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The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ

 by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST
250 Comments | Add A Comment
250 Comments

Sequential Read/Write Performance

To measure sequential read and write performance I created an iometer test script to read and write 2MB files to the drives. The writes are 100% sequential and are performed on an unpartitioned drive for 3 minutes.

Performance is reported in MB/s, higher numbers are better.

The sequential read performance of the latest generation of SSDs is nothing short of amazing. The OCZ Vertex pulls through with 250MB/s, over twice the speed of the VelociRaptor and 2.5x the speed of the Samsung SLC drive that OCZ used to sell for $1000.

Looking at write performance we see things change a bit. The OCZ Summit and Intel X25-E are the only two drives that can outperform the VelociRaptor, and they do so handsomely. The rest of the drives fall below even the 7200 RPM Caviar SE16. They are by no means slow, they just don't destroy the fastest hard drives as they do in other tests.

While the X25-E should perform the way it does, the OCZ Summit uses MLC flash yet it performs like an SLC drive. This is a very important benchmark as it shows the sort of performance Samsung has optimized for with its controller. This drive is designed to shatter bandwidth barriers, but what about latency?

The Test Random Read/Write Performance
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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, thx

  • mikeblas - 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.
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