileSystem, RAID controller, and SSD controller.
Each of them can compensate for the SSDs, the question is which one SHOULD be responsible for optimizing random IOs.
It is very clear that Intel's SSDs have implemented all the nitty gritty stuff like copy on write onto the SSD controller itself. So the OS or FileSystem shouldn't be responsible for performance degradation, however the same cannot be said for other SSDs.
I am sure results would be difference if this were conducted on Solaris/OpenSolaris ZFS with Adaptec 5405(IOP348 based RAID card). Not to pump Solaris and ZFS, but it is the primary reason why IBM wants to buy SUN, because it is the only File System on the market that can properly operate SSDs and to do so without RAID controllers.
If Anand really wants to stick to windows still, I think benchmarking on Windows 7 Beta would be slightly better option that Vista. Windows had made a lot of optimizations for rotational based hard disks that it actually makes SSD perform worse.
The Vertex random write 4K IOPS benchmark doesn't look right at 2.6MB/sec, that is hardly 650 IOs. It should be much higher. It could be the ICH10R controller though.
hyc - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I'd expect IBM's JFS to be pretty efficient on an SSD as well. Anything that appends and avoids overwriting existing sectors will perform better here.Stepping back a bit, I still have a perfectly usable Dothan-based laptop with IDE. Any chance of getting an in-depth review on recent Transcend 128GB IDE SSDs? My new laptop is running fine with a G.Skill Titan 256GB SSD, but when I fire up the older laptop it's unbearable, even with that 7200rpm Hitachi 100GB drive inside.
By the way, I paid under $2/GB for the 256GB G.Skill Titan; for the work I do with it on Linux it performs fine most of the time. (Just make sure to maximize use of the FS cache.) I don't see the value proposition for the OCZ Vertex or Summit.
tshen83 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
The random write 4K benchmark isn't right for the Vertex and other SSDs because of the test procedure:"The write test was performed over an 8GB range on the drive, while the read test was performed across the whole drive."
It partially disables any write optimization algorithms on the Vertex. Intel wasn't affected as much.
Anand, your first article pumping X25-M literally screwed Samsung's SSD manufacturers big time: they lost hundreds of millions of dollars because of your blatant pumping. Yes the random write was a big problem, but so was testing it on a Windows OS with NTFS and integrated SATA controller like ICH9/10 with no ram cache and obviously lack of IO optimizations for SSDs.
Please redo the review with a proper OS, ie Windows 7 beta or OpenSolaris.
Proteusza - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Yeah, who in their right mind uses Windows and integrated SATA controllers? Oh wait, nearly everyone.Since its pretty obvious that you either work for Samsung or one of their partners, I think its laughable that you think this cost them hundreds of millions in sales. How big is the SSD market exactly, and how many potential buyers visit this site? Not enough to cause such an impact if you ask me.
And the fact remains - had you guys done what OCZ did, and optimized for real world use even if it cost you e-peen in the way of benchmarks, you would have been fine. Its only because you thought you could cheat and swindle consumers that you guys got a bad rep from Anand. Run an honest business, and your customers will thank you. I know that, if I ever considered an SSD, I would either buy Intel or an OCZ Vertex, nothing else. You know why? because they do what they say on the tin. You complain that the X25-M got a glowing review? Make a product as good as it and then Anand will sing your praises, but dont be upset when he tells it like it is.
tshen83 - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Nearly everyone uses Windows and integrated SATA controllers. It still does not negate the fact that neither were optimized for SSD random IO patterns.No, I don't work for Samsung or its partners. It didn't cost them hundreds of millions in sales, but it did cost them hundreds of millions in inventory markdowns. Just look at the free falling of price of JMicron and original Samsung based SSDs in the past few months, and multiply by the inventory, that's the loss I was mentioning.
I am not saying that Intel X25-M is a bad drive. It is good. but there is no reason to use crippled OS File Systems and crippled SATA controller to show off the X25-M's internal copy on write features. When windows 7 comes out of beta(soon), it will be the OS the majority of people will use, and I am just looking forward 6 months when SSD adoption rate will improve more. As to Solaris ZFS, you don't need it if you aren't mentally capable of understanding its elegance.(Most people won't and it is ok)
strikeback03 - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
If they had also tested with Solaris/ZFS and reported that the drives worked well there, but 99.x% of users can't take advantage of that, would you have been happier? They may work perfectly well in that scenario, but it is meaningless to most users. Working properly in Vista and OSX is currently a requirement for selling to general consumers. Windows 7 was not even available in beta at the time of the last test, I would expect they will test with it once it launches but for now with the OS/FS they are likely to use most of the available SSDs fail.Also, your economic analysis assumes they would have been able to sell all their inventory at the inflated prices they wanted to. Whether or not they received a negative review from sites like Anandtech, word would have gotten out from early adopters that they had problems. Also, they would have moved fewer units at those prices.
tshen83 - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
I could really careless if they did review SSD ZFS. I am using it right now and it kicks ass. Next Version of OSX will have ZFS so I guess Apple agrees that ZFS is the way to go here.Vista is one of the crappiest OS Microsoft put out in recent memory, maybe besides the Windows ME release. Just look at Vista adoption rates, and you will see why.
You still don't understand my argument. My argument was that either File System, or RAID controller or SSD controller must implement copy on write.(basically if you have to erase a block to write to it, you are screwed) ZFS implements that in the file system. Adaptec 5 series or any Intel IOP RAID cards also help SSD performance greatly. If you don't use those two, then the SSD controller must implement it(X25-M is in this category.) You only need one of the three to properly handle SSDs to get greatly improved performance. Anandtech's review obviously skips file system optimization by picking Vista, and RAID controller optimization by picking ICH10R. What is left is the poor SSD controller that needs to virtualize the logical space, thus making the review entirely biased toward the X25-M for a good reason.
It is sad that this is supposedly a review for the Vertex units that OCZ sent to Anand, but it seems to me that it just turned out to be another article defending the X25-M. I know X25-M is a good SSD, but it does not explain why Anand should cripple the OS, Controller so much to do it and then test the SSDs with strange IO queue depth of 3 and during the random write IOPS test, tried to cap the write space to a 8GB confinement. Those settings greatly exaggerate X25-M's internal implementation advantages.
My economic analysis was based on SSD spot price published on dramexchange.com. Since the release of X25-M's review by Anandtech, all Samsung/JMicron MLC drives(Core, Core v2, Supertalent, etc) have been reduced to spot price of 2 dollars per GB to clear the inventories from the typical 4-5 dollars per GB that they used to command. The inventory markdown can be as high as 200+ dollar per drive and then you multiply that by the inventory that major vendors had, giving you hundreds of millions of dollars of aggregate damage sustained by the group of Samsung/JMicron partners.
strikeback03 - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
I understand your point, but I am not sure you understand the point I (and others) are trying to make. The SSD makers (should) know their market. As they seem to be marketing these SSDs to consumers, they should know that means the vast majority are on Vista or OSX, so the OS won't be optimized for SSDs. It also means the majority will be using integrated disk controllers. Therefore, in choosing a SSD controller which does not operate properly given those restrictions, they chose poorly. The testing here at Anandtech shows that regardless of how the drives might perform in ideal circumstances, they have noticeable issues when used the way most users would use them, which is really all those users care about.tshen83 - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
In the history of computing, it was always the case that software compensated for the new hardware, not the other way around. When new hardware comes out that obsoletes current generation of software, new software will be written to take advantage of the new hardware.Think of it this way: you always write newer version of drivers to drive the newest GPUs. When is the last time newer GPUs work with older drivers?
