I am not sure if I missed it, but will you do a price/performance for SSDs? For example, and Intel or Corsair SSD migth be the fastest, but if it has a good price/performance vs the fastest SSD then it's something that consumers might consider when getting an SSD.
I don't have a clear "performance" since you have run many benchmark in there, but something like a "real world load" would be good to see. I may not want the fastest SSD, but I will be looking for something that has good over-all balance in performance, and not so heavy on the pocket...
Intel or Corsair SSD might NOT be the fastest, but if it has a good price/performance vs the fastest SSD then it's something that consumers might consider when getting an SSD.
Yes, light being "AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Light Workload".
Either Light or Heavy depending on your use seems to be a combination of both random and sequential performance.
As stated in the article: "I'll be sharing the full details of the benchmark in some upcoming SSD articles but here are some details:
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."
What price would you use? MSRP? Newegg after MIR? Just pick a usage scenario that fits your usage and divide the score by the dollar amount of your favorite e-tailer... Pretty simple.
Realistically speaking, if you're buying computer components/peripherals, the function Retailer GetLowestPrice(Component component) { return Newegg; } would probably be better than the average price comparison site.
It seems like the one true major difference between the Intel SSD 510 and the OCZ Vertex 3 is that one is available now while the other is only talked about in reviews. First to market is always a benefit for a manufacturer that has a decently performing product, though Newegg's markup makes early adopter's pay dearly for it.
Of course, this leads to the important question of "when will the Vertex 3 series reach general availability?" I recently purchased a 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 for a new 2011 17" MacBook Pro and the performance is stunning compared to the stock HDD (it's my first SSD). I'm wondering if I should return the drive and just wait for the Vertex 3 because once you've gone SSD, it is so hard to go back!
Oh, another thing. Are we going to get an SSD State of the Union for 2011? I'm guessing you're waiting to finish the reviews of most of the SSDs that are coming out this year first... Yeah, I just answered my own question, I think. :)
It would be silly to return the Vertex 2 (my opinion). Just check out the PCMark Vantage scores in this article. There's little real world difference between all of the high end drives. Without the benchmarks, there's no way to tell the drives apart.
But if it's going to eat you up inside, knowing you were just a 2-3 months away from having the latest model, go ahead. I'll be keeping be enjoying my OCZ Agility 2 in the mean time.
"I'm wondering if I should return the [Vertex 2] and just wait for the Vertex 3"
I've got a mix of Vertex 1's, Intel G1s, Intel G2, and Vertex 2's in a variety of machines at home and at work.
For workstation usage as a software dev, there's not a heck of a lot of subjective (ie, "it feels faster") difference between them. At this level of disk performance, your machine just isn't waiting on the hard drive very often.
Obviously you may have specific needs. I used to work for a client who had a 8GB database that I was constantly backing up and restoring many times a day in the course of development work. Now there was a situation where raw read/write speeds were king and the Vertex 3 probably would have performed close to 2x faster. For me that kind of usage is the exception and not the rule though.
I didn't see any discussion on internal garbage collection (ie: NOT trim).
Does it have any?
In my mind, this will be the key deciding feature between Intel and Vertex 3. Whichever has the better garbage collection without TRIM. Remember, TRIM still doesn't work in a RAID array or in OSX.
+1. I'm really eager for an IGC comparison of the Intel 510, the Vertex 3 and if possible, also of a current firmware version of the Crucial C300 (since the drive still competes very well).
In Anand's initial test, the C300 suffered from very poor IGC, but Marvell supposedly alleviated this problem in their new firmware releases. Unfortunately, no IGC tests have been conducted with the 0006 firmware yet.
It's not what's the latest, but what's offers the best bang for buck after upgrades.
Such a review would be immensely helpful.
Although based on the Intel 510 TRIM-test random write results, it may have to wait for the first Intel FW upgrade as the numbers with the shipping FW are truly appalling.
I'm dying to know how it will hold up in my macbook pro. I finally caved and bought one of these 510 SSD's and although it's after the fact, I still want to know how long it'll still be "good" in my system.
If the original X25-M "conroe'd" the market, it seems G3 "atomed" it. In the way that Intel, in their crusade to maximize profits and segmentize the market, designed quite a bit to conservatively.
I'm all for it though, because I believe that currently, the last thing SSDs are lacking is speed, so the last thing they really need is more of it. I believe at this point just about everybody would want one, if it weren't for the prohibitively high prices. So if Intel can half the per-GB-price of the G3, I'll buy one for sure!
I thought the exact same thing about the 1st gen drive compared to this one. What makes SSD's "feel" so much faster is the random read/write performance. When the 40GB X25-V is so close to matching random read/write the 510 will just "feel" slow, especially once you have everything installed on it. I mean, really, who cares about sequential performance once you have everything on the drive that you planned putting on it?
Anand, please put the current WD velociraptor numbers into this graph. It will demonstrate what I mean.
oh yeah if I just looked I would see the velociraptor numbers... lol its late and I should be asleep... maybe I am? Did Intel just atom their next SSD?
I think this is a fair criticism. I also only look at the random R/W performance of these new SSDs. I can pull 215 MB/s R/W from my 300GB Velociraptors in RAID0, and use these drives to install all my games on since game loading performance is largely determined by sequential reading of data from the disks (lots of big sequential files), and because I need around 400GB of space currently for all my game installs .
