The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Why You Absolutely Need an SSD
Compared to mechanical hard drives, SSDs continue to be a disruptive technology. These days it’s difficult to convince folks to spend more money, but I can’t stress the difference in user experience between a mechanical HDD and a good SSD. In every major article I’ve written about SSDs I’ve provided at least one benchmark that sums up exactly why you’d want an SSD over even a RAID array of HDDs. Today’s article is no different.
The Fresh Test, as I like to call it, involves booting up your PC and timing how long it takes to run a handful of applications. I always mix up the applications and this time I’m actually going with a lighter lineup: World of Warcraft, Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Firefox 3.5.1.
Other than those three applications, the system was a clean install - I didn’t even have any anti-virus running. This is easily the best case scenario for a hard drive and on the world’s fastest desktop hard drive, a Western Digital VelociRaptor, the whole process took 31 seconds.
And on Intel’s X25-M SSD? Just 6.6 seconds.
A difference of 24 seconds hardly seems like much, until you actually think about it in terms of PC response time. We expect our computers to react immediately to input; even waiting 6.6 seconds is an eternity. Waiting 31 seconds is agony in the PC world. Worst of all? This is on a Core i7 system. To have the world’s fastest CPU and to have to wait half a minute for a couple of apps to launch is just wrong.
A Personal Anecdote on SSDs
I’m writing this page of the article on the 15-inch MacBook Pro I reviewed a couple of months ago. I’ve kept the machine stock but I’ve used it quite a bit since that review thanks to its awesome battery life. Of course, by “stock” I mean that I have yet to install an SSD.
Using the notebook is honestly disappointing. I always think something is wrong with the machine when I go to fire up Adium, Safari, Mail and Pages all at the same time to get to work. The applications take what feels like an eternity to start. While they are all launching the individual apps are generally unresponsive, even if they’ve loaded completely and I’m waiting on others. It’s just an overall miserable experience by comparison.
It’s shocking to think that until last year, this is how all of my computer usage transpired. Everything took ages to launch and become useful, particularly the first time you boot up your PC. It was that more than anything else that drove me to put my PCs to sleep rather than shut them down. It was also the pain of starting applications from scratch and OS X’s ability to get in/out of sleep quickly that made me happier using OS X than XP and later Vista.
It’s particularly interesting when you think of the ramifications of this. It’s the poor random read/write performance of the hard disk that makes some aspects of PC usage so painful. It’s the multi-minute boot times that make users more frustrated with their PCs. While the hard disk helped the PC succeed, it’s the very device that’s killing the PC in today’s instant-on, consumer electronics driven world. I challenge OEMs to stop viewing SSDs as a luxury item and to bite the bullet. Absorb the cost, work with Intel and Indilinx vendors to lower prices, offer bundles, do whatever it takes but get these drives into your systems.
I don’t know how else to say this: it’s an order of magnitude faster than a hard drive. It’s the difference between a hang glider and the space shuttle; both will fly, it’s just that one takes you to space. And I don’t care that you can buy a super fast or high flying hang glider either.
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nemitech - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
opps - not ebay - it was NEWEGG.Loki726 - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Thanks a ton for including the pidgin compiler benchmarks. I didn't think that HD performance would make much of a difference (linking large builds might be a different story), but it is great to have numbers to back up that intuition. Keep it up.torsteinowich - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
HiYou write that the Indilinx wiper tool collects a free page list from the OS, then wipes the pages. This sounds like a dangerous operation to me since the OS might allocate some of these blocks after the tool collects the list, but before they are wiped.
Have you received a good explanation for Indilinx about how they ensure file system integrity? As far as i know Windows cannot temporarily switch to read-only mode on an active file system (at least not the system drive). The only way i could see this tool working safely would be by booting off a different media and accessing the file system to be trimmed offline with a tool that correctly identifies the unused pages for the particular file system being used. I could be wrong of course, maybe windows 7 has a system call to temporarily freeze FS writes, but i doubt it.
has407 - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
It: (1) creates a large temporary file (wiper.dat) which gobbles up all (or most) of the free space; (2) determines the LBA's occupied by that file; (3) tells the SSD to TRIM those LBA's; and then (4) deletes the temporary file (wiper.date).From the OS/filesystem perspective, it's just another app and another file. (A similar technique is used by, e.g., sysinternals Windows SDelete app to zero free space. For Windows you could also probably use the hooks used by defrag utilities to accomplis it, but that would be a lot more work.)
cghebert - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Anand,Great article. Once again you have outclassed pretty much every other site out there with the depth of content in this review. You should start marketing t-shirts that say "Everything I learned about SSDs I learned from AnandTech"
I did have a question about gaming benchmarks, since you made this statement:
" but as you'll see later on in my gaming tests the benefits of an SSD really vary depending on the game"
But I never saw any gaming benchmarks. Did I miss something?
nafhan - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Just wanted to say awesome review.I've been reading Anandtech since 2000, and while other sites have gone downhill or (apparently) succumbed to pressure from advertisers, you guys have continued to give in depth, critical reviews.
I also appreciate that you do some real analysis instead of just throwing 10 pages of charts online.
Thanks, and keep up the good work!
zysurge - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Awesome amazing article. So much information, presented clearly.Question, though? I have an Intel G2 160GB drive coming in the next few days for my Dell D830 laptop, which will be running Windows 7 x64.
Do I set the controller to ATA and use the Intel Matrix driver, or set it to AHCI and use Microsoft's driver? Will either provide an advantage? I realize neither will provide TRIM until Q4, but after the firmware update, both should, right?
Thanks in advance!
ggathagan - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
From page 15 (Early Trim support...):Under Windows 7 that means you have to use a Microsoft made IDE or AHCI driver (you can't install chipset drivers from anyone else).
Mumrik - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
but I can't live with less than 300GB on that drive, and SSDs in usable sizes still cost more than high end video cards :-(I really hope I'll be able to pick up a 300GB drive for 100-200 bucks in a year or so, but it is probably a bit too optimistic.
Simen1 - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
This is simply wrong. Ask anyone over 10 years if they think this mathematical statement is true or false. 80 can never equal 74,5.Now, someone claims that 1 GB = 10^9 B and others claim that 1 GB is 2^30 B. Who is really right? What does the G and the B mean? Who defines that?
The answers is easy to find and document. B means Byte. G stands for Giga ans means 10^6, not 2^30. Giga is defined in the international system of units, SI.
No standardization organization have _ever_ defined Giga to be 2^30. But IEC, International Electrotechnical Commission, have defined "Gi" to 2^30. This is supposed to be used for digital storage so people wont be confused by all the misunderstandings around this. Misunderstandings that mainly comes from Microsoft and quite a few other big software vendors. Companies that ignore the mathematical errors in their software when they claim that 80GB = 74,5 GB, and ignore both international standards on how to shorten large numbers.