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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ryedizzel - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Anand,I just wanted to thank you for an amazing article. I am a very picky buyer and technology critic, so I always come to your site for the ‘real’ story on things. In fact for the amount of time, research, and (useful) testing methodologies you invest, I almost feel guilty receiving this information for free. Especially since your findings benefit the industry as a whole since it causes manufacturer’s to fix/improve their products (well at least the smart ones do). The i7 motherboard roundup was another great example of this. Seriously, if you have a place for donations I would send you $50 in a heartbeat. I know it’s not much but if others did the same it would add up to a decent token of appreciation.
Oh and please don’t take people’s grammar or nitpicky corrections the wrong way. Yes it can be annoying, but in the end it does help the article become closer to perfect since others catch little things overlooked by human error. In the end we are all grateful for these articles, otherwise we wouldn’t be here reading them!
bsoft16384 - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
You know, the JMicron SSDs really aren't so bad. Yes, you'd have to be crazy to spend $400 on one when there are better options like the X25-M (or the new Vertex series for that matter).But I paid $65 for my 30GiB OCZ "Core" SSD. Yeah, random writes are piss slow. I knew this. The drive replaced the 5400.5 that came with my EEE PC.
I'm not going to be doing any 'extensive multitasking' on my EEE. I'm not running a file server, I certainly don't have antivirus in the background, and I don't spend all day installing new apps.
I'm running 7. Compared with the 5400.5, the system boots faster, Chrome loads faster, but Windows updates take longer. That's a trade-off I'm willing to deal with, considering that I get less noise and more battery life in return.
I can tell you this - the JMicron SSDs beat the pants off of the PCIe MLC SSDs that ship with many netbooks.
So, yeah, I guess this is a product that's "unfit for market". But it's perfect for some of us. If I wanted a boot drive for a Linux media/backup server (along with HDDs for storage), I could see choosing a $50 SSD over a $50 HDD.
It's all about your needs. No one is pretending that JMicron SSDs are fast, at least not at writing. But if your usage is mostly read-centric (or "nothing-centric", as is frequently the case on netbooks), and your chief criteria are low power and low price, the JMicron SSDs do quite well.
petersterncan - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Anand,That was an awesome article... and good for you to give OCZ to do the right thing... and they did!
Kudos also to OCZ for actually listening to feedback and doing something about it.
Adul - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Good work Anand :)SSDMaster - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
The stuttering problem with SSD's can be fixed with diskpart. Go do some research before you post an article this massive and convoluted.goinginstyle - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
No it does not, it will help if the partition is properly aligned but it is not a cure, neither is the rest of the voodoo magic being spouted on the OCZ forums. They help, but do not cure the stuttering problem with the JMicron based drives. I just love the fact that OCZ wants to sell you a drive (Core series) that does not work properly, have you purchase third party software, and then hack the OS in order to improve the performance of the product. Glad to see it fixed with the Vertex and Summit drives though, but it will take a long time before I even think about using an OCZ product again. I was hoping to see the new ADATA and SuperTalent drives in this article, maybe those are coming in the next segment he mentioned.SSDMaster - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Yes, it does.I have a Core series 60GB OCZ drive. I bought it right before Newegg increased the price on the drives. The stuttering was horrible, and worthless even as a secondary drive if it was formatted with XP. Also, after using Diskpart and aligning the drive I could not install XP on the drive and have it bootable.. Which sucked.
But there's ways around that, and guess what, I have a stutter free flash drive for cheap that gets very good performance numbers, and boots Server 2008 in under 10 seconds.
bsoft16384 - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
OCZ's product works fine. You may not like the performance, but it's certainly not unusable.The $65 I paid for my 30GiB OCZ "Solid" SSD is about what you'd pay for a USB flash drive. The disk I have has a USB interface, which is very convenient, plus it's plenty fast enough for my EEE PC.
I'm glad that Anand has done these reviews. People need to understand what they're getting into when they by a JMicron SSD. If you don't expect much, you won't be disappointed.
Arguably for a normal notebook/desktop you should buy a normal hard drive if your budget is under $100. But the JMicron SSDs do a good job in netbooks (which, again, aren't too fast to begin with) at a very low price.
I have aligned my partitions and disabled swap on my Windows 7 install (on my EEE). I also have 2GB of memory in my EEE. I haven't done any fancy tweaking on the OS.
Compared with the EEE 900A that I had briefly (PCIe SSD), my EEE 900HA is dramatically faster. You can't run XP or Vista on PCIe SSDs unless you have a lot of patience. You *can* run it on a JMicron SSD.
I honestly don't notice any stuttering. I don't run antivirus and I don't multitask much on this machine. If I demanded from my EEE what I demand from my desktop (Q9300 + 8GB + WD6400AAKS), I know that the SSD would choke up. But I'm not going to do that on a 1.6GHz single-core Atom anyway.
So, yeah, OK. I guess I think that trashing JMicron SSDs is a little like trashing USB flash drives for being slow. Paying $300 for a UFD would be stupid, as is paying $300 for a JMicron SSD. But in the sub-$100 category, you don't expect much.
When better SSDs drop below $100, maybe I'll upgrade. Until then, I'm enjoying 5 hours of battery life on my 900HA.
tomoyo - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Well I think it's unusable for my needs if I'm running it as an operating system drive. I place a giant important on the latency of the drive at that point and it certainly includes random writes. Which is why I would never ever buy an ssd that's majorly below the Intel write performance. It's not worth the price premium or loss of storage size compared to the standard hard drive.Bikerskummm - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Fantastic article Anand!Just a few thoughts:
I have had some trouble replicating some of the Samsung SLC results...
Despite filling the drive up and emulating a well used drive as described in the article I cannot get my Sammy drive's performance to degrade as much as you managed to especially regarding random write performance...
Now my system used for testing is a socket 775 (qx9650) and I was testing on ICH9R and WINXP (SP3) but still I would expect to see similar figures ...
I do not have an X58 system to test on at the moment but I would be very interested if The Sammy SLC drives were shown to degrade faster / perform worse with a X58 / ICH10R / Vista x64 (SP1?) setup...