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 Test
If you’ve managed to make it this far in the article then I owe you a great deal of gratitude. While I’d offer to make you dinner it’d probably be a little impractical, so instead I’ll help you find out how these SSDs perform.
Note that every single benchmark here was run with the drive in a “used” state. Again, I did so by performing a secure erase on the drive, filling it to capacity, then restoring my test bed image over the partition. I can definitely make the drives benchmark faster, but I’m trying to provide performance data that shows you how your drive will behave after you’ve owned it for a while.
To make the benchmarks all that more stressful and realistic, I kept Avast Anti-Virus running and scanning every file accessed in the background of all of my non-suite and non-synthetic tests. Basically everything that was hand-timed. Firmware 0122 is utilized for this review. OCZ recently released firmware revision 1199 that we are testing currently and another release (1275) is expected shortly. We will provide an update if there is a significant difference in performance or the user experience routines.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-965 (3.2GHz) |
| Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) |
| Chipset: | Intel X58 |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1010 (Intel) |
| Memory: | Qimonda DDR3-1066 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Card: | eVGA GeForce GTX 280 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 180.43 |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1920 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit |
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zdzichu - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
Very nice and thorough article. I only lack more current status of TRIM command support in current operating systems. For example, Linux supports it since last year:http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_28#head-a1a9591...">http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_28#h...a9591f48...
Sinned - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
Outstanding article that really helped me understand SSD drives. I wonder how much of an impact the new SATA III standard will have on SSD drives? I believe we are still at the beginning stage for SSD drives and your article shows that much more work needs to be done. My respect for OCZ and how they responded in a positive and productive way should be a model for the rest of the SSD makers. Thank you again for such a concise article.Respectfully,
Sinned
529th - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
The first thing I thought of was Democracy. Don't know why. Maybe it was because a company listened to our common goal of performance. Thank you OCZ for listening, I'm sure it will pay off!!!araczynski - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
very nice read. the 4/512 issue seems a rather stupid design decision, or perhaps more likely a stupid problem to find this 4/512 solution as 'acceptable'.although a great marketing choice, built in automatic life expectancy reduction.
sounds like the manufacturers want the hard drives to become a disposable medium like styrofoam cups.
perhaps when they narrow the disparity down to 4/16, i might consider buying an ssd. that, or when they beat the 'old school' physical platters in price.
until then, get back to the drawing board and stop crapping out these half arsed 'should be good enough' solutions.
IntelUser2000 - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
araczynski: The 4/512 isn't done by accident. It's done to lower prices. The flash technology used in SSDs are meant to replace platter HDDs in the future. There's no way of doing that without cost reductions like these. Even with that the SSDs still cost several times more per storage space.araczynski - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 - link
i understand that, but i don't remember original hard drives being released and being slower than the floppy drives they were replacing.this is part of the 'release beta' products mentality and make the consumer pay for further development.
the 5.25" floppy was better than the huge floppy in all respects when it was released. the 3.5" floppy was better than the 5.25" floppy when it was released. the usb flash drives were better than the 3.5" floppies when they were released.
i just hate the way this is being played out at the consumer's expense.
hellcats - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
Anand,What a great article. I usually have to skip forwards when things bog down, but they never did with this long, but very informative article. Your focus on what matters to users is why I always check anandtech first thing every morning.
juraj - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
I'm curious what capacity is the OCZ Vertex drive reviewed. Is it an 120 / 250g drive or supposedly slower 30 / 60g one?Symbolics - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
The method for generating "used" drives is flawed. For creating a true used drive, the spare blocks must be filled as well. Since this was not done, the results are biased towards the Intel drives with their generous amount of spare blocks that were *not* exhausted when producing the used state. An additional bias is introduced by the reduction of the IOmeter write test to 8 GB only. Perhaps there are enough spare blocks on the Intel drives so that these 8 GB can be written to "fresh" blocks without the need for (time-consuming) erase operations.Apart from these concerns, I enjoyed reading the article.
unknownError - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
I also just created an account to post, very nice article!Lots of good well thought out information, I'm so tired of synthetic benchmarks glad someone goes through the trouble to bench these things right (and appears to have the education to really understand them). Whats with the grammar police though? geez...