The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD

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by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/30/2009 12:00:00 AM
Posted in Storage

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What's Wrong with Samsung?

The largest SSD maker in the world is Samsung. Samsung makes the drives offered by Apple in its entire MacBook/MacBook Pro lineup. Samsung makes the drives you get if you order a Lenovo X300. In fact, if you're buying any major OEM system with an SSD in it, Samsung makes that drive.

It's just too bad that those drives aren’t very good.

This is the 4KB random write performance of Samsung's latest SSD, based on the RBB controller:

4.4MB/s. That's 3x the speed of a VelociRaptor, but 1/3 the speed of a cheaper Indilinx drive.

Speedy, but not earth shattering. Now let's look at performance once every LBA has been written to. This is the worst case scenario performance we've been testing for the past year:

...and now we're down to mechanical hard drive speeds

Holycrapwtfbbq? Terrible.

Now to be fair to Samsung, this isn’t JMicron-terrible performance. It’s just not worth the money performance.

The Samsung RBB based SSDs are rebranded by at least two manufacturers: OCZ and Corsair.

The OCZ Summit and the Corsair P256 both use the Samsung RBB platform.

The Corsair and OCZ Samsung RBB drives.

The drive most OEMs are now shipping is an even older, lower performing Samsung SSD based on an older controller.

I talked to some of the vendors who ship Samsung RBB based SSDs and got some sales data. They simply can’t give these drives away. The Indilinx based drives outsell those based on the Samsung RBB controller by over 40:1. If end users are smart enough to choose Indilinx and Intel, why aren't companies like Apple and Lenovo?

Don't ever opt for the SSD upgrade from any of these OEMs if you've got the option of buying your own Indilinx or Intel drive and swapping it in there. If you don't know how, post in our forums; someone will help you out.

Samsung realized it had an issue with its used-state performance and was actually the first to introduce background garbage collection; official TRIM support will be coming later. Great right? Not exactly.

There’s currently no way for an end user to flash the firmware on any of these Samsung drives. To make matters worse, there’s no way for companies like OCZ or Corsair to upgrade the firmware on these drives either. If you want a new firmware on the drive, it has to go back to Samsung. I can’t even begin to point out how ridiculous this is.

If you’re lucky enough to get one of the Samsung drives with background garbage collection, then the performance drop I talked about above doesn’t really matter. How can you tell? Open up Device Manager, go to your SSD properties, then details, then select Hardware Ids from the dropdown. Your firmware version will be listed at the end of your hardware id string:

Version 1801Q doesn’t support BGC. Version 18C1Q (or later) does.

How can you ensure you get a model with the right firmware revision? Pick a religion and start praying, because that’s the best you can do.

Now the good news. When brand new, the Samsung drives actually boast competitive sequential write, sequential read and random write speeds.

These drives are also highly compatible and very well tested. For all of the major OEMs to use them they have to be. It’s their random write performance that’s most disappointing. TRIM support is coming later this year and it will help keep the drives performing fresh, but even then they are still slower than the Indilinx alternatives.

There’s no wiper tool and there’s currently no method to deploy end-user flashable firmware updates. Even with TRIM coming down the road, the Samsung drives just don’t make sense.

The OCZ Vertex Turbo: Overclocked Indilinx Why You Absolutely Need an SSD

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Using Lightroom and Photoshop by drsethl on Monday, March 15, 2010

Hi,

just to add to the chorus of praise: this is a superbly informative article, thank you for all the effort, and I hope that it has paid off for you, as I'm sure it must have.

My first question is this. Is it possible to analyse a program while you're using it, to see whether it is primarily doing sequential or random writes? Since there seems to be a quite clear difference between the Intel X25m 80gb and the OCZ vertex 120gb, which are the natural entry-level drives here, where the Intel works better for random access, the vertex for sequential, it would be very useful to know which I would make best use of.

Second question: does anyone know whether lightroom in particular is based around random or sequential writes? I know that a LR catalog is always radically fragmented, which suggests presumably that it is based around random writes, but that's just an uninformed guess. It does have a cache function, which produces files in the region of 3-5mb in size--are they likely to be sequential?

Third question: with photoshop, is it specifically as a scratch disk that the intel x25m underperforms? Or does photoshop do other sequential writes, besides those to the scratch disk? I ask because if it only doesn't work as a scratch disk, then that's not a big problem--anyone using this in a PC is likely to have a decent regular HDD for data anyway, so the scratch disk can just be sent there. In fact, I've been using a vertex 120gb, with a samsung spinpoint f3 500gb on my PC, and I found that with the scratch disk on the samsung I got better retouch artists results (only by about half a second, but that's out of 14 seconds, so still fairly significant).

Thanks in advance to anyone who might be able to answer, and thanks again Anand for such an informative read.

Cheers
Seth

drsethl

RE: Using Lightroom and Photoshop: Lightroom 3 better on OCZ vertex or intel x25m g2? by drsethl on Friday, July 09, 2010

Hi again,

just to report back, since writing the previous comment I have bought both drives, vertex and intel (the original vertex 128gb, and the intel g2 x25m). While the Intel does perform better in benchmarks, the difference in general usage is barely noticeable. Except when using lightroom 3, when the intel is considerably slower than the vertex. I'm using a canon 550d, which produces 18mpx pictures. When viewing a catalogue for the first time (without any pre-created previews), the intel takes on average about 20s to produce a full scale 1:1 preview. This is infuriating. The vertex takes about 8s. Bear in mind that i've got 4gb of 1333mhz ram, intel i7 q720 processor, ati 5470 mobility radeon graphics. So it's not the most powerful laptop in the world, but it's no slouch either. I can only conclude that when LR3 makes previews it does large sequential writes, and that the considerable performance advantage of the vertex on this metric alone suddenly becomes very important. With which in mind, I'm now going to sell the Intel and buy a vertex 2e, which will give the best of both worlds. But I'm sure there are lots of photographers out there wondering about this like I was, so hopefully this will help.
cheers,
Seth

drsethl

RE: Using Lightroom and Photoshop: Lightroom 3 better on OCZ vertex or intel x25m g2? by jgstew on Friday, October 08, 2010

I believe you are correct about the LR Catalog being mostly random writes, but I don't think this is a performance concern since the Catalog is likely stored in RAM for reads, and written back to the drive when changes are made that affect the Catalog, which is not happening all the time.