Nobody should be designing hardware now that makes DOS run fast right? All file systems (except ZFS and soon BTRFS) are obsolete now for SSDs, so we write new file systems. I am not sure Intel X25-M's approach of virtualizing flash to the likings of NTFS and EXT3 is the correct one. It is simply a bridge to get to the next solution.
SSD makers right now are making a serious mistake pushing SSDs down consumer's throats during an economic crisis. They should have focused on the enterprise market, targeting DB servers. But in that space, Intel X25-E sits alone without competition. (Supertalent UltraDrive LEs should be within 25% of X25-E by my estimation)
pmonti80 - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Now I understand what you meant in the beginning. But still I don't agree with you, the system reviewed is the one 99% of SSD buyers will use(integrated mobo controller + NTFS). So, why optimize the benchmark to show the bad drives in a good light?About the Vertex, I don't understand what you are complaining about. After reading this article most people got the idea that Vertex is a good drive and at half Intel's price (I know, I searched on google for comments about this article).
tshen83 - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Professional people only look at two SSD benchmarks: random read IOPS at 4k and random write IOPS at 4k(Maybe 8K too for native DB pages).The Vertex random write IOPS at 4K size is abysmal. 2.4MB/sec at 4K means it only does 600ish random write IOPs. Something was wrong, and Vista/ICH10R didn't help. The 8GB/sec write boundary Anand imposed on the random write IOPS test is fishy. So is the artificial io queue depth = 3.
The vertex random write IOPS should be better. The random read IOPS also should be slightly better. I have seen OCZ's own benchmark placing the Vertex very close to Intel X25-M at random read/ write IOPS tests.
I personally think that if you use NTFS, just ignore the SSDs for now until Windows 7 RTM. You can't hurt waiting for SSD price to drop some more in the next 6 months. Same thing for Linux, although I would argue that Linux is even in a worse position for SSDs right now than windows 7. EXT3/EXT4/JFS/XFS/REISERFS all suck on SSDs.
gss4w - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Anandtech should adopt the same comment system as Dailytech so that comments that don't make any sense can be rated down. Who would want to read a review of something using a beta OS, or worse an OS that is only used on servers? I think it would be interesting to see if Windows 7 beta offered any improvements, but that should not be the focus of the review.7Enigma - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Here's another vote for the Dailytech comments section. The ability to rate up down, but more importantly HIDE the comments below a threshold would make for much more enjoyable reading.curtisfong - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Why should Anand test with Windows 7b or *nix? What is the majority OS?Kudos to Anand for testing real world performance on an OS that most use, and to Intel for tuning their drives for it. I'm happy the other manufacturers are losing business..maybe they will also tune their drives for real world performance and not synthetic benchmarks.
To the poster above: do you work for OCZ or Samsung?
Glenn - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
tshen83 "A very thorough review by tshen83, an hour agoBUT, still based on Windows Vista.
"
As long as these drives are marketed toward said OS, why would you not use it? Most of us wouldn't recognize Solaris if we saw it! And I believe you seriously overestimate yourself if your gonna drill anything into Anands head! You might need your own site, huh?
Great Job Anand! Don't forget to remind these CEO's that they also need to provide any software needed to configure and optimize these drives to work properly. ie go to OCZ Forums and try to figure out how to align, optimize and keep your drive running like it's supposed to, in less than 4 hours of reading! It would be nice if these companies would do their own beta testing and not rely on early adopters to do it for them!
Roland00 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
It was a joy to read all 31 pagesMagicPants - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Anand it would be really helpful to have a list of SSD companies blacklisting you so I know which ones to avoid. In general it would be nice to know who doesn't provide review samples to reputable sites.Jamor - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
The best tech article I've ever read, and I've read a few.haze4peace - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Wow, excellent article and so much useful information in an easy to understand way. I have just recently been paying attention to SSDs and thanks to this article I am armed with the information to make the correct choice for my needs. Thanks AnandTech, its the deep and honest articles like these that keep me coming back for more.Alseki - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I just registered then simply to say, great article. Really informative and enjoyable to read.alexsch8 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Anand,Thank you for this article, very informative.
Looking at the example you are giving with your self-manufactured SSD drive: If I save the DOC I use up a page. Based on what you are saying, if I make a change to that DOC, it would then be saved in the next page instead of overwriting the existing page? If that is true, then the File Allocation system (FAT or MFT) itself would contribute quite a bit to the 'filling up of pages' phenomena. Could you elaborate if the proposed file system for SSD addresses this?
Ytterbium - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Fantastic article, shame that the vendors blacklisted you for telling the truth and OCZ rock for working so hard to address issues.I'll be ordering my Intel SSD soon, I'll defintly consider the Summit when it comes out for my encoding rig as there sequental writes matter to me.
mindless1 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Great even, but I've have to disagree with the significance of the passage that suggested the Indilinx controller makes data loss as bad on those SSD as on a conventional hard drive.The primary cause of data loss is mechanical or component failure, not power loss. If we want to consider power loss, it's not just the drive which is prone to lose data, the entire system memory suffers far more data loss than that.
Further, a sufficiently sized supercapacitor should keep the drive operating for a period of time beyond when the rest of the system would be operational, it could be sufficient for the controller to finish writing to flash all received data (or just use an UPS, that's what they're for?).
Second, I can't believe that OCZ only tests designs with HDTach and Atto, I think it more likely they knew of the problem but didn't expect anyone to find it so quickly, and felt the higher sequential speeds made it more marketable. This makes me feel that manufacturers, then online sellers should differentiate their drives with a standardized random read/write score.
What would be really nice is if the Indilinx based SSDs had an application available, similar to a HDD acoustic management bit changing app, that lets the owner set their own preference for IO versus sequential read performance.
gomakeit - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
This is by far the BEST article on SSD I've ever read! Great job anand and yes I read every single word of it!MagicPants - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Don't they ever try using their own devices? One second of latency should slap any user in the face. It should be very easy for a manufacturer to build a system with their new technology put it in front of people and see what happens, but apparently they're not doing this.They wait for reviewers to do the work for them and then get upset when they find a problem.
What the manufacturers should be taking away from this article is:
1) Try your competitor's products
2) Try your own products
3) Try them in real life as opposed to synthetic tests
4) Compare everything you've tried and market the performance that matters
7Enigma - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
But that would make sense....and we know marketing rarely does.paulinus - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
That art is great. Finally someone done ssd test's right, and said loud what we, customers, can get for that hefty pricetags.I've supposed that only choices are intel and new ocz's. Now I know, and big kudos for that.
Just need a bit more $$ for x25-m, it'll be ideal for heavy workstation use, and biggest vertex'll replace wd black in my aging 6910p :)
punjabiplaya - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Great info. I'm looking to get an SSD but was put off by all these setbacks. Why should I put away my HDDS and get something a million times more expensive that stutters?This article is why I visit AT first.
