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
Final Words
I began this article with a recap of my history with SSDs, stating that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Honestly, today, the SSD world isn't much different.
Drives are most definitely cheaper today; the Intel X25-M originally sold at close to $600 for 80GB and is now down in the $340 - $360 range. The Samsung SLC drives have lost their hefty price tags and are now just as affordable as the more mainstream MLC solutions.
But the segmentation of the SSD market still exists. There are good drives and there are bad ones.
Ultimately it all boils down to what you optimize for. On its desktop drives, Intel chose to optimize for the sort of random writes you’d find on a desktop. The X25-E is much more resilient to the workload a multi-user environment would throw at it, such as in a server and thus carries a handsome price tag.
At first glance it would appear that Samsung’s latest controller used in the preview OCZ Summit drive I tested optimizes for the opposite end of the spectrum: sacrificing latency for bandwidth. As the Summit was used more and more, its random write latency went up while its sequential write speed remained incredibly high. Based on these characteristics I’d venture that the Summit would be a great drive for a personal file server, while the Intel X25-M is better suited as a boot/app drive in your system.
I’d argue that Intel got it “right”. Given the limited sizes of SSDs today and the high cost per GB, no one in their right mind is using these drives for mass storage of large files - they’re using them as boot and application drives, that’s where they excel after all.
Over the past year Intel continually claimed that its expertise in making chipsets, microprocessors and generally with the system as a whole led to a superior SSD design. Based on my tests and my own personal use of the drive and literally every other one in this article, I’d tend to agree.
OCZ and Indilinx initially made the mistake of designing the Vertex and its Barefoot controller similarly to the Samsung based Summit. It boasted very high read/write speeds but at the expense of small file write latency. In the revised firmware, the one that led to the shipping version, OCZ went back to Indilinx and changed approaches. The drive now performs like a slower Intel drive; rightfully so, as it’s cheaper.
While I wouldn’t recommend any of the JMicron based drives, with the Vertex I do believe we have a true value alternative to the X25-M. The Intel drive is still the best, but it comes at a high cost. The Vertex can give you a similar experience, definitely one superior to even the fastest hard drives, but at a lower price. And I’ll spare you the obligatory reference to the current state of the global economy. The Samsung SLC drives have come down in price but they don't seem to age as gracefully as the Intel or OCZ Vertex drives. If you want price/performance, the Vertex appears to be the best option and if you want all-out performance, snag the Intel drive.
The only potential gotcha is that both OCZ and Indilinx are smaller companies than Intel. There’s a lot of validation that goes into these drives and making sure they work in every configuration. While the Vertex worked totally fine in the configurations I tested, that’s not to say that every last bug has been worked out. There are a couple of threads in OCZ’s own forums that suggest compatibility problems with particular configurations; while this hasn’t been my own experience, it’s worth looking into before you purchase the drive.
While personally I'm not put off by the gradual slowdown of SSDs, I can understand the hesitation. In the benchmarks we've looked at today, for the most part these drives perform better than the fastest hard drives even when the SSDs are well worn. But with support for TRIM hopefully arriving close to the release of Windows 7, it may be very tempting to wait. Given that the technology is still very new, the next few revisions to drives and controllers should hold tremendous improvements.
Drives will get better and although we're still looking at SSDs in their infancy, as a boot/application drive I still believe it's the single best upgrade you can do to your machine today. I've moved all of my testbeds to SSDs as well as my personal desktop. At least now we have two options to choose from: the X25-M and the Vertex.
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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.