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.
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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.