Hellfire26 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Anand, when you filled up the drives to simulate a full drive, did you also write to the extended area that is reserved? If you didn't, wouldn't the Intel SLC drive (as an example) not show as much of a performance drop, versus the MLC drive? As you stated, Intel has reserved more flash memory on the SLC drive, above the stated SSD capacity.I also agree with GourdFreeMan, that the physical block size needs to be reduced. Due to the constant erasing of blocks, the Trim command is going to reduce the life of the drive. Of course, drive makers could increase the size of the cache and delay using the Trim command until the number of blocks to be erased equals the cache available. This would more efficiently rearrange the valid data still present in the blocks that are being erased (less writes). Microsoft would have to design the Trim command so it would know how much cache was available on the drive, and drive makers would have to specifically reserve a portion of their cache for use by the Trim command.
I also like Basilisk's comment about increasing the cluster size, although if you increase it too big, you are likely to be wasting space and increasing overhead. Surely, even if MS only doubles the cluster size for NTFS partitions to 8KB's, write cycles to SSD's would be reduced. Also, There is the difference between 32bit and 64bit operating systems to consider. However, I don't have the knowledge to say whether Microsoft can make these changes without running into serious problems with other aspects of the operating system.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I only wrote to the LBAs reported to the OS. So on the 80GB Intel drive that's from 0 - 74.5GB.I didn't test the X25-E as extensively as the rest of the drives so I didn't look at performance degradation as closely just because I was running out of time and the X25-E is sooo much more expensive. I may do a standalone look at it in the near future.
Take care,
Anand
gss4w - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Has anyone at Anandtech talked to Microsoft about when the "Trim" command will be supported in Windows 7. Also it would be great if you could include some numbers from Windows 7 beta when you do a follow-up.One reason I ask is that I searched for "Windows 7 ssd trim" and I saw a presentation from WinHEC that made it sound like support for the trim command would be a requirement for SSD drives to meet the Windows 7 logo requirements. I would think if this were the case then Windows 7 would have support for trim. However, this article made it sound like support for Trim might not be included when Windows 7 is initially released, but would be added later.
ryedizzel - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
I think it is obvious that Windows 7 will support TRIM. The bigger question this article points out is whether or not the current SSDs will be upgradeable via firmware- which is more important for consumers wanting to buy one now.Martimus - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
It took me an hour to read the whole thing, but I really enjoyed it. It reminded me of the time I spent testing circuitry and doing root cause analysis.alpha754293 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I think that it would be interesting if you were to be able to test the drives for the "desktop/laptop/consumer" front by writing a 8 GiB file using 4 kiB block sizes, etc. for the desktop pattern and also to test the drive then with a larger sizes and larger block size for the server/workstation pattern as well.You present some very very good arguments and points, and I found your article to be thoroughly researched and well put.
So I do have to commend you on that. You did an excellent job. It is thoroughly enjoyable to read.
I'm currently looking at a 4x 256 GB Samsung MLC on Solaris 10/ZFS for apps/OS (for PXE boot), and this does a lot of the testing; but I would be interested to see how it would handle more server-type workloads.
korbendallas - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
If The implementation of the Trim command is as you described here, it would actually kind of suck."The third step was deleting the original 4KB text file. Since our drive now supports TRIM, when this deletion request comes down the drive will actually read the entire block, remove the first LBA and write the new block back to the flash:"
First of all, it would create a new phenomenon called Erase Amplification. This would negatively impact the lifetime of a drive.
Secondly, you now have worse delete performance.
Basically, an SSD 4kB block can be in 3 different states: erased, data, garbage. A block enters the garbage state when a block is "overwritten" or the Trim command marks the contents as invalid.
The way i would imagine it working, marking block content as invalid is all the Trim command does.
Instead the drive will spend idle time finding the 512kB pages with the most garbage blocks. Once such a page is found, all the data blocks from that page would be copied to another page, and the page would be erased. Doing it in this way maximizes the number of garbage blocks being converted to erased.
alpha754293 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
BTW...you might be able to simulate the drive as well using Cygwin where you go to the drive and run the following:$ dd if=/dev/random of=testfile bs=1024k count=76288
I'm sure that you can come up with fancier shell scripts and stuff that uses the random number generator for the offsets (and if you really want it to work well, partition it so that when it does it, it takes up the entire initial 74.5 GB partition, and when you're done "dirtying" the data using dd and offset in a random pattern, grow the partition to take up the entire disk again.)
Just as a suggestion for future reference.
I use parts of that to some (varying) degree for when I do my file/disk I/O subsystem tests.
nubie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I should think that most "performance" laptops will come with a Vertex drive in the near future.Finally a performance SSD that comes near mainstream pricing.
Things are looking up, if more manufacturers get their heads out of the sand we should see prices drop as competition finally starts breeding excellence.
GlItCh017 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I just wanted to comment that the backstory portion to this article is simply the most interesting part to an article (or almost even an article inside the main article). On top of that, it is easily the most interesting article I have ever read simply because of that section. Really really must say that I enjoyed reading it!radguy - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I have been waiting for this one for a while and it was very informative. Thank you very much for it. I did pick up one of the patriot warp drives for my netbook. I was really happy until I installed avg free. So not running an antivirus on it anymore but I have drive image backup incase it goes bad. Overall pretty happy as it was only 80 bucks if I get my mir.I think I'm going to wait until windows 7 till I upgrade my primary desktop. 2 of those vertexs in raid 0 would be sweet though.
sleepeeg3 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
They were one of the first SSDs you reviewed and they use their own controller. How does their random write performance compare to everything else out now?These reviews made me totally reassess the purchase of the two Samsungs I bought. I had no idea the random writes on the Samsung drives were so bad. Other reviews show the Samsung drives doing better or at least near the X25-M in write tests: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15433/6">http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15433/6 However, those tests probably would have been somewhat sequential.
nubie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Grammatically awkward sentence on Page 21:"so if you own one of these drives - you owned a fixed version."
The tense is incorrect (own/owned). I think "own a fixed version" is still awkward, perhaps "you have the fixed version", also the "so" may be superfluous. You can replace the ", so if" with a "; if". Here is how I might re-write the sentence:
"The old firmware never shipped thanks to OCZ's quick acting; if you own one of these drives - you have a fixed version."
(I am not an expert, so feel free to correct me if I am wrong.)
Awesome article btw, thanks for setting me straight on SSD, I have been steering clear of them. I hope soon you can review SSD's and most are good to excellent. :)
Flyboy27 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
This article has answered every question I've had regarding SSDs recently. Thanks Anand!Flyboy27 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
If a 120gb Vertex was around $250 I would get one yesterday. I suppose I can wait though.7Enigma - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
For me, 2 60's or 2 80's for around that price and I'm sold. Want the Raid0.kgwagner - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I almost didn't read this article, as everybody and their brother seems to want to explain SSDs these days and most of the articles aren't much more than glorified press releases. But, this one truly took the drives to task and presented some valid information and explanations about the state of the art and where it needs to go. Kudos, Anand. Awesome show. Good job.Mr Perfect - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
"Needless to say, there was some definite fallout from that review. I’m used to negative manufacturer response after a GPU review, but I’m always a bit surprised when it happens in any other segment."Obviously you can't make a business out of irritating manufacturers, but when there really are issues, the readers want to know about them. After all, that's why we come here!
gwolfman - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
You own Anand. Keep up the good work. I've seen you cited from many sites about the work you've done, in particular with SSDs. Best article I've read in months!Franco1 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I've been waiting a long time for this review. It was certainly worth the wait! I would love to see some benchmarks with 2+ drives in RAID configurations via onboard and add-on controller cards. Maybe another follow up?Howard - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Looks like the Vertex is the drive to get, especially once the user base expands a bit.MagicalMule - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Thanks for the article. Everyone is critiquing grammar and all this nonsense it seems, but I really enjoyed the article.It was very thorough and very informative.
