The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
What's Wrong with Samsung?
The largest SSD maker in the world is Samsung. Samsung makes the drives offered by Apple in its entire MacBook/MacBook Pro lineup. Samsung makes the drives you get if you order a Lenovo X300. In fact, if you're buying any major OEM system with an SSD in it, Samsung makes that drive.
It's just too bad that those drives aren’t very good.
This is the 4KB random write performance of Samsung's latest SSD, based on the RBB controller:
4.4MB/s. That's 3x the speed of a VelociRaptor, but 1/3 the speed of a cheaper Indilinx drive.
Speedy, but not earth shattering. Now let's look at performance once every LBA has been written to. This is the worst case scenario performance we've been testing for the past year:
...and now we're down to mechanical hard drive speeds
Holycrapwtfbbq? Terrible.
Now to be fair to Samsung, this isn’t JMicron-terrible performance. It’s just not worth the money performance.
The Samsung RBB based SSDs are rebranded by at least two manufacturers: OCZ and Corsair.
The OCZ Summit and the Corsair P256 both use the Samsung RBB platform.
The Corsair and OCZ Samsung RBB drives.
The drive most OEMs are now shipping is an even older, lower performing Samsung SSD based on an older controller.
I talked to some of the vendors who ship Samsung RBB based SSDs and got some sales data. They simply can’t give these drives away. The Indilinx based drives outsell those based on the Samsung RBB controller by over 40:1. If end users are smart enough to choose Indilinx and Intel, why aren't companies like Apple and Lenovo?
Don't ever opt for the SSD upgrade from any of these OEMs if you've got the option of buying your own Indilinx or Intel drive and swapping it in there. If you don't know how, post in our forums; someone will help you out.
Samsung realized it had an issue with its used-state performance and was actually the first to introduce background garbage collection; official TRIM support will be coming later. Great right? Not exactly.
There’s currently no way for an end user to flash the firmware on any of these Samsung drives. To make matters worse, there’s no way for companies like OCZ or Corsair to upgrade the firmware on these drives either. If you want a new firmware on the drive, it has to go back to Samsung. I can’t even begin to point out how ridiculous this is.
If you’re lucky enough to get one of the Samsung drives with background garbage collection, then the performance drop I talked about above doesn’t really matter. How can you tell? Open up Device Manager, go to your SSD properties, then details, then select Hardware Ids from the dropdown. Your firmware version will be listed at the end of your hardware id string:
Version 1801Q doesn’t support BGC. Version 18C1Q (or later) does.
How can you ensure you get a model with the right firmware revision? Pick a religion and start praying, because that’s the best you can do.
Now the good news. When brand new, the Samsung drives actually boast competitive sequential write, sequential read and random write speeds.
These drives are also highly compatible and very well tested. For all of the major OEMs to use them they have to be. It’s their random write performance that’s most disappointing. TRIM support is coming later this year and it will help keep the drives performing fresh, but even then they are still slower than the Indilinx alternatives.
There’s no wiper tool and there’s currently no method to deploy end-user flashable firmware updates. Even with TRIM coming down the road, the Samsung drives just don’t make sense.
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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.