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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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!