Keep up the good work. =).
futrtrubl - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
You missed out a VERY significant step that causes the greater part of the slowdown associated with your scenario. After the block is read out to cache the block has to be erased before it can be written to again and as you pointed out earlier an erase cycle, and thus the entire read/modify+erase/write cycle, takes a relatively LONG time, much longer than a simple read/modify/write.Edward
DrKlahn - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I've worked in IT for 15 years and have played with very fast arrays and know a fair amount about storage. 2 months ago I replaced my Raptor boot/gaming drive with a GSkill Titan. In day to day use I have no stuttering. The only stutter I have seen was while installing a large patch, surfing with multiple windows/tabs open and using Outlook. It wasn't even a second. I did align the partition, turned off drive indexing and defragmentation, and turned on caching. In day to day use it simply kills the Raptor. Games and applications load in a fraction of the time. Vista boot time has decreased dramatically.This isn't a case of purchase justification. If the drive was a dud I would have moved it to a secondary machine, reinstalled the Raptor, and chalked it up as a bad decision. I simply have not run into any scenario in daily use that it performs worse than the drive it replaced and I have not seen any real stuttering in daily use.
Gary Key - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I have a GSkill Titan drive also and really like it. However, my experiences while positive overall, do not compare with yours when it comes to stuttering (yes, all optimizations have been done to the drive and OS). I still have significant stuttering problems when using multiple IM programs and having multiple windows/tabs open at the same time. I literally have to wait a few seconds when texting colleagues if more than two conversations are occurring at the same time as the system pauses, hitches, and stutters in this scenario. It is especially aggravating when on Skype and trying to text, speak, and transfer files at the same time. This does not occur on the Intel drive in my testing. Apparently, it is no longer a problem on the OCZ Vertex or Summit drives. Except for my example above, I would certainly use the Titan drive over my Raptor any day of the week.druc0017 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
great article, keep up the good work, cant wait to see more updates, thxmikeblas - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Is the Velociraptor really "World's fastest hard drive", as this article states? Faster than the Hitachi SAS drives?Gary Key - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
We have changed those statements to "...fastest consumer desktop hard drive...", that was the original intent of the statement, just clarified now. :)7Enigma - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I think the majority of us understood that. People just like to nit-pick.SunSetSupaNova - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Just wanted to say great job Anand on a great article, it took me a while to read it from start to finish but it was well worth it!FHDelux - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
That was the best review i have read in a long time. I originally bought an OCZ Core drive when they first came out. It was the worst piece of garbage i had ever used. Newegg wouldn't let me send it back and OCZ support forums told me all sorts of junk to get me to fix it but it was just a poorly designed drive. I eventually ended up getting the egg to take it back for credit and i wrote OCZ off as a company blinded by the marketing department. I currently own an Intel SSD and its wonderfull, everytime i see OCZ statements saying their drive competes with the Intel drive i would laugh and think back to the OCZ techs telling me i need to update my bios, or i need to install vista service pack 1 before it would work right.I am thankful that you slapped that OCZ big wig around until they made a good product. All of us out there that wasted our time and money on Pre-vertex generation drives are greatfull to you and the whole industry should be kissing your butt right now.
One thing these companies need to learn is that marketing isn't the answer, creating solid products is. Hopefully OCZ has learned their lesson, and because of your article i will give them another chance.
THANK YOU!
kelstertx - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I didn't want to worry about eventual failure of the Flash chips of an SSD, and went with an SDRAM based Ramdrive from Acard. These drives have no latency of any kind, since they use SDRAM, and no lifespan of write cycles. I've been using mine for a couple of weeks now, and I like it a lot. I put Ubuntu on mine, and had 2G left for my small home folder. The standard HDD is my long-term storage for data files, music, etc. As SDRAM gets more affordable over time, I can add DIMMs and bump up the size.I know this review was about SSDs strictly, so an SDRAM drive doesn't technically fit, but it would have been interesting to see a 9010 or 9010b in there for comparison. It beat the Intel SSD in almost all the tests. http://techreport.com/articles.x/16255/1">http://techreport.com/articles.x/16255/1
7Enigma - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I've been eying these guys ever since the announced their first press release. Every time I always was drawn away by the constant need for power (4h max on battery scares the bejeezus out of me if I was to be gone on vacation during a storm), high power usage at all times, and high cost of entry (after factoring in all of the ram modules).I really dislike that article as well, since I think the bottlenecks were much less apparent with such a horribly slow cpu. The majority of that review's data is extremely compressed. I mean a P4, and 1 gig of memory; are you F'ing kidding me? This article was written in Jan of this year!? Why didn't they just use my old 486DX?
tirez321 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
What would a drive zeroing tool do to write performance, like if you used acronis privacy expert to zero only the "free space" regularly? Would it help write performance due to the drive not having to erase pages before writing?tirez321 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I can kinda see that it wouldn't now.Because there would still be states there regardless.
But if you could inform the drive that it is deleted somehow, hmm.
strikeback03 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
The subjective experiences with stuttering are more important to me than most of the test numbers. Other tests I have found of the G.Skill Titan and similar have looked pretty good, but left out mention of stuttering in use.Too bad, as the 80GB Intel is too small and the ~$300 for a 120GB is about the most I am willing to pay. Maybe sometime this year the OCZ Vertex or similar will get there.
strikeback03 - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 - link
When I wrote that, the Newegg price for the 120GB Vertex was near $400. Now they have it for $339 with a $30 MIR. Now that's progress.kamikaz1k - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
the latency times are switched...incase u wanted to kno.also, first post ^^ hallo!
GourdFreeMan - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
It seems rather premature to assume the ATA TRIM command will significantly improve the SSD experience on the desktop. If you were to use TRIM to rewrite a nonempty physical block, you do not avoid the 2ms erase penalty when more data is written to that block later on and instead simply add the wear of another erase cycle. TRIM, then, is only useful for performance purposes when an entire 512 KiB physical block is free.A well designed operating system would have to keep track of both the physical and logical maps of used space on an SSD, and only issue TRIM when deletion of a logical cluster coincides with the freeing of an entire physical block. Issuing TRIMs at any other time would only hurt performance. This means the OS will have significantly fewer opportunities to issue TRIMs than you assume. Moreover, after significant usage the physical blocks will become fragmented and fewer and fewer TRIMs will be able to be issued.
TRIM works great as long as you only deal with large files, or batches of small files contiguously created and deleted with significant temporal locality. It would greatly aid SSDs in the "used" state Anand artificially creates in this article, but on a real system where months of web browsing, Windows updates and software installing/uninstalling have occurred the effect would be less striking.
TRIM could be mated with periodic internal (not filesystem) defragmentation to mitigate these issues, but that would significantly reduce the lifespan of the SSD...
It seems the real solution to the SSD performance problem would be to decrease the size of the physical block... ideally to 4 KiB, as that is the most common cluster size on modern filesystems. (This assumes, of course, that the erase, read and write latencies could be scaled down linearly.)
