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
Disappointed, I went back to OCZ
OCZ was worried. The last time I reviewed one of their SSDs I was truthful about it, and it hurt their sales considerably. Customers were returning drives, and to OCZ’s credit, they stepped up and even accepted some returns themselves - something that most manufacturers wouldn’t have done. Regardless what they had told me, there was some admission of fault there. Those JMicron drives were nothing short of crap.
As soon as OCZ started getting word that I wasn’t pleased with Vertex, they went into a state of panic. These drives all do very well in synthetic HDD tests like HDTach and ATTO, that’s generally all they’re reviewed in, so that’s all they’re tested in. But now OCZ was hearing that the Vertex wasn’t passing some of my tests and they had no idea what it was failing or why.
I tend to do a good job of keeping what tests I run secret until the review is published, so there isn’t any unfair optimization. I purposefully introduce new tests to our performance suites to help keep manufacturers honest and optimizing for real world usage scenarios rather than specific benchmarks. OCZ had no idea what I was running, but they knew that the Vertex wasn’t doing well.
Summit on the other hand was performing just fine, but that’s an expensive drive. Vertex was supposed to be good, it should’ve been good, there’s no reason for it to be performing this poorly. I ran the infamous iometer test to see what was going on:
| Iometer 4KB Random Writes, IOqueue=1, 8GB sector space | IOs per second | MB/s | Average Latency | Maximum Latency |
| Original Pre-release OCZ Vertex | 20.7 | 0.08 MB/s | 48.2 ms | 484.5 ms |
How on earth is this acceptable at all? Average latency of 48.2ms and a maximum latency as bad as the Apex and G.Skill Titan drives? I’ve heard some SSD vendors dismiss the iometer results but let me caution you against that. What these numbers are telling us is that on average, when your OS goes to write a 4KB file somewhere on your drive, it’ll take nearly 50ms. That’s 4.5x longer than a 5400 RPM 2.5” notebook drive and that’s the average case. What part of that sounds acceptable? Anyone who tells you otherwise is delusional.
I thought for sure that the drive was broken and that we’d made no progress since last fall. But the drive hadn’t launched yet, while there were glowing reviews of it, no one had wasted any money. I wrote an email to Ryan Petersen, OCZ’s CEO. I described my findings and told him that while the Vertex’s performance was better than any of the JMicron solutions, it was unacceptable for anything other than perhaps extremely light, single-tasking usage.
I told him it sucked. He said that wasn’t fair. We argued over email but he came back and asked me what I needed to see to make the drive better.
I told him I’d need an average response time in the sub-1ms range and a max latency no worse than Intel’s 94ms. I didn’t think it would be possible. I was prepared for OCZ to hate me once more. He told me to give him a couple of days.
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coil222 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Yes I run a pair of MTRON 7500s in a raid 0 stripe for my OS and Gaming (wow). I don't recall numbers off the top of my head but tests were better on the raid 0 than a single drive configuration.Watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&fea...">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&fea...
sawyeriii - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I just wanted to state how much I loved the combination of technical and real world information in this article.What is the possibility of having different page sizes built into a drive? I.e. you could have a drive with many 1k page packages on one die, 2k on another, and most others 4k. Could that theoretically help? Could the controllers work with that (or would you need to combine multiple 1k's into a 4k transfer size)?
PS One note on page 3, the VelociRaptor and Intel in the first chart (responce time) are switched, however the text is correct.
StormyParis - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
the ugly truth is that an SSD won't let you do anything that you couldn't do without it, and due to its cost and small capacity, it's not a replacement drive, it's an extra drive: not less power consumption but more, not less noise but just the same. You just gain a bit of time when booting up and lauching apps... which I do about 1/week and 1/day, respectively. Assuming your system has enough RAM (and if it doesn't, buy RAM before buying an SSD !), you won't feel much difference once the apps are launched.For the same cost, I'd rather buy a bigger screen.
It's urgent to wait for prices to come down. But I'm all for lots of people buying them now and help get the price down for us wiser buyers.
Rasterman - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
I've already decided my next system in a few months will have one, after you go through 5 hard drive failures (over several years) lets see how much your willing to pay to not have to put up with it anymore. If you use your PC for anything useful (work) then an SSD is a no brainer even at $1000/64GB IMO if the data security is there, speed is secondary for me.When you already have the best screen, video card, memory, why not have the best drive? And your argument is pretty dumb, almost any upgrade won't let you do anything that you couldn't do without it, not just SSDs.
Calin - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
You get lower power due to the lower power use of the SSD and the fact that the other drive is not stressed with difficult access patterns (small random reads/writes). Remember that idle power of a SSD drive is very low7Enigma - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
No, his comment was accurate for most users. Due to the small capacities and high cost these will be used as boot drives primarily with maybe a single heavily used program (say the current game or program you are playing/using), the rest will be on an additional drive. So while the power consumption of the SSD would be less than the old drive, the aggregate power usage of both (even when the larger storage drive is primarily at idle) will be higher than the single HD.And I believe you meant to say traditional HD for idle power?
strikeback03 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
If all you were going to throw on the drive is the OS and a game, a 32GB drive should be plenty. The reason the 80GB and up range is important is so general consumers can load all their programs on it.But yes, in consumer usage other than a laptop, some people who were previously using one drive for both boot and storage would likely need a mechanical HDD is addition to the SSD. OTOH, those who were using a Velociraptor (or RAID array) for boot and another drive for storage will see their power consumption decrease.
sawyeriii - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Have you used a SSD? (If so which)I would state that it is not a luxary product, it is a premium product. The price difference you pay WILL translate to faster performance (if you choose correctly). More RAM only helps upto a point.
Remember performance is based on a system of parts...
CPU
RAM
NORTHBRIDGE
GPU
SOUTHBRIDGE
I/O INTERFACE
HDD/SDD
Microsoft's Windows Experience Index has specific flaws, but the concept is sound... The system can only go a fast as the slowest component in the system (relative to the amount of time used by that component).
Testtest - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
... there's also Supertalent's Ultradrive ME (MLC) and LE (SLC) and Photofast's G-Monster v3At least the Supertalent drives are quite a bit cheaper with the same drive layout/controller than the Vertex drives and only differ in the firmware (which isn't bad either).
It's however possible at least with the Ultradrive ME currently to provoke a kinda timeout error after they've been fully filled once and then still beeing written on. I don't own a Vertex so I can't test that there but if it was a controller issue, it should pop up there sooner or later as well (if you take a look in their suppport forum some error reports seem very similar).
Intels have their 80% bug, Indilinx drives have their issues too it seems - let's hope that firmware can cure it!
Great article btw!
iwod - Thursday, March 19, 2009 - link
Both SuperTalent and OCZ 30 / 32 GB drive cost exactly the same on NewEgg$129