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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VaultDweller - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I love it when people critique someone's critique of grammar... and get it wrong.It's an SSD, not a SSD.
gwolfman - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
lolzsidex - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I would like to know the firmware version of Vertex used in your review. To me sounds the old 0112kensiko - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Yes that is important to know.I'm sure this is not done with the latest firmware available which is 1199. This version got better performance.
Firmware 1275 is coming also.
Anand, will you update your benchmarks with the latest firmware?
If not, then the benchmarks are obsolete.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I tested with the shipping firmware for this article (0122). I've been playing around with 1199 in the lab and will most likely have an update in a couple of weeks once I've done a thorough evaluation of it. By then I should also have the final version of the new Samsung drive and maybe even some other interesting things.For now, I've got to get to work on the new Mac Pro and the updated Ion article :) I need a small break from SSDs por favor :)
Take care,
Anand
VaultDweller - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Awww, don't you have some underlings to do your SSD-related will?Would love to see an update, and would love to see Corsair's SSD drive tested as well (it's based on Samsung's last generation MLC controller, and doesn't seem to emphasize sequential like the Summit does).
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I will do an update on the new firmware, I just want to do it right so it'll take some time :)I'll put in a request for the Corsair drive as well :)
-A
Slash3 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Page 29: "Not all applications will launch faster than a VelociRaptor on a SSD, but let's not forget that the VelociRaptor is the world's fastest hard drive."Really? What about the nice and speedy enterprise-level 15k SAS/SCSI drives everyone neglects to acknowledge? :)
George Powell - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
I believe it refers to consumer drives. While SAS drives are beginning to be a possibility on the desktop with newer motherboards supporting them natively, the drives themselves are too expensive and too noisy for most consumers to actually want them.FishTankX - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Good info. However, I noticed one mistake.Second page
Samsung had a MLC controller at the time but it was too expensive than what SuperTalent was shooting for.