Strontium Hawk (240GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on June 25, 2013 8:00 AM ESTTRIM Performance
Our IO consistency tests give a good idea of the drive's garbage collection but for TRIM testing we still rely on the good old HD Tach method. To begin the test, I ran HD Tach on a secure erased drive to get the baseline performance:
Next I tortured the drive for 30 minutes with 4KB random writes (QD=32, 100% LBA) and TRIM'ed the drive after the torture:
TRIM works as expected, although there is some weird behavior at the 50% mark. It seems like the Hawk features a performance mode similar to OCZ's Vector and Vertex 4. The idea is rather simple: you only write to half of the pages until they are full. The gain is lower latencies as your drive is basically operating with 50% over-provisioning, but the downside is that the pages need to be reorganized once more than half of the drive has been filled. In the graph the write speed drops to ~100MB/s but this is because the drive is organizing the pages while it's being written to, which results in quite bad performance. After I had run HD Tach, I let the drive idle for about 10 minutes and IOmeter showed that the write speed had returned to +300MB/s. However, it did drop to ~100MB/s quite quickly so the reorganizing might take a while (with Vector it only took a few minutes) and I would advice to let the drive idle for an hour or so if you fill more than half of it.
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ssj3gohan - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Wait, what?! HIPM and DIPM have been standard features that are always enabled on every intel desktop system since the intel 5 series at least (and AM2+ on the AMD side, which had other reasons). The only reason not to have HIPM and DIPM is your choice of OS. It's a driver-enabled feature, it doesn't work without explicitly enabling it.Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
That's not true. You can do the registry hack and get the option to enable HIPM+DIPM but that will have zero impact on power consumption on a desktop system. We've tried four different motherboards including Intel-branded ones and also both Windows 7 and 8 without success. That's why it took us so long to start doing HIPM+DIPM tests as Anand had to take an Ultrabook apart just for power testing and obviously I don't have access to that system due to geographical issues.JDG1980 - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
If you want a Toshiba drive, why not just buy a Toshiba drive instead of one rebranded by a no-name company? I don't see the point of this.JarredWalton - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
It's cheaper and uses the same hardware and firmware?Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Toshiba has quite poor retail presence, so Strontium may be targeting the markets where the availability of Toshiba SSDs is either very poor or non-existent.HisDivineOrder - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
My concern would be what happens when they change products and firmwares are... nonexistent. SSD's are still far too temperamental to trust just some nobody who likes to throw caution to the wind.OCZ can't even be trusted in this regard.
Samsung, Intel, Micron/Crucial, maaaaybe Sandisk.
bji - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Can OCZ be trusted in *any* regard?zanon - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Kristian no they couldn't, seriously what the hell? We *still* have people arguing wrongly in freaking 2013? "Giga" is an SI prefix, it's base-10. That's what it is, anything else is wrong. This is particularly surprisingly from a technology enthusiast, as tech depends on precision, not random overloaded definitions. Maybe you'd like to suggest that they come up with their own definitions of "kilogram" and "pound" too with whatever mass they feel like? That sounds like a recipe for success!
If they want to show base-2, then they can use KiB/MiB/GiB/TiB/PiB. I don't think those sound the greatest but whatever, they're precise, correct, and the international standard (IEC 60027, published in *1999*). Storage makers were never wrong to use the SI prefixes and have base-10 numbers of sectors.
If anything the problem is Microsoft, who should long since have switched to displaying GB instead of GiB. Even Apple finally updated ages ago.
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
The problem is that Giga is not only an SI prefix, it's also a JEDEC prefix where Giga is defined as 1024^3. I do agree that Giga should only be used as an SI prefix (i.e. meaning 1000^3) but I guess someone at JEDEC thought that since 1000^3 and 1024^3 are "close enough", lets just call them the same.I also agree that it's Microsoft who should just change to the SI standard and define GB as 1000^3 bytes like Apple did. My point about Intel was that it's useless for a small OEM like Strontium to differ from the norm and I don't see Intel or anyone else switching away from the SI standard because the advertised capacities would end up being smaller than they are now.
KAlmquist - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
"Storage makers were never wrong to use the SI prefixes"This is, I believe, inconsistent with your preceding paragraph. When disk drive manufacturers came up with their own definition of megabyte to make their disk drives seem larger, that created the same problems you envision if someone came up with their own definitions for "kilogram" and "pound".
As you note, that the IEC has decided to endorse the disk drive manufacture's definition of "megabyte" and has invented the term "mebibyte" to refer to a megabyte. That's a response to the linguistic mess created by the disk drive manufacturers; it doesn't justify creating the mess in the first place.
Meanwhile, as Kristian notes, JEDEC is sticking with the original meaning of the word. Words can acquire new meanings fairly quickly, but it takes a long time (on the order of 100 years) for a word to lose a well-established meaning.