Sequential reads for most SSDs are lower than the 215 MB/s reads I enjoy from my Velociraptors in RAID0. I have a Crucial C300 256MB in this same desktop and I also use an 80GB Intel G2 in my laptop; both of these drives are slower than my Velociraptors in RAID0 in terms of sequential read performance. Also, there is obviously a space concern, in that there isn't enough space on either of these drives to install my games to them.
Now for the host OS and all the random programs I run in parallel, a SSD gives you huge gains and the system just feels snappier. This is largely due to random R/W performance. Basically you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between sequentially reading 10MB of data or less at 215MB/s (Velociraptors in RAID0) vs 320MB/s (my Crucial C300 256MB average speed on a PCIe4x, SATA3, ASUS add-in card), hence the reason that sequential performance of SSDs doesn't matter much to me anymore.
Now if I could get a 512GB or bigger SSD with greater than 215MB/s sequential read performance for less than $1/GB, I might bite on that. So far this product has not come to market, so I'll stick with my Velociraptors until it does.
Basically you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between sequentially reading 10MB of data or less at 215MB/s (Velociraptors in RAID0) vs 320MB/s (my Crucial C300 256MB average speed on a PCIe4x, SATA3, ASUS add-in card), hence the reason that sequential performance of SSDs doesn't matter much to me anymore.
I'd also like to add that you will however most certainly notice the difference of 3.15MB/s of random R/W performance my RAID0 Velociraptors put out versus the random R/W performance of pretty much any SSD. SSDs make a huge amount of sense as an OS and applications drive.
I had high expectations from Intel.. now I'm a little disappointed. As the article said, random read is MOST important for a boot drive. Surely Intel should know this?
1. The SSD market still has a lot of growth ahead of it. Price per GB is the current issue and may be the new "performance per watt" buzz word in this space. Case in point, when I can grab a cheap Dell server for $350 and average notebooks are advertised everyday for $300-$600, are people really going to spend $300-$600+ on an SSD? If it was a much cheaper option then many would go with it.
2. Synthetic vs. Real-world. Synthetic benchmarks are great for bragging on the various overclocking forums but most of us get work done in the real-world. This is no different than people who tune cars for 1/4 mile races but must transport the car on a flat-bed carrier. For some this is a perfectly great trade-off for bragging rights but many of us prefer to get 90% of the 1/4 mile performance and be able to drive the car back and forth to a weekend outing. My point is that in real-world benchmarks there may be some minor deficiencies but will 95% of users notice? I doubt it.
3. I put an Intel X-25M G2 160GB SSD in my father's quad-core desktop that he uses for Photoshop work after listening to many months of complaints that his system was too slow. After the swap, he loves the performance and I love the fact that I'm no longer fielding "it's too slow" complaints. This was the best money I've spent in recent memory but the price is still an issue for most people.
4. Would a user like my father noticed a difference between the X-25M and either a 510 or Vertex 3? I doubt it. Besides we'd have to get him a SATA3 motherboard or an add-in card. Again, it's a price issue.
5. Not too long ago the must-have upgrade was adding RAM to a Windows machine. These days 3-8GB systems are almost the norm so the must-have upgrade is an SSD if a user can stomach the cost. Head on over to NewEgg and read the reviews of "value" SSDs and you'll get an idea of the disappointment for some people who transitioned from HDDs to SSDs in both desktops and laptops. The drives in this segment aren't changing the user experience as dramatically as those ponying up for the high-end devices. Then there is the issue of lack of TRIM support, 4K issues, firmware upgrades destroying data, and the list goes on. The segment needs to addressed by Intel.
6. Finally, hybrids. We see the Intel Z68 will support SSD caching along with higher-end stuff from Adaptec or HighPoint's RocketHybrid controllers trying to get the best of both SSDs and HDDs. Could this be a game-changer? Possibly.
The points that I'm making come down to both real-world performance and market segments. The SSD market would benefit from a better stragety on the entry-level and mid-range markets the way ATI and nVidia have done things. Whoever brings the price down to grab the majority of users will eventually win a good chunk of business. With all that aside, as it stands the 510 is fine for the types of loads I'd put on an SSD as a power user so I'm happy to trade a bit of real-world performance for Intel's reliability.
The sad thing is that they won't. They always have their "conroe" moment and then they sink up their product in the next generations but they still come out ahead. Even their Prescott cores did very well when they shouldn't have.
I am really the biggest fan of Anand and his team (used to bypass my company firewall and risk losing my job just to read all the stuff here..) but it does seem like Anand is trying to smooth over the 510's seriously non-competitive random performance....
IMO it showed badly enough that I finally decided to sign up and post a comment...
Well isn't it the old debate regarding synthetic vs. real-world tests? I'll admit it looked bleak for the random parts, but looking at the heavy and light workload 510 looked somewhat shinier...
I was 100% sure on the Vertex 3, but presently I'll have to wait and see about the pricing when it lands here in little Denmark :-)
Btw, mentioning the bundle you completely overlooked the very nice cabinet sticker Intel included. I would like some tests about glue adherency, how envious your friends look when they see the sticker on your pc-cabinet etc. :-) ok just kidding, very nice and informative review! (why we love Anand so much :-)
I'm still disappointed that Anand hasn't covered the OCZ Vertex 2 "25nm version" con. This is a consumer rights issue and should take precedence over any other development of a technical nature.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe everything regarding the 25nm issue has been resolved? OCZ has initiated an exchange program and is covering all associated costs for users that were affected.
