The SandForce Roundup: Corsair, Kingston, Patriot, OCZ, OWC & MemoRight SSDs Compared
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 11, 2011 12:01 AM ESTFinal Words
There really shouldn't be any surprises here. Given the same controller, the same NAND and the same firmware there's no difference between SandForce SSDs. They may look different and they may be priced differently, but they are effectively the same. So how do you pick between otherwise identical drives?
Firmware availability is an important feature. OCZ's exclusive arrangement with SandForce still gives it the advantage here. No competing SandForce drive gets firmware updates as quickly as OCZ owners. That's not always a good thing however. In the interest of pushing out fixes and improvements as quickly as possible you don't just get good firmware updates, sometimes you get updates that are best skipped. If you're the type of user that wants the latest updates as quickly as possible, OCZ is your only option.
For everyone else it looks like all of the competing drives are at least running with fairly up to date firmware revisions (either the absolute latest or one revision older than the latest). However it's unclear what the update cadence will be like going forward for these guys. The hope is that you won't need to update the firmware on your drive after you buy it, but it's clear at this point that there's still some room for compatibility improvements in the latest SandForce firmware.
The BSOD issue continues to be a significant blemish on SandForce's trackrecord. I don't have nearly enough systems deployed with SF-2281 hardware to really make any accurate statements of how widespread the issue is, but even if it is limited - it's a problem that should not exist. SandForce based drives continue to offer the best performance out of anything on the market today, not just in peak performance but in performance over time. For systems without TRIM support (e.g. Macs without the TRIM enabler) the hallmark SandForce resiliency is even more important. Unfortunately the unresolved BSOD issue makes all of these drives a risk if you don't know for sure that your system won't be affected.
The safest route without sacrificing significant performance continues to be Intel's SSD 510.
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imaheadcase - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
I was wondering the same thing...this seems to happen a lot lately with roundups.Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
My apologies! An older version of the graphs made its way live, I've updated all of the charts :)Take care,
Anand
Nickel020 - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
I always thought the difference in price between a 25nm SF1200 drive and a synchronous SF2200 was mainly due to the cost of the controller, but since you put the controller at $25, it's the NAND in the SF1200 that must be cheaper.A Corsair F115 with synchronous 25nm (G08CAMDB)* costs $170, a Force 3 with asynchronous NAND costs $185 and a Force GT with synchronous NAND costs $245. The synchronous NAND in the F115 must be way cheaper than the synchronous in the Force GT thus.
I'm guessing the SF2200 is more expensive than the SF1200, so that basically means that following your cost breakdown, the asynchronous NAND in drives such as the Force 3 or Agility 3 must be similarly priced as the synchronous NAND in the 25nm SF1200 drives.
Why is the synchronous in the SF1200 drives so much cheaper than the one in the SF1200 drives? Could you decipher the the whole part number?
*I'm assuming the F115 uses the same NAND as the first Vertex 2s with 25nm:
http://www.tomshardware.de/ocz-vertex-2-25nm-ssd,t...
Coup27 - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
If the current state of affairs are due to the reasons you have outlined in the first couple of paragraphs then this has been brought on by the manufacturers themselves.All the manufacturers have tried to bring costs down as much as possible for obvious reasons, but they should not have brought them down so low that they sacrifice validation and testing to get there.
The benefits SSD's have over HDD's are enormous and I am sure I am not alone when I say that I would quite happily pay an additional 15-25% than the current prices for my drive knowing that it works, full stop.
QChronoD - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
I understand sync and async, but not really sure what toggle means. Is it safe to assume that means that it can switch between the two modes? Or is there something else that is special about it?Nickel020 - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
It's a different NAND standard. Intel/Micron NAND follows the ONFI standard (which they developed afaik), Toggle is another standard that's developed by Samsung and others, the Toggle NAND in SF2281 SSDs is 34nm from Toshiba.If I understand it correctly, the difference is mainly the interface, with which the MLC cells are connected to the controller. Both are MLC though, the basic principle on which they are based is the same.
The Toggle NAND SSDs are generally faster, because 34nm means less density, more NAND dies, and thus more interleaving. Same thing causes bigger SSDs to be faster than smaller ones (read Anands other recent articles if you want to know more).
Conscript - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
is there a reason the same products aren't in every graph? Corsair GT seems to be missing from quite a few?Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
Fixed :)Take care,
Anand
Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
Is there a way you can force the drive to run at SATA2 speeds to see if that eliminates the lockups?irev210 - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
You open this SandForce article on Intel 320 SSDs firmware bug.I love how the BSOD is a page two reference.
Anand, your OCZ/sandforce bias bleeds through pretty hard. I hope you can be a bit more objective with your reports moving forward.
The speed difference between SSDs at this point is pretty trivial. As you continue to hammer about reliability, you never even reviewed the Samsung 470, rarely talk about the Crucial C300/M4, and Toshiba seems to be an afterthought.
At least tomshardware made an attempt to look at SSD reliability.
Bottom line, it seems like sandforce-driven ssds have the biggest number of issues, yet you still recommend them. You say "well I never really experience the issues" but just because you don't doesn't mean that it is the most reliable drive.
I think you should work a little harder at focusing on reliability studies instead of performance metrics. For most users, it taking 1.53 seconds or 1.54 seconds to open an application is pretty irrelevant if SSD A is 10x more likely to fail over SSD B.