Intel X25-V in RAID-0: Faster than X25-M G2 for $250?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 29, 2010 8:59 PM ESTRandom Read/Write Speed
This test reads/writes 4KB in a completely random pattern over an 8GB space of the drive to simulate the sort of random access that you'd see on an OS drive (even this is more stressful than a normal desktop user would see). I perform three concurrent IOs and run the test for 3 minutes. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire time.
I've had to run this test two different ways thanks to the way the newer controllers handle write alignment. Without a manually aligned partition, Windows XP executes writes on sector aligned boundaries while most modern OSes write with 4K alignment. Some controllers take this into account when mapping LBAs to page addresses, which generates additional overhead but makes for relatively similar performance regardless of OS/partition alignment. Other controllers skip the management overhead and just perform worse under Windows XP without partition alignment as file system writes are not automatically aligned with the SSD's internal pages.
First up is my traditional 4KB random write test, each write here is aligned to 512-byte sectors, similar to how Windows XP might write data to a drive:
In sector-aligned 4K random writes, nothing is faster than our X25-V RAID 0 array. We're talking faster than Intel's X25-E, faster than SandForce...you get the picture.
Our 4K aligned test, more indicative of random write performance under newer OSes puts a damper on the excitement:
At 71.6MB/s we're definitely faster than any other Intel drive here, as well as the 50GB SandForce offerings. But still no where near as fast as the C300 or OCZ Vertex LE.
Random read performance didn't improve all that much for some reason. We're bottlenecked somewhere else obviously.
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galvelan - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
Looks forward to the info Annihilus.GullLars - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
Damn, that's a lot of RE:'sAnyways, i thought i'd post it here so everyone could see:
The numbers he's refering to shows 16KB stripe as superior performance-wise.
Here's the PCmark vantage HDD scores of 3 x25-V's in RAID-0 by stripe size:
16KB: 74 164
32KB: 70 364
64KB: 63 710
128KB: 55 045
For those wondering, 16KB shows 540MB/s read and 131MB/s write in CrystalDiskMark 3.0 while 128KB shows 520MB/s read and 131MB/s write (1000MB lenght, 5 runs)
Also, here are the AS SSD total scores by stripe size for 3 x25-V's in RAID-0:
16KB: 809
32KB: 797
64KB: 795
128KB: 774
By doing PCmark vantage points multiplied by 2/3, i guess Anand used a 128KB stripe.
If he'd used a 16KB stripe, the numbers would likely be around 48-49 000
This is supported by benchmarking done by the user Anvil, who got 47 980 points in the Vantage HDD test with 2 x25-V's in RAID-0 off ICH10R with a 16KB stripe size. (IRST 9.6 driver, writeback cache disabled).
galvelan - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
Excellent info GullLars... Think others are just thinking that 128k is best for all SSD's.. But they obviously are not all the same.. Thanx alot!!mschira - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Hi I like to get two 160 25-M for RAID. Linux software RAID to be precise.Can I use TRIM then?
best
M.
yacoub - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
"earlier this month Intel launched its first value SSD: the X25-V."Last month.
The drive was definitely available in early February. Maybe you started writing this article in February? :)
buzznut - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
bought mine in January.Lithium - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Great test Mr. Anand.
Few weeks ago I purchased two Kingston 40GB drives to do just that, RAID-0.
Can you please explain which program you use for Secure Erase and in which enviroment, from DOS or Windows.
Next, when you create smaller 60GB partition, from DOS or from Win7 setup. Should I use quick format from Win7 setup...
All the best
Thanks
7Enigma - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Hi Anand,It it really as simple as copying a large file(s) to the free space of these SSD's in RAID to bring performance back to similar to a secure erase?
If so why doesn't Intel or some other 3rd party release a small program that simply uses My Computers' free space measurement, copy a file of the same size to the SSD and then delete it? Seems like it could be done very easily.
Thanks for the mini-review....makes me want to get another 80gig G2 to RAID with my current one!
mervincm - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I think this app does exactly that. You can even pick if it writes )'s or 1'smervincm - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
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