I'm still curious to look into the behavior of 25nm NAND however by the time I got back from MWC it looks like the bulk of what needed to happen regarding the 25nm issue already happened.
Is there a remaining aspect of the issue that hasn't been addressed that you'd like me to pursue?
Thanks for replying. Just to be clear, what I've been expecting is for you to write a news item or an article about OCZ and 25nm SSDs. It seems you thought I was asking for you fix the problem (it is not your problem and it isn't you who was supposed to fix it).
I still don't understand why all the review sites were silent even after the OCZ 25nm drives hit retail. Was I the only one excited about the new NAND flash tech, and itching to read an in depth review/analysis. Some time passed and some people started complaining that their 25nm V2s were somewhat slower than what reviews (and the packaging) were promising…still no in depth look at 25nm tech at that point.
The jmicron issue was resolved eventually as well but there were a lot of articles written about it.
I’m still stumped as to how hard it is to find a proper review about the 1st ever consumer 25nm SSD to hit retail (the OCZ V2).
I am sure Anand has quite a lot of pull with OCZ and I believe users who have been stranded with 25nm drives will thank him for investing his time in sorting out the issue rather than writing on it....
would like to hear your POV though Anand, so far you haven't given us your take on it....
-- Is there a remaining aspect of the issue that hasn't been addressed that you'd like me to pursue?
Absolutely!!! Not so much the OCZ nonsense, but rather the impact we can expect on SSD acceptance and viability with 25nm parts. IIRC, IMFT NAND at 25nm has/will have ECC on die to deal with some of the issue.
What's not clear is whether an SSD can be built at 25nm that ends up being as "good" as one at 32/34nm at the same price point. We may have hit a corner case in Moore's Law: the reduction in price at 25nm may not be sufficient to overcome both the erasure and electrical issues which present at 25nm. The OCZ fix was to replace larger die with smaller die to get back channels. That's gotta hurt the profit equation. And this doesn't fix the erasure issue.
In other words, there's a whole lot to be delved into with regard to 25nm impact on SSD. A whole lot.
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe everything regarding the 25nm issue has been resolved?"
I've just done a quick search on newegg for a Vertex 2 and I still can't figure out at a glance which are the nerfed 25nm drives and which aren't. So the bait-and-switch games is still on as far as I can tell.
It really boils down to the performance vs. reliability debate. The Vertex 3 is overall a faster drive (assuming you're not doing much in the way of incompressible writes), however it's unclear how much OCZ and SF have improved their reliability testing and validation. If the 510 is close enough in performance and can boast the same sort of reliability that the original X25-M did, then it may be a viable alternative for some users who aren't as interested in absolute performance but want a product that has gone through Intel's validation/testing.
With the X25-M the performance gap was too great to really value the drive over the SF-1200 based offerings. The 510 is much more competitive, although our recommendation for pure performance is still obviously the Vertex 3.
As I mentioned in the conclusion, if OCZ can ramp and ship the Vertex 3 with a better reliability track record than the Vertex 2 (not that the latter was bad, it just wasn't quite as good as the X25-M) then this becomes a non-issue. The way I see it is this: the 510 pressures OCZ to work on validation and QA testing, while the Vertex 3 forces Intel to take performance much more seriously. Both are very important to have in the market.
I do have an issue with sleep though on an Intel SSD. On resume after sleep, the drive errors with KERNEL_NONPAGED bluescreens. Does not occur with hibernate. Any idea what is going on?
Oh yeah, thanks for the max latency figures. They're very useful.
The G2's max of 900ms is quite a long time. Nearly a second! What are the max latencies for say a velociraptor in similar tests? I know the theoretical figures would be based on seek time + RPM but often theory is different from practice.
I find it interesting that the Crucial RealSSD C300 does worse than the Intel SSD 510 in the "Anand Storage Bench 2011- Heavy Workload" despite getting better numbers in the random and sequential tests. Any idea why this would be so? Poorer max latency?
Poorer sequential performance I guess. The C300 (which I just got) is very fast, but the sequential perf of the 510 is simply better, which impacts a lot of the sequential portion of the workload test. Random performance in typical desktop models has reached somewhat of a plateau, particularly since most applications currently out there are optimized for the dog-slow random performance of consumer hard drives.
Interestingly, one of THE main performance cases is when you need to quickly write lots of stuff, like in video editing. And there, all data is at least partially compressed, so i guess there the intel will be in a better place.
Intel is going to have to price this thing cheaper than the Vertex 3, or any other new Sandforce SSD for that matter. They can't use performance as a selling point. I'm sure the new SF controller will offer good stability. Unless you're an Intel fanboy I don't see any reason to get the 510 over the Vertex 3, unless they price it much lower.
I think the conclusion, although critical in places was overall mild. “It looks like we may have hit the upper limit of what we need from 4KB random write performance”… Yeah, in the consumer/budget space. But what consumer/budget computer user would buy a 250GB SSD. I’ve managed to convince a few of my clients to go with an “expensive upgrade” and in the end they’ve been extremely happy… In those cases I’ve only installed 64GB drives.
