The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
All Indilinx Drives Are Built Alike
G.Skill, OCZ, Super Talent and Patriot all sent their Indilinx MLC drives in for review. If you take the drives apart you see that most are the very same on the inside, despite differences externally:
From Left to Right: OCZ Vertex Turbo, OCZ Agility, Patriot Torqx, G.Skill Falcon and Super Talent UltraDrive GX. Only the Super Talent drive uses a different PCB design.
Even the packaging doesn’t appear to vary much between manufacturers; that part I don’t really understand. All that seems to change is the artwork on the outside.
There are some minor differences between drives. Patriot ships its Torqx with a 2.5” to 3.5” drive bay adapter, a nice addition. The Torqx also comes with a 10 year warranty, the longest of any Indilinx based manufacturer. OCZ is next with a 3 year warranty, followed by Super Talent and G.Skill at 2 years.
Indilinx is still a very small company so it relies on its customers to help with validation, testing and even provide feedback for firmware development. As far as I can tell, every single Indilinx customer gets the same firmware revisions. Some vendors choose to rename the firmware revisions, while others do not. OCZ calls its latest stable firmware 1.30, while G.Skill, Super Talent and Patriot call it 1571.
The Indilinx Barefoot controller (right), powered by an ARM core.
Of all the Indilinxites, OCZ and Super Talent work closest with the controller manufacturer. In exchange for their help in manufacturing and validation, OCZ and Super Talent also get access to the latest firmwares earlier than the rest of the manufacturers. Ultimately all manufacturers will get access to the same firmware, it just takes longer if you’re not OCZ or Super Talent.
You no longer need to use a jumper to upgrade your firmware, provided that you’re already running fw revision 1275 or later. If you have a previous version you’re pretty much out of luck as you need to upgrade to 1275 first before upgrading to anything else, and none of the manufacturers make it easy to do. Some don’t even offer links to the necessary firmware you’d need to jump to 1275. Thankfully pretty much anything you buy today should come nearly up to date, so this mostly impacts the original customers of the drive.
Performance, as you’d expect, is the same regardless of manufacturer:
There's normal variance between drives depending on the flash/controller, that's why the OCZ Vertex is slower than the Patriot Torqx here but faster than the Super Talent UltraDrive GX. The manufacturer and size of the flash has more to do with determining performance. Samsung is used on all of these drives but the larger the drive, the better the performance. The 256GB model here will always be faster than a 128GB drive, which will always be faster than a 64GB, etc...
All of the drives here use the same firmware (1571) except for one of the Super Talent drives. That drive is using the beta 1711 firmware with TRIM support that was pulled.
When it comes to the best overall package, I’d say Patriot’s Torqx is the nicest for a desktop customer. You get a 3.5” adapter bracket and a 10 year warranty (although it’s difficult to predict what Patriot’s replacement strategy will be in 10 years).
The Patriot Torqx bundle, complete with a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter.
Prices vary a bit between manufacturers, although most of the more expensive drives here have a $30 rebate to bring their prices in line:
| Price for 128GB | |
| Corsair Extreme Series | $384.00 |
| OCZ Agility | $329.00 |
| OCZ Vertex | $369.00 |
| OCZ Vertex Turbo | $439.00 |
| Patriot Torqx | $354.99 |
OCZ does do some unique things that the other manufacturers don’t such as deliver an overclocked drive (Turbo) and a drive with slower flash (Agility). There’s a Mac Edition of the Vertex, unfortunately it’s no different than the regular drive - it just has a different sticker on it and a higher pricetag.
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GourdFreeMan - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
You would, in fact, be incorrect. I refer you to ANSI/IEEE Std 1084-1986, which defines kilo, mega, etc. as powers of two when used to refer to sizes of computer storage. It was common practice to use such definitons in Computer Science from the 1970s until standards were changed in 1991. As many people reading Anandtech received their formal education during this time period, it is understandable that the usage is still commonplace.Undersea - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Where was this article two weeks ago before I bought my OCZ summit? I hope this little article will jump start samsung.Thanks for all the hard work :)
FrancoisD - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Hi Anand,Great article, as always. I've been following your site since the beginning and it's still the best one out there today!
I mainly use Mac's these days and was wondering if you knew anything about Apple's plans for TRIM??
Thanks for all the fantastic work, very technical yet easy to understand.
