OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS & Patriot Wildfire SSDs Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 23, 2011 4:35 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2011
Last year we introduced our AnandTech Storage Bench, a suite of benchmarks that took traces of real OS/application usage and played them back in a repeatable manner. I assembled the traces myself out of frustration with the majority of what we have today in terms of SSD benchmarks.
Although the AnandTech Storage Bench tests did a good job of characterizing SSD performance, they weren't stressful enough. All of the tests performed less than 10GB of reads/writes and typically involved only 4GB of writes specifically. That's not even enough exceed the spare area on most SSDs. Most canned SSD benchmarks don't even come close to writing a single gigabyte of data, but that doesn't mean that simply writing 4GB is acceptable.
Originally I kept the benchmarks short enough that they wouldn't be a burden to run (~30 minutes) but long enough that they were representative of what a power user might do with their system.
Not too long ago I tweeted that I had created what I referred to as the Mother of All SSD Benchmarks (MOASB). Rather than only writing 4GB of data to the drive, this benchmark writes 106.32GB. It's the load you'd put on a drive after nearly two weeks of constant usage. And it takes a *long* time to run.
1) The MOASB, officially called AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload, mainly focuses on the times when your I/O activity is the highest. There is a lot of downloading and application installing that happens during the course of this test. My thinking was that it's during application installs, file copies, downloading and multitasking with all of this that you can really notice performance differences between drives.
2) I tried to cover as many bases as possible with the software I incorporated into this test. There's a lot of photo editing in Photoshop, HTML editing in Dreamweaver, web browsing, game playing/level loading (Starcraft II & WoW are both a part of the test) as well as general use stuff (application installing, virus scanning). I included a large amount of email downloading, document creation and editing as well. To top it all off I even use Visual Studio 2008 to build Chromium during the test.
The test has 2,168,893 read operations and 1,783,447 write operations. The IO breakdown is as follows:
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload IO Breakdown | ||||
| IO Size | % of Total | |||
| 4KB | 28% | |||
| 16KB | 10% | |||
| 32KB | 10% | |||
| 64KB | 4% | |||
Only 42% of all operations are sequential, the rest range from pseudo to fully random (with most falling in the pseudo-random category). Average queue depth is 4.625 IOs, with 59% of operations taking place in an IO queue of 1.
Many of you have asked for a better way to really characterize performance. Simply looking at IOPS doesn't really say much. As a result I'm going to be presenting Storage Bench 2011 data in a slightly different way. We'll have performance represented as Average MB/s, with higher numbers being better. At the same time I'll be reporting how long the SSD was busy while running this test. These disk busy graphs will show you exactly how much time was shaved off by using a faster drive vs. a slower one during the course of this test. Finally, I will also break out performance into reads, writes and combined. The reason I do this is to help balance out the fact that this test is unusually write intensive, which can often hide the benefits of a drive with good read performance.
There's also a new light workload for 2011. This is a far more reasonable, typical every day use case benchmark. Lots of web browsing, photo editing (but with a greater focus on photo consumption), video playback as well as some application installs and gaming. This test isn't nearly as write intensive as the MOASB but it's still multiple times more write intensive than what we were running last year.
As always I don't believe that these two benchmarks alone are enough to characterize the performance of a drive, but hopefully along with the rest of our tests they will help provide a better idea.
The testbed for Storage Bench 2011 has changed as well. We're now using a Sandy Bridge platform with full 6Gbps support for these tests. All of the older tests are still run on our X58 platform.
AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload
We'll start out by looking at average data rate throughout our new heavy workload test:
The breakdown of reads vs. writes tells us more of what's going on:
The next three charts just represent the same data, but in a different manner. Instead of looking at average data rate, we're looking at how long the disk was busy for during this entire test. Note that disk busy time excludes any and all idles, this is just how long the SSD was busy doing something:
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alpha754293 - Friday, June 24, 2011 - link
Can you run h2benchw on the drives and post the results? Thanks.doylecc - Friday, June 24, 2011 - link
Anand,What write amplification did you get during your use of the SSD 510?