At the moment SSDs are NOT mainstream and it’s mostly the enthusiast and pro crowd that will be buying consumer grade SSDs. I’ll be using my SSD for VMs for testing and studying and I do a lot of heavy random IO operations.
For a drive as big and as expensive as the 250GB 510, I expect much better across-the-board performance.
Hi, the article states "~900ms write operation, the 510 keeps the worst case latency to below 400ms. The Vertex 3 by comparison has a max write latency of anywhere from 60ms - 350ms"
microseconds are usually abbreviated us, where the u has a funny tail on it. (the u is greek for something) ms usually means milliseconds. I usually type 'mics' when on the keyboard and reserve the funny u for when handwriting. example, a good SSD write takes less then 100 mics.
saying something is around 900 ms means it takes about a second.
Article says "Write speed with fully incompressible data is easily a victory for the SF-2200 based OCZ Vertex 3. "
I think you meant "Write speed with compressible data is easily a victory for the SF-2200 based OCZ Vertex 3. "
Excellent article, I was interested in the 3rd gen intel SSD, but not at these specs. Wish you gave the read latency time (it can be inferred to some degree from the elapsed time charts which are good). Also, given the size of internal cache these devices use perhaps running for more than 3 mins would be a good idea. The average performance is still changing at 3 mins.
That's 100% a valid point and it does show that even with extensive validation errors can still get through.
You'll remember that the X25-M was the first to have major firmware issues before any of its present day competitors were even created.
Only time will tell how well Intel has learned from those experiences and how seriously it's taking the validation of the 510. Initial compatibility testing looks good but we've got a long road ahead of us.
...I think Anand is right. Many of you are complaining, but as he said on the final page: it is not clear, where the actual limits are for random speeds. Of course, it's always better to have more. The thing is, that your PC at home can't benefit from 60'000 IOPS. It just can't. You can run it through benchmarks which show high numbers, but as soon as you feed the drive and the CPU with real data, the drive is NOT the limiting factor anymore. I'm not saying that it's a good thing the Intel 510 has such low random speeds, compared to other, even older drives. But in the end, the question is whether or not you can actually benefit from 200MB/s random reads and random writes with QDs above 4.
Anand said himself, and I assure you that he is correct - you can trace it yourself if you want - that with standard workload on home desktop PCs, Queue Depth rarely exceeds 1 or 2, especially not with an SSD in your system. Not even during boot! And now THINK AGAIN. What are the random 4k read speeds for low QD of EVERY SSD today? It's actually limited by the NAND being used and it's between 20MB/s and 30MB/s for EVERY SSD. Again, I'm not saying that high IOPS aren't important. I'm just saying, they aren't as important as you think. Not anymore, not in the very high regions we are today and especially not with very high QDs.
The 510 seems to have very good performance in real world benchmarks - it seems that most of you rate synthetic benchmarks higher than real world benchmarks. This, I don't quite understand.
The fact is, you will not be using a very competitively priced 250GB SSD for net browsing. When I get my SSD, I'll be using it to store my test VMs where I do a lot of software installations and snapshot jumping.
The 510 is not a mainstream product where the QD rarely goes above 2. Not at that price at least. I've installed an SSD for a few average users but they were all 60GB drives. I could never justify the price of a 250GB SSD to them but a pro user might (i.e. someone who might make use of a high IOPS drive).
Like Anand I'm shocked Intel went this route. After touting the random read/write so heavily (and for good reason) they pull this stunt and look horrible. I'm an owner of an 80gig G2 and love it but have been in the process of justifying an upgrade so I can put the 80gig in my laptop. I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of sequential performance (just like I did with the G2 over other competitors), but this is a complete step backwards.
And remember the review unit was the larger drive. Put the 120gig version in those benchmarks and the critical numbers that are so low to start with are only going to become much worse. Just like all of the previous releases due to high cost the majority of people will be purchasing the smaller-sized drives (most people bought Intel 80gig when 160gig was out, etc.).
When you are competing on firmware only, and that firmware is not the best to begin with (in comparison to Sandforce), you have to be perfect, and in this case Intel just didn't produce.
"After touting the random read/write so heavily (and for good reason) they pull this stunt and look horrible."
They don't look horrible, they are 2nd or 1st in most of the real world tests, Improving on the G2 performance.
Random performance is lower, but the real world tests demonstrate that random performance has reached a point where it is "enough" for typical workloads.
Whose real world are we talking about here? Average Joe "real world", mainstream "real world", enthusiast "real world"... you get the idea.
As an average user (net browsing, office apps, flash gaming, etc...) this sort of performance is great. However, the same user would benefit just as much from a much cheaper 60GB SSD. The 510 is neither cheap overall or in $/GB sense. My "real world" is using VMs and lot's of tests involving high QDs and IOPS so this drive is not for me... At that price, capacity and performance, I don't know who this drive is for.
It's a bit surprising that the Crucial C300 (on the 6 GB/s) interface did so well in the real world benchmarks. This drive is a year old and still competitive. Newegg had them on sale a couple weeks ago for only $480.00. Which is a bargain compared to the $615.00 for the Intel 510. This is an interesting technology to watch, with lots of plot twists and upsets. I can't wait to see the crucial M4.
I see the price point of the new Intel 510 drives extremely critical. Intel have always charged more than the competition and got away with it due to the fact that on the other hand there was the good quality, compatibility and reliablity of their SSD products.