Kary - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Why use TRIM at all?!?!?If you have extras Blocks on the drive (NOT PAGES, FULL BLOCKS) then there is no need for TRIM command.
1)Currently in use BLOCK is half full
2)More than half a block needs to be written
3)extra BLOCK is mapped into the system
4)original/half full block is mapped out of system.. can be erased during idle time.
You could even bind multiple continuous blocks this way (I assume that it is possible to erase simultaneously any of the internal groupings pages from Blocks on up...they probably share address lines...ex. erase 0000200 -> just erase block #200 ....erase 00002*0 -> erase block 200 to 290...btw, did addressing in base ten instead of binary just to simplify for some :)
korbendallas - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Actually i think that the Trim command is merely used for marking blocks as free. The OS doesn't know how the data is placed on the SSD, so it can't make informed decision on when to forcefully erase pages. In the same way, the SSD doesn't know anything about what files are in which blocks, so you can't defrag files internally in the drive.So while you can't defrag files, you CAN now defrag free space, and you can improve the wear leveling because deleted data can be ignored.
So let's say you have 10 pages where 50% of the blocks were marked deleted using the Trim command. That means you can move the data into 5 other pages, and erase the 10 pages. The more deleted blocks there are in a page, the better a candidate for this procedure. And there isn't really a problem with doing this while the drive is idle - since you're just doing something now, that you would have to do anyway when a write command comes.
GourdFreeMan - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
This is basically what I am arguing both for and against in the fourth paragraph of my original post, though I assumed it would be the OS'es responsibility, not the drive's.Do SSDs track dirty pages, or only dirty blocks? I don't think there is enough RAM on the controller to do the former...
korbendallas - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Well, let's take a look at how much storage we actually need. A block can be erased, contain data, or be marked as trimmed or deallocated.That's three different states, or two bits of information. Since each block is 4kB, a 64GB drive would have 16777216 blocks. So that's 4MB of information.
So yeah, saving the block information is totally feasible.
GourdFreeMan - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Actually the drive only needs to know if the page is in use or not, so you can cut that number in half. It can determine a partially full block that is a candidate for defragmentation by looking at whether neighboring pages are in use. By your calculation that would then be 2 MiB.That assumes the controller only needs to support drives of up to 64 GiB capacity, that pages are 4 KiB in size, and that the controller doesn't need to use RAM for any other purpose.
Most consumer SSD lines go up to 256 GiB in capacity, which would bring the total RAM needed up to 8 MiB using your assumption of a 4 KiB page size.
However, both hard drives and SSDs use 512 byte sectors. This does not necessarily mean that internal pages are therefore 512 bytes in size, but lacking any other data about internal pages sizes, let's run the numbers on that assumption. To support a 256 MiB drive with 512 byte pages, you would need 64 MiB of RAM -- which only the Intel line of SSDs has more than -- dedicated solely to this purpose.
As I said before there are ways of getting around this RAM limitation (e.g. storing page allocation data per block, keeping only part of the page allocation table in RAM, etc.), so I don't think the technical challenge here is insurmountable. There still remains the issue of wear, however...
GourdFreeMan - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Substitute "allocated" for "dirty" in my above post. I muddled the terminology, and there is no edit function to repair my mistake.Also, I suppose the SSD could store some per block data about page allocation appended to the blocks themselves at a small latency penalty to get around the RAM issue, but I am not sure if existing SSDs do such a thing.
My concerns about added wear in my original post still stand, and doing periodic internal defragmentation is going to necessitate some unpredictable sporadic periods of poor response by the drive as well if this feature is to be offered by the drive and not the OS.
Basilisk - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I think your concerns parallel mine, allbeit we have different conclusions.Parag.1: I think you misunderstand the ERASE concept: as I read it, after an ERASE parts of the block are re-written and parts are left erased -- those latter parts NEED NOT be re-erased before they are written, later. If the TRIM function can be accomplished at an idle moment, access time will be "saved"; if the TRIM can erase (release) multiple clusters in one block [unlikely?], that will reduce both wear & time.
Parag.2: This argument reverses the concept that OS's should largely be ignorant about device internals. As devices with different internal structures have proliferated over the years -- and will continue so with SSD's -- such OS differentiation is costly to support.
Parag 3 and onwards: Herein lies the problem: we want to save wear by not re-writing files to make them contiguous, but we now have a situation where wear and erase times could be considerably reduced by having those files be contiguous. A 2MB file fragmented randomly in 4KB clusters will result in around 500 erase cycles when it's deleted; if stored contiguously, that would only require 4-5 erase cycles (of 512KB SSD-blocks)... a 100:1 reduction in erases/wear.
It would be nice to get the SSD blocks down to 4KB in size, but I have to infer there are counter arguments or it would've been done already.
With current SSDs, I'd explore using larger cluster sizes -- and here we have a clash with MS [big surprise]. IIRC, NTFS clusters cannot exceed 4KB [for something to do with file compression!]. That makes it possible that FAT32 with 32KB clusters [IIRC clusters must be less than 64KB for all system tools to properly function] might be the best choice for systems actively rewriting large files. I'm unfamiliar with FAT32 issues that argue against this, but if the SSD's allocate clusters contiguously, wouldn't this reduce erases by a factor of 8 for large file deletions? 32KB clusters might ham-string caching efficiency and result in more disk accesses, but it might speed-up linear reads and s/w loads.
The impact of very small file/directory usage and for small incremental file changes [like appending to logs] wouldn't be reduced -- it might be increased as data-transfer sizes would increase -- so the overall gain for having fewer clusters-per-SSD-block is hard to intuit, and it would vary in different environments.
GourdFreeMan - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
RE Parag. 1: As I understand it, the entire 512 KiB block must always be erased if there is even a single page of valid data written to it... hence my concerns. You may save time reading and writing data if the device could know a block were partially full, but you still suffer the 2ms erase penalty. Please correct me if I am mistaken in my assumption.RE Parag. 2: The problem is the SSD itself only knows the physical map of empty and used space. It doesn't have any knowledge of the logical file system. NTFS, FAT32, ext3 -- it doesn't matter to the drive, that is the OS'es responsibility.
RE Parag. 3: I would hope that reducing the physical block size would also reduce the block erase time from 2ms, but I am not a flash engineer and so cannot comment. One thing I can state for certain, however is that moving to smaller physical block sizes would not increase wear across the surface of the drive, except possibly for the necessity to keep track of a map of used blocks. Rewriting 128 blocks on a hypothetical SSD with 4 KiB blocks versus 1 512 KiB block still erases 512 KiB of disk space (excepting the overhead in tracking which blocks are filled).
Regarding using large filesystem clusters: 4 KiB clusters offer a nice tradeoff between filesystem size, performance and slack (lost space due to cluster size). If you wanted to make an SSD look artificially good versus a hard drive, a 512 KiB cluster size would do so admirably, but no one would use such a large cluster size except for a data drive used to store extremely large files (e.g. video) exclusively. BTW, in case you are unaware, you can format a non-OS partition with NTFS to cluster sizes other than 4 KiB. You can also force the OS to use a different cluster size by first formating the drive for the OS as a data drive with a different cluster size under Windows and then installing Windows on that partition. I have a 2 KiB cluster size on a drive that has many hundreds of thousands of small files. However, I should note that since virtual memory pages are by default 4 KiB (another compelling reason for the 4 KiB default cluster size), most people don't have a use for other cluster sizes if they intend to have a page file on the drive.
ssj4Gogeta - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Thanks for the wonderful article. And yes, I read every single word. LOLrudolphna - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Hey anand, page 3, the random read latency graph, they are mixed up. it is listed as the WD Velociraptor having a .11ms latency, I think you might want to fix that. :)SkullOne - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Fantastic article. Definitely one of the best I've read in a long time. Incredibly informative. Everyone who reads this article is a little bit smarter afterwards.All the great information about SSDs aside, I think the best part though is how OCZ is willing to take blame for failure earlier and fix the problems. Companies like that are the ones who will get my money in the future especially when it is time for me to move from HDD to SSD.