François
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Thanks for your support over the years :)No word on Apple's plans for TRIM yet, I am digging though...
Take care,
Anand
Dynotaku - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Amazing article as always, now I just need one that shows me how to install just Win 7 and my Steam folder to the SSD and move Program Files and "My Documents" or whatever it's called in Win7 to a mechanical disk.GullLars - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
A really great article with loads of data.I only have one complaint. The 4kb random read/write tests in IOmeter was done with QD=3, this simulates a really light workload, and does not allow the controllers to make use of the potential of all their flash channels. I've seen intels x25-M scale up to 130-140 MB/s of 4KB random read @ QD=64 (medium load) with AHCI activated. I have not yet tested my Vertex SSDs or Mtron Pro's, but i suspect they also scale well beyond QD=3.
It would also be usefull to compare the different tests in the HDDsuite in PCmark vantage instead of only the total score.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
The reason I chose a queue depth of 3 is because that's, on average, what I found when I tried heavily (but realistically) loading some Windows desktop machines. I rarely found a queue depth over 5. The super high QDs are great for enterprise workloads but I don't believe they do a good job at showcasing single user desktop/notebook performance.I agree about the individual HDD suite tests, I was just trying to cut down on the number of graphs everyone had to mow through :)
Take care,
Anand
heulenwolf - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Anand,I'd like to add my thanks to the many in the comments. Your articles really do stand out in their completeness and clarity. Well done.
I'm hoping you or someone else in the forums can shed some light on a problem I'm having. I got talked into getting a Dell "Ultraperformance" SSD for my new work system last year. Its a Samsung-branded SLC SSD 64 GB capacity. As your results predict, its really snappy when its first loaded and performance degrades after a few months with the drive ~3/4 full. One thing I haven't seen predicted, though, is that the drives have only lasted 6 months. The first system I received was so unstable without explanation that we convinced Dell to replace the entire machine. Since then, I'm now on my second SSD refurb replacement under warranty. In both SDD failures, the drive worked normally for ~6 months, then performance dropped to 5-10 MB/sec, Vista boot times went up to ~15 minutes, and I paid dearly in time for every single click and keypress. Once everything finally loaded, the system behaved almost normally. Dell's own diagnostics pointed to bad drives, yet, in each case, the bad SSD continued to work just at super slow speeds. I was careful to disable Vista's automatic defrag with every install.
My IT staff has blamestormed first Vista (we're still mostly an XP shop) and now SSDs in general as the culprit. They want me to turn in the SSD and replace it with a magnetic hard drive. So, my question is how to explain this:
A) Am I that 1 in a bazillion case of having gotten a bad system followed by a bad drive followed by another bad drive
B) Is there something about Vista - beyond auto defrag - that accelerates the wear and tear on these drives
C) Is there something about Samsung's early SSD controllers that drops them to a lower speed under certain conditions (e.g. poorly implemented SMART diagnostics)
D) Is my IT department right and all SSDs are evil ;)?
Ardax - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Well, first you could point them to this article to point out how bad the Samsung SSDs are. Replace it with an Intel or Indilinx-based drive and you should be fine. Anecdotes so far indicate that people have been beating on them for months.As far as configuring Vista for SSD usage, MS posted in the Engineering Windows 7 Blog about what they're doing for SSDs. [url=http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/suppor...">http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/0...nd-q-a-f...]Article Link[/url].
The short version of it is this: Disable Defrag, SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, and Application and Boot Prefetching. All these technologies were created to work around the low random read/write performance of traditional HDs and are unnecessary (or unhealthy, in the case of defrag) with SSDs.
heulenwolf - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Thanks for the reply, Ardax. Unfortunately, the choice of SSD brand was Dell's. As Anand points out, OEM sales is where Samsung's seems to have a corner on the market. The choices are: Samsung "Ultraperformance" SSD, Samsung not-so-ultraperformance SSD, Magnetic HDD, or void the warranty by getting installing a non-Dell part. I could ask that we buy a non-Dell SSD but since installing it would preclude further warranty support from Dell and all SSDs have become the scapegoat, I doubt my request would be accepted. Additionally, the article doesn't say much about drive reliability which is the fundamental problem in my case.I'll look into the linked recommendations on Win 7 and SSDs. I had already done some research on these features and found the general concensus to be that leaving any of them enabled (with the exception of defrag) should do no harm.