The SSD Improv: Intel & Indilinx get TRIM, Kingston Brings Intel Down to $115
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 17, 2009 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Overall System Performance using PCMark Vantage
Next up is PCMark Vantage, another system-wide performance suite. For those of you who aren’t familiar with PCMark Vantage, it ends up being the most real-world-like hard drive test I can come up with. It runs things like application launches, file searches, web browsing, contacts searching, video playback, photo editing and other completely mundane but real-world tasks. I’ve described the benchmark in great detail before but if you’d like to read up on what it does in particular, take a look at Futuremark’s whitepaper on the benchmark; it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to be a member of a comprehensive storage benchmark suite. Any performance impacts here would most likely be reflected in the real world.
The overall impact of the TRIM firmware is negligable, no real improvements here - something you'll see echoed in nearly all of the PCMark results. The 40GB Kingston drive does well for its price, delivering performance similar to an Indilinx drive as it is crippled by a small amount of free space.
The memories suite includes a test involving importing pictures into Windows Photo Gallery and editing them, a fairly benign task that easily falls into the category of being very influenced by disk performance.
The TV and Movies tests focus on on video transcoding which is mostly CPU bound, but one of the tests involves Windows Media Center which tends to be disk bound.
The gaming tests are very well suited to SSDs since they spend a good portion of their time focusing on reading textures and loading level data. All of the SSDs dominate here, but as you'll see later on in my gaming tests the benefits of an SSD really vary depending on the game. Take these results as a best case scenario of what can happen, not the norm.
In the Music suite the main test is a multitasking scenario: the test simulates surfing the web in IE7, transcoding an audio file and adding music to Windows Media Player (the most disk intensive portion of the test).
The Communications suite is made up of two tests, both involving light multitasking. The first test simulates data encryption/decryption while running message rules in Windows Mail. The second test simulates web surfing (including opening/closing tabs) in IE7, data decryption and running Windows Defender.
I love PCMark's Productivity test; in this test there are four tasks going on at once, searching through Windows contacts, searching through Windows Mail, browsing multiple webpages in IE7 and loading applications. This is as real world of a scenario as you get and it happens to be representative of one of the most frustrating HDD usage models - trying to do multiple things at once. There's nothing more annoying than trying to launch a simple application while you're doing other things in the background and have the load take forever.
The final PCMark Vantage suite is HDD specific and this is where you'll see the biggest differences between the drives:
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chizow - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
Ya they had them for about 4 hours in an AM Shell Shocker for $240, which is their MSRP. They also had them for that price for about 8 hours at launch and since then its been gouged as high as $400 for a G2. All the other retailers that are selling for around the $240 MSRP are drop-shipping directly from Intel so they typically don't have stock in-hand and are estimating anywhere from 2-8 weeks for delivery....crimson117 - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Amazon has decent prices on these, but shipping time ranges from 2 weeks to 8 weeks.80GB G2 for $244: http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Mainstream-Solid-Retai...">http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Mainstream-...-Retail-...
160GB G2 for $467: http://www.amazon.com/Intel-160GB-Mainstream-Retai...">http://www.amazon.com/Intel-160GB-Mains...-Retail-...
Xentropy - Sunday, November 1, 2009 - link
5 days later now, and Amazon's up to $599 for the 160GB, though they are in stock instead of shipping in several weeks.Exar3342 - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
I bought a G2 80GB yesturday via Amazon from a 3rd party company; was $244.00 (OEM) version. Good times.strikeback03 - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
With your recommendation to keep at least 20% of a drive as free space, should it be within a partition, or just leave some unpartitioned space on the drive?Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Either way works, just don't put data on it :)Take care,
Anand
Doormat - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Anand: great review.The 40GB 5-channel version has read speeds of 170MB/s. Does this mean that if the 10-channel G2 weren't inhibited by SATA 3Gb/s, it would probably get 340MB/s? Or is there diminishing returns on adding more channels.
Also, any price cuts on the horizon or just stagnating until drives start shipping with SATA 6Gb/s support.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
It's possible. All of the high end SSDs are bound by the interface for sequential read speed. I'm not sure how fast the controller could go if it weren't bound by the interface, but over 300MB/s sounds quite likely.Flash prices haven't really gone down lately from what I'm hearing. I don't know of any price cuts on the horizon unfortunately. Next year.
Take care,
Anand
semo - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
i don't think you will see any price cuts since intel can't make enough G2s.I tend to agree with others regarding SATA 3. If intel is not rushing to enable SATA 3 on their ICH anytime soon, why would they be coming out with SATA 3 devices?
ekerazha - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Anand,it's strange to see your
"Is Intel still my overall recommendation? Of course. The random write performance is simply too good to give up and it's only in very specific cases that the 80MB/s sequential write speed hurts you."
of the last review, is now a
"The write speed improvement that the Intel firmware brings to 160GB drives is nice but ultimately highlights a bigger issue: Intel's write speed is unacceptable in today's market."