Apache2009 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
i got one Vertex SSD. Why suspend will cause system halt ? My laptop is nVidia chipset and it is work fine with HDD. Somebody know it ?MarcHFR - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Hi,You wrote that there is spare-area on X25-M :
"Intel ships its X25-M with 80GB of MLC flash on it, but only 74.5GB is available to the user"
It's a mistake. 80 GB of Flash look like 74.5GB for the user because 80,000,000,000 bytes of flash is 74.5 Go for the user point of view (with 1 KB = 1024 byte).
You did'nt point out the other problem of the X25-M : LBA "optimisation". After doing a lot of I/O random write the speed in sequential write can get down to only 10 MB /s :/
Kary - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
The extra space would be invisible to the end user (it is used internally)Also, addressing is normally done in binary..as a result actual sizes are typically in binary in memory devices (flash, RAM...):
64gb
128gb
80 GB...not compatible with binary addressing
(though 48GB of a 128GB drive being used for this seems pretty high)
ssj4Gogeta - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Did you bother reading the article? He pointed out that you can get any SSD (NOT just Intel's) stuck into a situation when only a secure erase will help you out. The problem is not specific to Intel's SSD, and it doesn't occur during normal usage.MarcHFR - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
The problem i've pointed out has nothing to do with the performance dregradation related to the write on a filled page, it's a performance degradation related to an LBA optimisation that is specific to Intel SSD.VaultDweller - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
So where would Corsair's SSD fit into this mix? It uses a Samsung MLC controller... so would it be comparable to the OCZ Summit? I would expect not since the rated sequential speeds on the Corsair are tremendously lower than the Summit, but the Summit is the closest match in terms of the internals.kensiko - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
No, OCZ Summit = newest Samsung controller. The Corsair use the previous controller, smaller performance.VaultDweller - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
So what's the difference?The Summit is optimized for sequential performance at the cost of random I/O, as per the article. That is clearly not the case with the Corsair drive, so how does the Corsair hold up in terms of random I/O? That's what I'm interested in, since the sequential on the Corsair is "fast enough" if the random write performance is good.
jatypc - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
A detailed description of how SSDs operate makes me wonder: Imagene hypothetically I have a SSD drive that is filled from more than 90% (e.g., 95%) and those 90% are read-only things (or almost read-only things such as exe and other application files). The remaining 10% is free or frequently written to (e.g., page/swap file). Then the use of drive results - from what I understood in the article - in very fast aging of those 10% of the SSD disk because the 90% are occupied by read-only stuff. If the disk in question has for instance 32GB, those 10% are 3.2 GB (e.g., a size of a usual swap file) and after writing it approx. 10000 times, the respective part of the disk would become dead. Being occupies by a swap file, this number of reads/writes can be achieved in one or two years... Am I right?sbuckler - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Depends on how smart the controller is? Shuffling around the data now and again in the background would make sense.Frallan - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
@AT
This is why i come to AT to read up on the developments.
@OCZ
Well played :0)
The ruler of the roost are the Intels however I will be able to afford one of those when there are cows enjoying themselfs by dancing on the moon. My next upgrade will be a Vertex - not only bc its Valu for money but equally much bc. OCZ obviously takes care of thier customers and listens to reason.
pmonti80 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
This is the kind of article that makes me come back here.nowayout99 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
OCZ, you should listen to Uncle Anand. ;) Hopefully Mr. Petersen understands that it's tough love.And the final product seems perfectly cool -- great performance at a better price than Intel. It's the first SSD I'd be able to reasonably consider.
SOLIDNecro - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Thx for this article Anand, I have been in a hotly contested debate over OCZ vs Samsung with my "Asperger Enhanced" nemisis/close friend...(In all fairness, I should mention I use the BiPolar SSE instruction set myself)
He was only looking at Samsung, I said he should look into what OCZ has now.
His reply was "I don't know them, and don't want to be disapointed"
(Long story behind that...He's from the Server/Workstain/HPC crowd, I am from the hardcore OC/Gamer/Desktop group, so he is not familiar with OCZ)
Looks like the Samsung (And alot of others) has "Issues" with performance degrading over time that are somewhat solved by Intel and OCZ (Plus maybe a few other companies that use the Rev B JMicron controller on there low cost SSD's)
I agree the OCZ Vertex offers the best bang for low buck SSD today, and I am tempted to grab one. But a year from now, anyone that bought a current gen MLC SSD will be saying "I coulda had a V-8" if that TRIM technology does what it promises!!!
James5mith - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
As people continue to try and push the envelope of storage performance in a variety of ways, and as 6gbps SATA becomes available, the performance of SSD's will only go up.As always, I wanted to say thanks for the great article and keep them coming. It's the only way the rest of us can keep pace with what's happening out there in the world of performance storage.
vailr - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Is there any benefit in using 2 SSD's in a Raid 0 configuration?And: any differences between motherboard Intel Raid vs. a Raid controller card from Areca, for example. Also: can the "Trim" command work while in Raid mode? Probably not, I'm guessing...
7Enigma - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Raid0 is really the holy grail for SSD's. The low risk of failure of SSD's which normally makes Raid0 with typical mechanical HD's more dangerous is very appealing. My personal storage-size goal is ~120-160gigs. Once they reach that size for under $300 I think I'm going to jump in. But I'm more likely to grab 2 60's or 2 80's and Raid0 them than get a single large SSD. The added performance will outweigh the higher power draw of 2 drives, and should make them extremely competitive with Intel's offerings (or whatever holds the crown at the time).I figure it will be about a year or so until the prices are in that range, as 2 60gig Vertex drives will currently run you about $400 after rebate.
I can't wait to jump on that upgrade and will then put my current 250gig mechanical drive as the storage drive (I don't use a ton of space in general as I have a 320gig external backup).
Rasterman - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
The problem with doing that is if you want to move your drives to another system they won't work, so upgrading is a pain. You could image them I guess, but plugging one drive in is much simpler. I had an older XP install that made it through 3-4 different systems.I would also question real world results, if you're going at 250MB/s or 500MB/s its not even going to be noticeable unless you are doing some massive video editing or some other huge file operations, and as Anand says, SSDs don't fill this role right now as they are super expensive per GB. So if you really are editing video a lot, you are going to need a hell of a lot more space than SSDs can offer you.