Now it seems like a clear win for Sandforce, especially if we take the superior write amplification of the sandforce controller, which is a big advantage regarding the reduced write cycles of the new 25nm NAND.
You have to tell them to stop sending you Ferraris because no one buys Ferraris. The 120GB versions of both the OCZ and Intel drives are much more relevant, and we dont have the foggiest clue how they line up. And even if we did, we would not know how the 40/60/80 GB versions stack up against each other. I am currently shopping for a 40-60GB SSD and I cannot even to this day get a clear answer on which product is better (performance per dollar). And all of these drives have been out for at least year....
"I am currently shopping for a 40-60GB SSD and I cannot even to this day get a clear answer on which product is better (performance per dollar). And all of these drives have been out for at least year.... "
This is a concern and all you really need to know is how they reduce capacity.
They can do it by reducing the number of chips (usually will see a performance hit) or They can do it by using the same number of chips, but each stores less (usually will perform about the same)
When you look at the OCZ 25nm "debacle" it was this very decision that created the issue. The 25nm flash itself was not the problem (even though that got a fair bit of the blame)... it was how they implemented it. They used half the 25nm higher density chips in the drives, reducing performance. This also meant reserving one block for over-provision meant it was larger in size, so that ate into the usable capacity. The solution still uses 25nm chips, but they're the same number of chips as 34nm, so they perform at about the same level.
There probably needs to be a chart at the beginning like the video card articles showing details for each drive. It would clear up any issues, as well as something that can be referred to in the future. I refer to the old video card reviews when looking for things like ROP / texture counts, memory bandwidth, speeds, etc... because those charts have really useful information in them.
How about throwing in a AMD SB850 to see how they handle SSD's. AMD has had native SATA6gb longer than intel so like to see how that matchs up. Most only look at CPU and ignore the chipset.
So nothing has really changed. There still isn't one "perfect" SSD that does everything well and is proven to be reliable. I guess the disappointment stems from many that were hoping that the new Intel SSDs would tick all those boxes - speed, reliability and price. As usual YMMV - Samsung and Intel is the conservative choice and SF based drives are for those who want maximum performance in random I/O situations.
This, as always in the tech world, is a numbers and marketing game. Somewhere there is a user who is encoding video and really needs the bleeding edge for that. There is an artist working on large incompressible canvasses in Photoshop. These guys need this drive. They have a small Sandforce doing OS duties but they need a fast non -Sandforce drive for data. All those numbers mean squat without perspective and that's what's the text of Anandtech articles bring.
So maybe for the consumer that is tech savvy enough to know they want an SSD but not enough to have read all that has been published with regards SSD drives they need a simple primer. Maybe a web app. Do you use you computer with VMs? Do you use it with games? Is your computer a netbook? I'm certain there is a way to ask a few questions and come up with a sensible suggestion for what drive is right for which user. That would only work with a more comprehensive field of tested drives. Other posters are right, there is little to no way of knowing which is the best 40GB drive. So I volunteer myself to help. Anand, I am a soon to be new father that would love to work from home if for no other reason than daycare costs nearly as much as what I get paid as a paramedic. Send me a system, every SSD on the market and a small stipend and I will test anything and everything solid state.
...with poor product differentiation. With Intel's adoption of the same controller others are using, SSDs become that much less interesting. I realize firmware and QC differences still exist, but without hard numbers (aside from the French site's), and given that major snafus can hit any maker at any time, it seems like the only real consideration is ye ole customer service. I've dealt with OCZ's 'support' department twice and that was enough for me. Intel and Crucial have always treated me right, so considering real world performance differences more or less don't exist anymore, they'll be getting my SSD $s.
I have been asking the question for a long time. Why an Toshiba SSD manage to beat Sandforce in some real world usage. And finally we got an answer.
Given all SSD latency are roughly equal or the same.
Seq Read Write is EXTREMELY Important in Everyday usage. IT IS THE SINGLE MOST Important factor that gives you most improvement in SSD Real World usage benchmarks.
Random Write reaches the top with 50 MB/s. And while we would want further reduction in Write latency, but with the increase of Ram / Cache onbroad with SSD. This should not be an issue.
Random Read results shows we have still some head room to grow.
With further tweaking Intel may be able to squeeze out even more performance our of it.
I think I missed something, while Seq Read Write is obviously the big number that makes the marketing materials, in terms of user experience (ooh, buzzword) the Random Reads are where lies the money, and as Anand said in the article, no modern OS stresses this enough to make the lower numbers a significant limitation.
High sequential reading and writing is only going to be felt by those that are moving large files around within an already fast environment where a mechanical disk drive would be a bottle neck (encoding files locally for instance). And while for those users Seq Read Write might be considered "THE SINGLE MOST important factor" it wouldn't be for, say, the person that wants to add some oopmh to a dual-core laptop of otherwise mediocre specifications.
Certainly, aside from playing around with transferring files, my drives have probably never approached their max seq speed. As OS drives, they mainly spend their time hunting out small files for the OS to use.
It would be nice if some HDDs were also included in workload benches. They were in the random read/write benches so I don't get why they were left out of the other ones.
HDDs aren't included because they'd throw off the scale pretty horribly. The number labeling the performance would be larger than the bar itself compared to all the other SSDs out there.
