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 Verdict
There’s no skirting the issue: even the best SSDs lose performance the more you use them. Eventually their performance should level off but what matters the most is how their performance degrades.
In using the X25-M I’d say that the performance drop was noticeable but not a deal breaker - and the data tends to agree with me. With average write latencies still well under 1ms, the drive maintained its most important performance characteristic - the ability to perform random accesses much faster than a conventional hard drive.
Keep in mind that with the cost per GB being as high as it is, these SSDs aren’t going to be used for large file storage in a desktop or notebook. You’re far more likely to use one as your boot/applications drive. As such, what matter the most aren’t peak transfer rates but rather fast access times. On a well designed drive with a good controller, peak transfer rates may fall over time, but latency remains good.
You end up with a drive that still manages to be much faster than the fastest 3.5” hard drives, but slower than when you first got it.
If, however, you aren’t ok with the performance drop over time then it’s worth considering what your options will be. When drives ship with ATA-TRIM support, hopefully late this year, they will do a better job of staying closer to their maximum performance. But the problem won’t be solved completely. Instead, what we’ll need to see is a more fundamental architectural change to eliminate the problem.
I still believe that a SSD is the single most effective performance upgrade you can do to your PC; even while taking this behavior into account. While personally I wouldn’t give up a SSD in any of my machines, I can understand the hesitation in investing a great deal of money in one today.
Intel’s X25-M: Not So Adaptive Performance?
The Intel drive is in a constant quest to return to peak performance, that’s what its controller is designed to do. The drive is constantly cleaning as it goes along to ensure its performance is as high as possible, for as long as possible. A recent PC Perspective investigation unearthed a scenario where the X25-M is unable to recover and is stuck at a significantly lower level of performance until the drive is secure erased once more.
There’s not much I can say about the issue other than I’ve been working with Intel on it very closely and it’s not something I’m overly concerned about at this point. I can replicate the PC Perspective data but not by using my machine normally. Through the right combination of benchmarks I can effectively put the drive in a poor performance state that it won’t recover from without a secure erase. I should also mention that I can do the same to other drives as well.
I’ll be able to say more soon but for now just hang tight. I’d venture a guess that Intel would not leave its most loyal customers out in the cold after spending $400 - $800 on a SSD. I can’t speak for Intel but like I said, stay tuned.
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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.