Gasaraki88 - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
RAID is a universal standard so if you take two RAID0 drives out and move them to another computer with a RAID controller, it SHOULD just work if the original RAID was doing it correctly.coil222 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Yes I run a pair of MTRON 7500s in a raid 0 stripe for my OS and Gaming (wow). I don't recall numbers off the top of my head but tests were better on the raid 0 than a single drive configuration.Watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&fea...">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&fea...
sawyeriii - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I just wanted to state how much I loved the combination of technical and real world information in this article.What is the possibility of having different page sizes built into a drive? I.e. you could have a drive with many 1k page packages on one die, 2k on another, and most others 4k. Could that theoretically help? Could the controllers work with that (or would you need to combine multiple 1k's into a 4k transfer size)?
PS One note on page 3, the VelociRaptor and Intel in the first chart (responce time) are switched, however the text is correct.
StormyParis - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
the ugly truth is that an SSD won't let you do anything that you couldn't do without it, and due to its cost and small capacity, it's not a replacement drive, it's an extra drive: not less power consumption but more, not less noise but just the same. You just gain a bit of time when booting up and lauching apps... which I do about 1/week and 1/day, respectively. Assuming your system has enough RAM (and if it doesn't, buy RAM before buying an SSD !), you won't feel much difference once the apps are launched.For the same cost, I'd rather buy a bigger screen.
It's urgent to wait for prices to come down. But I'm all for lots of people buying them now and help get the price down for us wiser buyers.
Rasterman - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
I've already decided my next system in a few months will have one, after you go through 5 hard drive failures (over several years) lets see how much your willing to pay to not have to put up with it anymore. If you use your PC for anything useful (work) then an SSD is a no brainer even at $1000/64GB IMO if the data security is there, speed is secondary for me.When you already have the best screen, video card, memory, why not have the best drive? And your argument is pretty dumb, almost any upgrade won't let you do anything that you couldn't do without it, not just SSDs.
Calin - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
You get lower power due to the lower power use of the SSD and the fact that the other drive is not stressed with difficult access patterns (small random reads/writes). Remember that idle power of a SSD drive is very low7Enigma - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
No, his comment was accurate for most users. Due to the small capacities and high cost these will be used as boot drives primarily with maybe a single heavily used program (say the current game or program you are playing/using), the rest will be on an additional drive. So while the power consumption of the SSD would be less than the old drive, the aggregate power usage of both (even when the larger storage drive is primarily at idle) will be higher than the single HD.And I believe you meant to say traditional HD for idle power?
strikeback03 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
If all you were going to throw on the drive is the OS and a game, a 32GB drive should be plenty. The reason the 80GB and up range is important is so general consumers can load all their programs on it.But yes, in consumer usage other than a laptop, some people who were previously using one drive for both boot and storage would likely need a mechanical HDD is addition to the SSD. OTOH, those who were using a Velociraptor (or RAID array) for boot and another drive for storage will see their power consumption decrease.
sawyeriii - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Have you used a SSD? (If so which)I would state that it is not a luxary product, it is a premium product. The price difference you pay WILL translate to faster performance (if you choose correctly). More RAM only helps upto a point.
Remember performance is based on a system of parts...
CPU
RAM
NORTHBRIDGE
GPU
SOUTHBRIDGE
I/O INTERFACE
HDD/SDD
Microsoft's Windows Experience Index has specific flaws, but the concept is sound... The system can only go a fast as the slowest component in the system (relative to the amount of time used by that component).
Testtest - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
... there's also Supertalent's Ultradrive ME (MLC) and LE (SLC) and Photofast's G-Monster v3At least the Supertalent drives are quite a bit cheaper with the same drive layout/controller than the Vertex drives and only differ in the firmware (which isn't bad either).
It's however possible at least with the Ultradrive ME currently to provoke a kinda timeout error after they've been fully filled once and then still beeing written on. I don't own a Vertex so I can't test that there but if it was a controller issue, it should pop up there sooner or later as well (if you take a look in their suppport forum some error reports seem very similar).
Intels have their 80% bug, Indilinx drives have their issues too it seems - let's hope that firmware can cure it!
Great article btw!
iwod - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Both SuperTalent and OCZ 30 / 32 GB drive cost exactly the same on NewEgg$129
strikeback03 - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
If you get Newegg's specials, one of the codes is for the 30GB for $103 with a $20MIR, so $83 with shipping if the rebate comes through. At the size I would want (~120) the Super Talent undercuts the OCZ slightly.Does anyone know if you can install the firmware of one maker to another maker's SSD? For example, assuming both the Ultradrive ME and the Vertex use the same Indilinx controller, and say Super Talent chose to release it with the firmware which optimizes for higher sequential speeds, would the user be able to choose the firmware which optimizes for less latency?
Testtest - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Ah, no editing?!A-Data's "300 plus" SSD also uses the Indilinx controller.
vailr - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
"The Anatomy of a SSD" should instead read: "The Anatomy of an SSD"Flunk - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Yes, because S is a vowel...abudd - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Assuming SSD = "es-es-dee" then "an SSD" is right. If it *sounds* like a vowel, use "an".JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Yes, *but* SSD could also be read as "Solid State Drive" instead of "ess ess dee", in which case you would say "a SSD". I tend to read it as "ess ess dee", but Anand thinks of those letters as "Solid State Drive".Potato, potato, tomato, tomato... let's call the whole thing off!
Azsen - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
When reading acronyms you're supposed to think of them as the letters, i.e. when you see RAM, you think "ram" straight off not Random Access Memory. When you see "IBM" you think "eye bee emm" not International Business Machines etc etc. It would take ages to read an article if you had to stop and think out all the full wording of acronyms as you're reading them.I'm going with the correction of "Anatomy of an SSD". Correct English fullstop.
JarredWalton - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
By your comment, you suggest two different things, and that's really okay. That was my point: when you see "RAM" you probably thing "ram" as in the animal... not "Are A Em". You say "a RAM stick" not "an RAM stick". I'd guess most people think of SATA as "Ess A Tee A", but if you talk to most computer techs that are in the know, it's "say-te" so you would say "a SATA drive".And you know, I'm sure plenty of people will agree with the correct way of saying SATA, and that's perfectly okay. English really is a very flexible thing - particularly in the tech world - and rarely is there an "always right" way of saying things. If Anand wants to say "a SSD" and others want to say "an SSD", I'm not going to try to declare one group or the other correct. They both are, depending on your viewpoint.
"I believe the world is neither black nor white, but only shades of gray."
Pythias - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Can't have gray without black and white.7Enigma - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
HAHAHA. What a tool. I love it when people critique grammar.....and get it wrong.VaultDweller - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I love it when people critique someone's critique of grammar... and get it wrong.It's an SSD, not a SSD.
gwolfman - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
lolzsidex - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I would like to know the firmware version of Vertex used in your review. To me sounds the old 0112kensiko - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Yes that is important to know.I'm sure this is not done with the latest firmware available which is 1199. This version got better performance.
Firmware 1275 is coming also.
Anand, will you update your benchmarks with the latest firmware?
If not, then the benchmarks are obsolete.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I tested with the shipping firmware for this article (0122). I've been playing around with 1199 in the lab and will most likely have an update in a couple of weeks once I've done a thorough evaluation of it. By then I should also have the final version of the new Samsung drive and maybe even some other interesting things.For now, I've got to get to work on the new Mac Pro and the updated Ion article :) I need a small break from SSDs por favor :)
Take care,
Anand
VaultDweller - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Awww, don't you have some underlings to do your SSD-related will?Would love to see an update, and would love to see Corsair's SSD drive tested as well (it's based on Samsung's last generation MLC controller, and doesn't seem to emphasize sequential like the Summit does).