I find that hard to believe, considering they were included in the random read/write graphs at 1/100 or less of the performance of some of the SSDs and the charts weren't scaled horribly.
In the sequential reads/writes, they performed at 25%-80% which doesn't through the scale off much at all.
The heavy workload looked to involve a lot of sequential access (installs and downloads). So again, I don't see why they weren't included.
There are also other comments asking for more HDDs in the benches. For people like myself, who didn't start following storage benchmarks until SSDs came out, it's hard to tell what the performance gain is.
I find that hard to believe, considering they were included in the random read/write graphs at 1/100 or less of the performance of some of the SSDs and the charts weren't scaled horribly.
In the sequential reads/writes, they performed at 25%-80% which doesn't throw the scale off much at all.
The heavy workload looked to involve a lot of sequential access (installs and downloads). So again, I don't see why they weren't included.
There are also other comments asking for more HDDs in the benches. For people like myself, who didn't start following storage benchmarks until SSDs came out, it's hard to tell what the performance gain is.
(sorry if double post, comment didn't seem to show up 1st time)
Anand you didn't clarify very clearly what is the difference of naming between 510 series and X-25 G3. The introduction leads me to believe 510 is X-25 G3, or is it not?
Is X-25 G3 going to use 25nm flash instead, so it's another drive? If so, when is the release date of that, and how do we expect its performance compared to 510 in this review? Will the X-25 G3 uses a custom controller?
As the article stated, the G3 (whatever it is officially called) will be a lower-performance part whose aim is to bring lower prices and better reliability to more mainstream segments
So I've been waiting for quite some time now for the new intel drives since the reviews in the past about how reliable and how long life an SSD has, promising that all of this would be better with these new generation drives. Although now I am faced with the potential "problem" of a 3Gbit bottle neck in mi macbook pro and as mentioned in the review above "these next-generation SSDs not only use 6Gbps SATA, they really need it." So where does that leave me? Should a go for a cheaper older drive which might be less reliable in the long run (but nobody really knows right?) or buy a new generation drive which might be suffering from a bottleneck? I didn't really understand why the new drives really need the 6Gbit SATA to function well? Can someone please explain or give me some advice.
Best right now would probably be an Intel G2 drive. Fast enough and very good durability.
The next generation drives aren't really going to perform much better on a 3Gb SATA port than the current generation already does, plus you have the worse durability inherent in the 25nm NAND chips.
Wow, so Intel has a gap in it's road map and goes the 3rd party route and brings us a product that is essentially slower than a consumer product (Vertex 3) from another manufacturer.
Would love to see you run a traditional hdd through the new bench so we can see what sort of real world improvements can be expected from making the switch to an SSD...
Great article. I'll be waiting for the x25-m G3. Keep on Intel about this!
Thanks for the review Anand, but I am a little disappointed that there are a lot of synthetic benchmarks but no real world tests.
By "real world tests" I mean separate tests for: booting into Windows; loading a web browser with 25 tabs of saved web page documents on the HDD; starting Star Craft and loading a map; copying a large amount of files to itself; running a batch Photoshop image transform job; starting IE6 from a stopped Windows XP Mode VM and opening a complex web page hosted on the local disk; running a intensive anti-virus scan on a specific (large) folder etc.
I know PC Mark and SysMark are meant to represent these real world test, but as individual consumers we have different usage profiles and by breaking down the results into individual tests we can better work out which drive is most appropriate for us, instead of studying the synthetic tests and making an educated guess.
A lot of people are complaining about the performance of the drive, and I'd like to know how much of a difference it actually makes in real world scenarios. If this drive comes within 10 ms of a vertex 3 loading up starcraft 2, then who cares?
Please, be so king and include a fast HDD (say a WD Velociraptor) in EVERY SSD benchmark.
While most readers here understand the difference between SSD and HDD, including a single fast HDD would make the article useful also as a reference/datapoint when talking to not-so-techy people.
Maybe I missed it, but i didn't see any discussion of the power usage of the new drives- according the intel press releases, the new drives use 380mW/100mW active/idle and the G2 drives only use 150mW/75mW active/idle.
This means the new drives would actually be worse on laptop battery life, correct?
The Intel SSD 510 is not a bad drive but it cost more than a Vertex 2 or 3.
The Intel Toolbox, and extensive compatablity and reliability testing are major pluses.
The SSD is still an extravagance for desktops though I can see its a no-brainer for laptops because of power conservation. Unless the cost per gigabyte is less than $0.80/gigabyte, the performance gain does not offset the mechanical harddrive.
I.e., an epic FAIL product priced at a premium to competing products that are far superior.
What misguided priorities from Intel. People shell out the big bucks for SSD's for their RANDOM IO performance, NOT sequential IO. So the geniuses at Intel decided to release a "next gen" product that actually has WORSE performance than the last gen product. Really?
I'm speechless. The really sad part about this fiasco is that most people will still buy this piece of crap over far superior competing products just because it's Intel.
nice review, but you're talking & comparing the Vertex 3 and this new drive, but where's the vertex 3 on the market? its not even released, its months away from release if im not mistaken? the C400 will be released before it, so what's the point of comparing tech today with tech months away from release (and in the SSD world months is a very long time!)
FWIW, we've deployed literally hundreds of X25-E drives, and our failure rate is well over 1%, closer to 2%. Usually they drop link, try to renegotiate at 1.5Gbps, and fail, so it's more likely the controller than a wear-out issue.
