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
The Fresh Boot Test
Allow me to set the stage. You just turn on your PC. I’m talking about a well used PC with tons of applications and data on the drive, not a clean test image. The moment you hit the Windows desktop you go and fire up the three applications you need to start working with right away.
If you ever wanted to know why SSDs are so much better, this is your reason. I ran through that exact scenario on our SSD testbeds. As soon as I hit the Vista desktop I ran Internet Explorer, Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Pinnacle Studio 12; I waited for all three to load, in the case of Pinnacle Studio I waited for my HD video project to load before stopping the timer.
The results speak for themselves:
Everyone’s beloved posterchild, the Western Digital VelociRaptor took 41.2 seconds to fully launch all three applications. Normal hard drives will fare much worse. The Seagate Momentus 5400.6, a high performance 5400RPM notebook drive took another 30 seconds on top of the WD time.
Now look at the SSDs; the worst SSDs we’ve got launch these applications in half the time of the VelociRaptor. The Intel X25-M will load the apps in about 13 seconds, barely a second longer than how long it takes to run Pinnacle Studio alone on an idle machine.
A good SSD makes Vista usable. All of the background tasks are nothing for these drives. If you ever sit there at an idle desktop and hear Vista go to town on your hard drive, those are IO operations that will bring any normal drive to its knees - or at least keep it busy enough to make all other IO requests take much longer than they should.
The SSDs that are worth recommending all deliver anywhere from 2x to 40x the number of IOs per second for small, random file writes compared to the Raptor. It doesn’t matter how many Raptors you RAID together, you’ll never achieve this sort of performance.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
250 Comments
View All Comments
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.