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I will do an update on the new firmware, I just want to do it right so it'll take some time :)I'll put in a request for the Corsair drive as well :)
-A
Slash3 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Page 29: "Not all applications will launch faster than a VelociRaptor on a SSD, but let's not forget that the VelociRaptor is the world's fastest hard drive."Really? What about the nice and speedy enterprise-level 15k SAS/SCSI drives everyone neglects to acknowledge? :)
George Powell - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I believe it refers to consumer drives. While SAS drives are beginning to be a possibility on the desktop with newer motherboards supporting them natively, the drives themselves are too expensive and too noisy for most consumers to actually want them.FishTankX - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Good info. However, I noticed one mistake.Second page
Samsung had a MLC controller at the time but it was too expensive than what SuperTalent was shooting for.
matrixireland - Thursday, December 24, 2009 - link
hi would like to know what you pros think of the;Golden Leopard ASAX-ZIF1.8-SSD? what would you add to it?
And how would you rate it against other ssd?
Specifications:
product description
ASAX-ZIF1.8-SSD is a high-performance design solid state drive based on the high-end micro-control IC with flash memory storage medium integrated advantaged of high speed,convenient ,aseismatic,energy-saving etc.
specification
Model
Size
Interface
Material
ASAX-ZIF1.8-SSD
1.8inch 70×54×6mm
ZIF
Aluminum-magnesium alloy appearance ,drawbench and colorful oxidation surface,elegant temperament
performance
read speed:80- 96Mbytes/second write speed:50- 60Mbytes/second
support ATA-7 V3 PIO/multi word/ultra DMA MODES
Low power TFBGA,4 channel of flash controller,masked ROM and data SRAM
SAMSUNG flash keeps the data faster on reliability and endurance
Dynamic and static wear-leveling prolong NAND FLASH and SSD for longer life
8/16 bit BCH ECC data error correction ability effectively guarantee the data read security.
Design consideration
Capacity
16G/32G/64G/128G/256G
Average access time
<0.25MS
operating temperature
0-85°
power consumption
DC Input Voltage(3.3V or 5 V ± 10%)Read and write:135mA/194Ma wait:70mA
shock
1500G
Application
the Laptop, pc, server,workstation,portable media player,digital collection apparatus and any computer equipment which need consecutive read and write speed and high reliability storage.
jay401 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
yeah, he wants "more expensive than" or "too expensive for".Spoelie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Second page as well:missing charts before and after this paragraph:
"The chart above shows how much faster these affordable MLC SSDs were than the fastest 3.5” hard drive in sequential transfers. But now look at random write performance:"
Spoelie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
chart 1 on page 2 now shows sequential read but the paragraph is changed to mention random read ;)page 21: As far as I know, this is THE one of THE only reviews
Some very surprising benchmark results for the ocz vertex, I thought the new firmware tanked sequential read speeds (to 80-90) based on the explanation beforehand, but not according to the actual graphs.
Spoelie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
third page, first table, first column: SSD and HDD entries are switchedmikaela - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
yeah great info. also great resourceSpoelie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
page 19: I’d never reviewed it'd & -ed?
HolyFire - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
"I'd never reviewed it" is correct. "I'd" here means "I had", it's Past Perfect tense.FishTankX - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
That should have bolded "too"FishTankX - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Also, I think the velociraptor vs X-25 figures are swapped. 6 odd ms for the intel drive and 0.11ms for the velociraptor..Natfly - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
DangerMouse4269 - Tuesday, April 13, 2010 - link
Nicely written. Even a very out of practice Comp Eng understood that.geekforhire - Monday, June 14, 2010 - link
I have just replaced the hard drive in this 3 year old Dell Inspiron 9400 notebook computer with a new and very quick OCZ SSD, manually configured the partition with a 1024 offset, freshly installed the OS, freshly downloaded all of the latest and greatest drivers from Dell, and applied all currently available OS updates from Msft.The problem is that when the machine resumes from Standby, it will /reliably/ (4 out of 4 attempts) produce a BSOD 0xF4 after the power button is pressed to resume the machine from standby.
Here's the sequence to recreate the problem:
0) Machine is booted normally into Windows, and log in to an account which has administrative privs.
1) Click on Start -> Shut Down -> Standby.
2) See display turn black, disk I/O light flashes then stops, then the power indicator light begins to flash on and off slowly.
3) Wait until the power light has made 2 slow flashes.
4) Press the power button.
5) See the Dell Bios splash screen, then disappear
6) Boom: See the BSOD 0xF4
The values reported after the STOP are:
(0x00000003, 0x865b3020, 0x865b3194, 0x805d2954)
Note that I've been in contact with OCZ before about this SSD+computer, because the previous BSOD that was produced was 0x77. Their recommendation was to create the partition with an offset with a 64 interval, and to reflash the SSD with their modern firmware. This was done, the OS was reinstalled as described, and now I'm getting a different BSOD code. Another mention was a question whether the notebook computer uses a SATA2 controller (definitely compatible) or SATA1 (which may have troubles).
I've run Spinrite on the SSD, and there are lots of ECC errors being reported. I've been in contact with Spinrite, and they chalk this up to the SSD being chatty (which they like), but since SSD's are new and magnetic disks are common, they want to stay focussed on magnetic disks.
When the machine boots back up, the OS reports that a serious error has occurred, and asks that a problem report be submitted, which I do. Then an attractive but somewhat generic page is displayed with common causes (Aging or failing hard disks, large file transfers from secondary media to local hd, loss of power to a hard drive, hard disk intensive processes (eg: antivirus scanners), recently installed hardware that might have compatibility and performance problems)
Has anyone else encountered this kind of problem, and do you have any suggestions?
angavar - Thursday, September 9, 2010 - link
As a medical student I can appreciate a well researched and analytical article when I see it. This is by far the best computer hardware review I have ever read! Thank-you for your time and effort in producing what is clearly a thoroughly researched and detailed analysis.mac021 - Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - link
Thank you for the lesson and helping me understand SSD drives. May I just ask for your advice...For everyday use designing and generating prototypes for websites and running typical office s/w like word and excel for long documentations while listening to music or just having some video play in the background, then the occasional gaming of, say Star Craft 2 and Dead Space 3, and lets assume I do this on a 5 hours a day average for 365 days in a year, how long before I need to replace an OCZ Vertex/Summit SSD? And does format/reinstall help in prolonging the life of an SSD just as it does for my old hard drives (from a computer that's 6 years old and counting)? Or there's no stopping the SSD's death after reaching 10,000 times of being erased and rewritten on? I'm not one who keeps upgrading or buying new computer systems for every new thing that comes out, i'm more of a keeper and maintainer for as long as the system servers my needs... but when I make a purchase, I make sure it will be enough to last me another 6-12 years IF possible! Which is why I'm still considering SATA for my next purchase late this year or early next year (and I'm only buying a new PC just because I made a mistake buying a foxconn motherboard that can't support anything higher than XP, not even Vista... weird, anyway I found that out too late).
Also, would you know of a motherboard that supports SSD, Windows 8, Nvidea, third gen i5/i7, and up to 64GB ram?
Thanks so much!
windows10 - Wednesday, November 30, 2016 - link
This article is meaningfull, interesting. thank you for sharingsusanbones - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link
I was wondered to these many responses here.