Hey Anand I've been reading your SSD bibles for years, searching and keeping abreast of the latest SSD news so I'd know the best before taking the plunge.
Well, I took the plunge after reading some reviews of the Samsung SSDs elsewhere. The price of a 60GB ($90) was too hard to pass up. In short I'm happy. Very happy.
Why dont any Samsungs appear in these exhaustive SSD lists? Do you have plans to do so?
I have to agree with some of the earlier comments on the size of the drives tested. Hopefully you can promptly add the Vertex 3 and this new Intel in the 120 GB flavors to your SSD BENCH when they are available. The larger capacity drives are just unafordable for quite a few of us, at least to me anyway.
Too bad the manufacturers don't send you the smaller capacity drives as well initially, although I understand why they don't. All of the Vertex3 results that I have seen so far are on the 240 GB drive also.
As comprehensive as the SSD bench currently is I'm sure that the 120 Gb versions will eventually be in there.
It would be really nice if the corsair performance 3 could be benched and compared to intel 510, both use the same controller, however the corsair p3 has barely any reviews online even though it has been available for a while now.
actually Corsair P3 has the same level high sequential number and poor random number, which lead me to believe P3 and 510 are using the same firmware with different Nand. looks like Intel not only uses 3rd party controller but also 3rd party firmware.
I really hope you can help me out. I'm putting together a new system and am looking for a new SSD. I've been awaiting the arrival of the new intel drive, but I'm a little disappointed with its performance.
So I'm wondering which would be the best choice for a pretty much gaming-system.
Crucial C300 128GB Intel G2 120GB Intel 510 120GB
Guess it's narrowed down to these three, since the Vertex three is month away and also the C400 shouldn't be coming within the next weeks?
I really hope you can help me out. I'm putting together a new system and am looking for a new SSD. I've been awaiting the arrival of the new intel drive, but I'm a little disappointed with its performance.
So I'm wondering which would be the best choice for a pretty much gaming-system.
Crucial C300 128GB Intel G2 120GB Intel 510 120GB
Guess it's narrowed down to these three, since the Vertex three is month away and also the C400 shouldn't be coming within the next weeks?
Any chance we could get the benchmarks for the OCZ RevoDrive X2 thrown into the mix for comparison? It's about the same price point now as the Intel 510 so I'm debating between the two.
I am looking to implement SSDs in Application servers and I need to know how they go in Raid 1 over time. Noone seems to test this! So I am stuck with magnetic drives!!
Anyone else notice the Samsung 470 near or at the top of most benchmarks on a 3gb controller? Is this the SSD in current Macbook Pro's? I havn't seen a review posted to Anandtech about this specific device.
I'm curious as to how does this SSD drive stacks up when compared to this unit SATA2 DDR2 HyperDrive5 from http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/. Maybe sometime in the future, Anand will consider this RAM drive.
Not specific to Intel 510 SSD: Sequential performance after several full disk GB rewrites ?
The LBA remapping for wear levelling must make more of the disk look random (not sequential) after every block has been re-written several times. It's a torture test to see how it can handle reading large files that have been spread over several non-sequential NAND blocks. Or does it not matter as much because the controller can optimise access to several NAND dies at once? Does it only remap 512KB at a time or does the 512KB blocks have non-sequential 4KB LBA's written to them?
Does SSD performance approach random R/W performance after long term heavy use ?
Just an anonymous tip. I happen to know this data is wildly inaccurate because my friend is a reliability engineer at a major company.
WHY DON'T YOU DO A SMALL RELIABILITY TEST OF YOUR OWN TO SEE FOR YOURSELF HOW UNLIKELY IT IS THAT THIS DATA IS ACCURATE.
It seems you have tested probably 20 SSDs for your reviews. So, how many of them have failed on you during testing? How many during the course of the past 3 years? What's the failure rate average across all manufacturers?
Even though manufacturers probably send you their best tested units for review, and your sample size is small, etc. I am willing to bet you REAL MONEY that the failure rate will be more than 3% even in a sample size of just 20.
How about we buy 20 SSDs today and in 3 years see who is right, loser buys em all, winner gets em (you can keep the failed ones)? Any takers?
You forgot to mention above that failure rates are generally PER YEAR. So that's a 3% chance it fails EACH YEAR. And it's still wrong by double or triple (it's closer to 9%).
Sorry to keep piling on, but it bothers me so much that this inaccurate data is out there and people are believing this that I also want to mention this data does not even say which models were tested. This is probably all enterprise grade drives that does not even apply to consumers that are reading this article, and, as I said above, it's STILL INACCURATE!
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deadsmeat - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I am not sure if I missed it, but will you do a price/performance for SSDs? For example, and Intel or Corsair SSD migth be the fastest, but if it has a good price/performance vs the fastest SSD then it's something that consumers might consider when getting an SSD.I don't have a clear "performance" since you have run many benchmark in there, but something like a "real world load" would be good to see. I may not want the fastest SSD, but I will be looking for something that has good over-all balance in performance, and not so heavy on the pocket...
deadsmeat - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Woops, I missed "not" i.e.Intel or Corsair SSD might NOT be the fastest, but if it has a good price/performance vs the fastest SSD then it's something that consumers might consider when getting an SSD.
dagamer34 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I thought that's what the light benchmark was, more "normal" tasks that aren't super-abusive with the SSD.vol7ron - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Yes, light being "AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Light Workload".Either Light or Heavy depending on your use seems to be a combination of both random and sequential performance.
