AS-SSD High Queue Depth Incompressible Sequential Performance

The AS-SSD sequential benchmark takes place at a very high queue depth of 32 and uses incompressible data for all of its transfers. The result is a pretty big reduction in sequential write speed on SandForce based controllers.

AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Read Speed

For all intents and purposes, worst case sequential read performance is identical between the Vertex 3 and Intel SSD 510.

AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Write Speed

While ATTO showed us the Vertex 3 with a signficant advantage over the 510, AS-SSD gives us the other end of the spectrum. If you're going to be copying a lot of H.264 movies around on your SSD, the 510 will likely have better write performance than the Vertex 3. However if you're copying large databases around instead, the advantage will shift back to OCZ/SF.

Performance vs. Transfer Size Overall System Performance using PCMark Vantage
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  • AnnihilatorX - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link

    Anand you didn't clarify very clearly what is the difference of naming between 510 series and X-25 G3.
    The introduction leads me to believe 510 is X-25 G3, or is it not?

    Is X-25 G3 going to use 25nm flash instead, so it's another drive? If so, when is the release date of that, and how do we expect its performance compared to 510 in this review? Will the X-25 G3 uses a custom controller?
  • strikeback03 - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    As the article stated, the G3 (whatever it is officially called) will be a lower-performance part whose aim is to bring lower prices and better reliability to more mainstream segments
  • MrStromberg - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link

    So I've been waiting for quite some time now for the new intel drives since the reviews in the past about how reliable and how long life an SSD has, promising that all of this would be better with these new generation drives. Although now I am faced with the potential "problem" of a 3Gbit bottle neck in mi macbook pro and as mentioned in the review above "these next-generation SSDs not only use 6Gbps SATA, they really need it." So where does that leave me? Should a go for a cheaper older drive which might be less reliable in the long run (but nobody really knows right?) or buy a new generation drive which might be suffering from a bottleneck? I didn't really understand why the new drives really need the 6Gbit SATA to function well? Can someone please explain or give me some advice.

    thank you
  • Denithor - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link

    Best right now would probably be an Intel G2 drive. Fast enough and very good durability.

    The next generation drives aren't really going to perform much better on a 3Gb SATA port than the current generation already does, plus you have the worse durability inherent in the 25nm NAND chips.
  • Nentor - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link

    Wow, so Intel has a gap in it's road map and goes the 3rd party route and brings us a product that is essentially slower than a consumer product (Vertex 3) from another manufacturer.

    They could have gone Sandforce, why not?
  • mateus1984 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link

    http://forums.hexus.net/general-discussion/199892-...
  • Drag0nFire - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link

    Would love to see you run a traditional hdd through the new bench so we can see what sort of real world improvements can be expected from making the switch to an SSD...

    Great article. I'll be waiting for the x25-m G3. Keep on Intel about this!
  • wheel - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link

    Thanks for the review Anand, but I am a little disappointed that there are a lot of synthetic benchmarks but no real world tests.

    By "real world tests" I mean separate tests for: booting into Windows; loading a web browser with 25 tabs of saved web page documents on the HDD; starting Star Craft and loading a map; copying a large amount of files to itself; running a batch Photoshop image transform job; starting IE6 from a stopped Windows XP Mode VM and opening a complex web page hosted on the local disk; running a intensive anti-virus scan on a specific (large) folder etc.

    I know PC Mark and SysMark are meant to represent these real world test, but as individual consumers we have different usage profiles and by breaking down the results into individual tests we can better work out which drive is most appropriate for us, instead of studying the synthetic tests and making an educated guess.

    Cheers,
    Ian
  • Boogaloo - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link

    Seconded.

    A lot of people are complaining about the performance of the drive, and I'd like to know how much of a difference it actually makes in real world scenarios. If this drive comes within 10 ms of a vertex 3 loading up starcraft 2, then who cares?
  • iwod - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link

    If you read carefully the Anand Benchmarks does exactly just that.

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