Thanks, and good review.
bse8128 - Friday, June 24, 2011 - link
I was wondering for a moment how (128GB-120GB)/128GB can be 13%, but then I noticed that it's really 120GB but 128 GiB. It's a bit confusing to call both 10^9 and 2^30 just "GB".jwilliams4200 - Friday, June 24, 2011 - link
Yes, I really wish Anand would keep his GB and GiB units straight. It makes his articles very difficult to follow sometimes.Marian666 - Saturday, June 25, 2011 - link
Who the hell asks for qd32?? Like there werent enough of such tests on internet, and anand was like the only one giving us qd3 4k read test....And whats with "depth of 32 instead of 3" ?? How hard it is to test drives in both queue depths
ARGH!!!!
/ragequit
MamiyaOtaru - Saturday, June 25, 2011 - link
this site used to be like my bible for SSDs. This continued pushing of OCZ in spite of manifest and multiple failures in their drives has soured me on the whole thing a bit.That aside, I went with Intel for a Macbook (with Snow Leopard) that had seen a couple hard drives die. It doesn't seem faster at all. I'm not willing to trade reliability for a few more percentage points, so some other drive is not an option. And if an SSD can't improve on the performance offered by a laptop drive I can't imagine what motivation I'd have to put one in my desktop.
somedude1234 - Saturday, June 25, 2011 - link
I had the exact opposite experience. I replaced a 7.2K laptop HDD with an Intel 80GB G2 SSD in my Dell D810 (running XP at the time) and have since migrated that same SSD to a Dell E6400 running Win7. The difference in overall system performance after moving to the SSD was absolutely clear in both XP and Win7, across both laptops.Granted, you're working in a Mac environment, but I will never again willingly deal with a workstation that isn't running an SSD for the OS drive.
I'm currently running my G2 with less than 5GB free, so it feels a bit slower than it did when there was > 20 GB free, but it's still night and day vs any HDD.
The system is used every day for productivity apps (primarily outlook/word/excel) as well as SAP client, putty, remote desktop, etc.
Movieman420 - Saturday, June 25, 2011 - link
Over the last few days, there has been a spark that has brought on a 'meeting of the minds' in this thread:http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread...
Be warned, this is a deeply technical discussion...I only thought I was up to speed on SSDs...lol
cactusdog - Sunday, June 26, 2011 - link
That is just another theory in a long line of theories. It doesnt explain why people have issues on other boards without IME.OCZ have tried to blame everything from sata cables to install methods.
If its only 1% with issues i dont know why OCZ are putting so much effort into it. It would be better for them to just give those 1% a refund to move to another drive.
As it stands, the OCZ forum and staff is preoccupied with this issue that "only affects 1%". It looks much worse than that and no doubt some people will be put off by all the discussion about BSOD's
If it is only 1% with issues, OCZ are handling the situation badly.
mcg75 - Sunday, June 26, 2011 - link
I was getting the bsod so I was watching their forums waiting for the result. OCZ said system was setup wrong. Then there are issues with secure erase in parted magic not working properly. So I went through the hassle of doing it all over again according to Tony's guide with no rst loaded. Still got bsod. Now IME is corrupting cmos. Told Tony that IME wasn't loaded when I got bsod. He only replied that I didn't follow his guide by not installing IME. Later in the thread in response to a post, Tony said we could run without IME using MS ahci which is exactly what I was doing.I've been setting up win7 the exact same way for years. First on a X-25m and no issues. Next a C300 with no issues. Now I setup the same way on a V3 and get bsod and it's all my fault. All OCZ has to do is look around at other forums and see there are far more than 1% being effected by this and it's cross platform with the Sandforce controller being the only constant.
They said they were able to recreate the same problem on other competitors ssd beside V3. When asked, Tony pointed to stuttering experienced by c300 users that was taken care of by firmware. That was his only example, no others and no c300 bsod either.
Now with firmware that reduces performance to get rid of bsod, we're back to the same old story that none of OCZ computers are showing the slowdown just like none of their computers would do the bsod. I dropped 50 points in as-ssd after new firmware was put in then secure erase and fresh install Win7. Obviously, I must be doing something wrong again.
Never again OCZ, never again.