As for the generating previews and Photoshop scratch disk, this is going to be primarily sequential since it is generating the data one at a time and writing it to disk completely. If LR was generating multiple previews for multiple photos simultaneously and writing them simultaneously, then you would have heavy fragmentation of the cache, and more random writes.

Any SSD is going to give significant performance benefit over spindle HD when it comes to random read/write/access. Sequential performance is the man concern with Photos/Video/Audio and similar data in most cases.

One thing you might consider trying is having more than one SSD, or doing this if you upgrade down the road. Have the smaller SSD with fast sequential read/write act as the cache disk for LR/Photoshop/Others and have the other SSD be the boot drive with all the OS/Apps/etc. This way other things going on in the system will not effect the cache disk performance, as well as speed up writes from boot ssd to cache disk, and back.

jgstew

Excellent articles and methodology by ogreinside on Monday, December 14, 2009

After spending all weekend reading this article, 2 previous in the trilogy, and all the comments, I wanted to post my thanks for all of your hard work. I've been ignoring SSDs for a while as I wanted to see them mature first. I am in the market for a new Alienware desktop, but as the wife is letting me purchase only on our Dell charge account, I have a limited selection and budget.

I was settled on everything except the disks. They are offering the Samsung 256SSD, which I believe is the Samsung PM800 drive. The cost is exactly double that of the WD VelociRaptor 300 GB. So naturally I have done a ton of research for this final choice. After exploring your results here, and reading comments, I am definitely not getting their Samsung SSD. I would love to grab an Intel G2 or OCZ Indilinx, but that means real cash now, and we simply can't do that yet. The charge account gives us room to pay it off at 12-month no-interest.

So at this point I can get a 2x WD VR in raid 0 to hold me over for a year or so when I can replace (or add) a good SSD. My problem is that I have seen my share issues with raid 0 on an ICH controller on two different Dell machines (boot issues, unsure of performance gain). In fact, using the same drives/machine, I saw better random read performance (512K) on a single drive than the ICH raid, and 4k wasn't far behind. I'm thinking I may stick to a single WD VR for now, but I really want to believe raid0 would be better.

So, back on topic, it would be nice to see the ICH raid controller explored a bit, and maybe add a raid0 WD VR configuration to your next round of tests.

(CryastalDiskMark 2.2)
Single-drive 7200 rpm g:
Sequential Read : 123.326 MB/s
Sequential Write : 114.957 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 55.793 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 94.408 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.861 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 1.724 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2009/12/09 2:03:4

ICH raid0:
Sequential Read : 218.909 MB/s

Sequential Write : 175.]347 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 51.884 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 135.466 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 1.001 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 2.868 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2009/12/08 21:45:20

ogreinside

RE: Excellent articles and methodology by marraco on Friday, August 13, 2010

Thumbs up for the ICH10 petition. It's the most common RAID controller on i7.

Also, I would like to see different models of SSD in RAID (For example one intel raided with one Indilinx).

I suspect that performance with SSD scales much better that with older technologies. So I want to know if makes sense to buy a single SSD, and wait for prices to get cheaper at the time of upgrade. The problem is that as prices get cheaper, old SSD models are no more available.

marraco

Intel X25-M and Mac by aaphid on Friday, November 27, 2009

OK, I'm still slightly confused. It seems that running the wipe/trim utility will keep the ssd in top condition but it won't run on a Mac. So are these going to be a poor decision for use in a Mac?

aaphid

it's strange to see by ekerazha on Monday, October 26, 2009

Anand,

it's strange to see your

"Is Intel still my overall recommendation? Of course. The random write performance is simply too good to give up and it's only in very specific cases that the 80MB/s sequential write speed hurts you."

of the last review, is now a

"The write speed improvement that the Intel firmware brings to 160GB drives is nice but ultimately highlights a bigger issue: Intel's write speed is unacceptable in today's market."

ekerazha

RE: it's strange to see by ekerazha on Monday, October 26, 2009

Ops wrong article

ekerazha

most awesome post ever ! by mohsh86 on Tuesday, October 13, 2009

am 23 years old computer engineer..

this is the most awesome informative article ever read !

mohsh86

Using SSD & Windows 7 Swap? by Pehu on Tuesday, October 13, 2009

First of all, thanks for the article. It was superb and led to my first SSD purchase last week. Installed the intel G2 yesterday and windows 7 (64 bit) with 8 G of RAM. A smooth ride I have to say :)

Now, there is one question I have been trying to find an answer:

Should I put the windows page file (swap) to the SSD disk or to another normal HD?

Generally the swap should be behind other controller than your OS disk, to speed things up. However, SSD disks are so fast that there is a temptation to put the swap on OS disk. Also, one consideration is the disk age, does it preserve it longer if swap is moved away from SSD.

Also what I am lacking is some general info about how to maximise the disk age without too much loss of speed, in one guru3d article instructions were given as:

* Drive indexing disabled. (useless for SSD anyway, because access times are so low).
* Prefetch disabled.
* Superfetch disabled
* Defrag disabled.

Any comments and/or suggestions for windows 7 on that?

Thanks.

Pehu

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