The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Disappointed, I went back to OCZ
OCZ was worried. The last time I reviewed one of their SSDs I was truthful about it, and it hurt their sales considerably. Customers were returning drives, and to OCZ’s credit, they stepped up and even accepted some returns themselves - something that most manufacturers wouldn’t have done. Regardless what they had told me, there was some admission of fault there. Those JMicron drives were nothing short of crap.
As soon as OCZ started getting word that I wasn’t pleased with Vertex, they went into a state of panic. These drives all do very well in synthetic HDD tests like HDTach and ATTO, that’s generally all they’re reviewed in, so that’s all they’re tested in. But now OCZ was hearing that the Vertex wasn’t passing some of my tests and they had no idea what it was failing or why.
I tend to do a good job of keeping what tests I run secret until the review is published, so there isn’t any unfair optimization. I purposefully introduce new tests to our performance suites to help keep manufacturers honest and optimizing for real world usage scenarios rather than specific benchmarks. OCZ had no idea what I was running, but they knew that the Vertex wasn’t doing well.
Summit on the other hand was performing just fine, but that’s an expensive drive. Vertex was supposed to be good, it should’ve been good, there’s no reason for it to be performing this poorly. I ran the infamous iometer test to see what was going on:
| Iometer 4KB Random Writes, IOqueue=1, 8GB sector space | IOs per second | MB/s | Average Latency | Maximum Latency |
| Original Pre-release OCZ Vertex | 20.7 | 0.08 MB/s | 48.2 ms | 484.5 ms |
How on earth is this acceptable at all? Average latency of 48.2ms and a maximum latency as bad as the Apex and G.Skill Titan drives? I’ve heard some SSD vendors dismiss the iometer results but let me caution you against that. What these numbers are telling us is that on average, when your OS goes to write a 4KB file somewhere on your drive, it’ll take nearly 50ms. That’s 4.5x longer than a 5400 RPM 2.5” notebook drive and that’s the average case. What part of that sounds acceptable? Anyone who tells you otherwise is delusional.
I thought for sure that the drive was broken and that we’d made no progress since last fall. But the drive hadn’t launched yet, while there were glowing reviews of it, no one had wasted any money. I wrote an email to Ryan Petersen, OCZ’s CEO. I described my findings and told him that while the Vertex’s performance was better than any of the JMicron solutions, it was unacceptable for anything other than perhaps extremely light, single-tasking usage.
I told him it sucked. He said that wasn’t fair. We argued over email but he came back and asked me what I needed to see to make the drive better.
I told him I’d need an average response time in the sub-1ms range and a max latency no worse than Intel’s 94ms. I didn’t think it would be possible. I was prepared for OCZ to hate me once more. He told me to give him a couple of days.
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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.