MyDigitalSSD SMART & BP3 mSATA SSD Review
by Kristian Vättö on January 22, 2013 1:24 PM ESTPerformance Over Time & TRIM
As the SMART is a SandForce drive with the stock firmware, I decided not to test its TRIM performance because we have tested that so many times, the latest being our article on SandForce TRIM issue. Hence this part will only cover the BP3 but since it's a new, untested controller, this data should be rather interesting. Let's start with HD Tach ran on a secure erased drive:
For our torture test, I filled the drive with sequential data and hammered it with 4KB random writes (100% LBA space, QD=32) for 40 minutes:
Performance is actually fairly good. The worst drop is around 70MB/s right at the beginning but after about half of the LBAs have been written with sequential data, the average data rate is around 200MB/s. Part of the cause for this is the fact that the BP3 has slow random write performance, which means it will write less data to the drive than what faster drives would, resulting in a less fragmented drive.
Next I secure erased the drive, filled it and tortured it again and TRIM'ed after torture:
TRIM performance is rather dubious. Performance is definitely better than without TRIM but it's still far from clean state performance. I have a feeling that the controller itself is not very powerful so it may simply not be able to do garbage collection on all the blocks without some idle time between torture and HD Tach run (I immediately TRIM'ed the drive after torture and began the HD Tach run). It would explain why the performance is over 300MB/s for a large part of the drive. The controller may have cleaned some of the blocks and the first writes go there but in the end it faces a situation where it has to read-modify-write because all blocks are full, and write performance drop to figures similar to after torture test.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
49 Comments
View All Comments
nathanddrews - Friday, January 25, 2013 - link
I have a JMicron-based G.SKILL FM-25S2S-64GB sitting around doing nothing. It has a USB port so I sometimes use it as a thumb drive. I am more than happy to donate it to the cause. Just tell me where to send it.Kristian Vättö - Saturday, January 26, 2013 - link
I bet sending the drive to Finland will cost more than the drive itself ;-) Anand should have some older SSDs, so I'll ask if he could run some testsnathanddrews - Saturday, January 26, 2013 - link
I just checked estimates from FedEx and UPS... You are not kidding! I thought it would cost about $25, not $125.Anand lives in southern USA, doesn't he? That should be very cheap. If he doesn't have one of these kickass drives, I'll send it to him. ;-)
Kristian Vättö - Saturday, January 26, 2013 - link
Anand lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. He still has JMicron based drives (just asked him) and he'll run some tests once he finds one, so no need to send one :-)nathanddrews - Saturday, January 26, 2013 - link
Cool, can't wait to see the results. Thanks, Kristian!Per Hansson - Thursday, January 31, 2013 - link
That's nice Kristian!I'm looking forward to seeing those results :)
Tjalve - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
Ive actually done some testing on performance consistency for my reviews over att Nordichardware.sehttp://www.nordichardware.se/SSD-Recensioner/svens...
Theese tests are NOT done on a steady state drive though. But theese nuymbers give an indication on how I/O Latency are reflected i a real-world situation.
AND the graphs include some crappy drives like the Verbatim SSD 128GB and the Teamgroup L2 128GB.
I actually have steady state 4K Write perormance numbers (similiar to the ones here) on most drives aswell, but i havet published them just yet.
Gunbuster - Tuesday, January 22, 2013 - link
Workstation laptops. Going mSATA for OS often leaves you two other spindles for large spinning storage, another SSD or a combo of both.Why? For Hyper-V devs or content creators.
madmilk - Tuesday, January 22, 2013 - link
Workstation laptops and DIY upgrading is quite a niche scenario. Most workstation owners (that is, businesses) would just build-to-order with the SSD, instead of risking downtime just to save a couple hundred bucks.critical_ - Tuesday, January 22, 2013 - link
I own a Dell M6700 with the ADATA SX300 mSATA SSD (256GB) and 3 Hitachi 7200RPM 2.5" 1TB drives in RAID5. While I'd like to think I'm the only person in the world with this configuration, that would be silliness on my part. :)