As stated in the article:
"I'll be sharing the full details of the benchmark in some upcoming SSD articles but here are some details:
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."
therealnickdanger - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
What price would you use? MSRP? Newegg after MIR? Just pick a usage scenario that fits your usage and divide the score by the dollar amount of your favorite e-tailer... Pretty simple.vol7ron - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Why not have both? AT has used a price grabber in the past.Actually, where did that go? It started to break down on the old site, but I'd like to see AT put that part shopper back up.
MrDiSante - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Realistically speaking, if you're buying computer components/peripherals, the functionRetailer GetLowestPrice(Component component)
{
return Newegg;
}
would probably be better than the average price comparison site.
marraco - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
To be useful, the comparison needs to consider RAID 0 setups.dagamer34 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
It seems like the one true major difference between the Intel SSD 510 and the OCZ Vertex 3 is that one is available now while the other is only talked about in reviews. First to market is always a benefit for a manufacturer that has a decently performing product, though Newegg's markup makes early adopter's pay dearly for it.Of course, this leads to the important question of "when will the Vertex 3 series reach general availability?" I recently purchased a 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 for a new 2011 17" MacBook Pro and the performance is stunning compared to the stock HDD (it's my first SSD). I'm wondering if I should return the drive and just wait for the Vertex 3 because once you've gone SSD, it is so hard to go back!
Thanks for the review Anand!
dagamer34 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Oh, another thing. Are we going to get an SSD State of the Union for 2011? I'm guessing you're waiting to finish the reviews of most of the SSDs that are coming out this year first... Yeah, I just answered my own question, I think. :)TrackSmart - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
It would be silly to return the Vertex 2 (my opinion). Just check out the PCMark Vantage scores in this article. There's little real world difference between all of the high end drives. Without the benchmarks, there's no way to tell the drives apart.But if it's going to eat you up inside, knowing you were just a 2-3 months away from having the latest model, go ahead. I'll be keeping be enjoying my OCZ Agility 2 in the mean time.
JohnBooty - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
"I'm wondering if I should return the [Vertex 2] and just wait for the Vertex 3"I've got a mix of Vertex 1's, Intel G1s, Intel G2, and Vertex 2's in a variety of machines at home and at work.
For workstation usage as a software dev, there's not a heck of a lot of subjective (ie, "it feels faster") difference between them. At this level of disk performance, your machine just isn't waiting on the hard drive very often.
Obviously you may have specific needs. I used to work for a client who had a 8GB database that I was constantly backing up and restoring many times a day in the course of development work. Now there was a situation where raw read/write speeds were king and the Vertex 3 probably would have performed close to 2x faster. For me that kind of usage is the exception and not the rule though.
sean.crees - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I didn't see any discussion on internal garbage collection (ie: NOT trim).Does it have any?
In my mind, this will be the key deciding feature between Intel and Vertex 3. Whichever has the better garbage collection without TRIM. Remember, TRIM still doesn't work in a RAID array or in OSX.
MrCromulent - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
+1. I'm really eager for an IGC comparison of the Intel 510, the Vertex 3 and if possible, also of a current firmware version of the Crucial C300 (since the drive still competes very well).In Anand's initial test, the C300 suffered from very poor IGC, but Marvell supposedly alleviated this problem in their new firmware releases. Unfortunately, no IGC tests have been conducted with the 0006 firmware yet.
halcyon - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Hate to do this, but+1.
It's not what's the latest, but what's offers the best bang for buck after upgrades.
Such a review would be immensely helpful.
Although based on the Intel 510 TRIM-test random write results, it may have to wait for the first Intel FW upgrade as the numbers with the shipping FW are truly appalling.
Syan48306 - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link
I'm dying to know how it will hold up in my macbook pro. I finally caved and bought one of these 510 SSD's and although it's after the fact, I still want to know how long it'll still be "good" in my system.tim851 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
If the original X25-M "conroe'd" the market, it seems G3 "atomed" it. In the way that Intel, in their crusade to maximize profits and segmentize the market, designed quite a bit to conservatively.I'm all for it though, because I believe that currently, the last thing SSDs are lacking is speed, so the last thing they really need is more of it. I believe at this point just about everybody would want one, if it weren't for the prohibitively high prices. So if Intel can half the per-GB-price of the G3, I'll buy one for sure!
anactoraaron - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
+1I thought the exact same thing about the 1st gen drive compared to this one. What makes SSD's "feel" so much faster is the random read/write performance. When the 40GB X25-V is so close to matching random read/write the 510 will just "feel" slow, especially once you have everything installed on it. I mean, really, who cares about sequential performance once you have everything on the drive that you planned putting on it?
Anand, please put the current WD velociraptor numbers into this graph. It will demonstrate what I mean.
Glad I didn't wait and got my 60GB Vertex 2...
anactoraaron - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
oh yeah if I just looked I would see the velociraptor numbers... lol its late and I should be asleep... maybe I am? Did Intel just atom their next SSD?Golgatha - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I think this is a fair criticism. I also only look at the random R/W performance of these new SSDs. I can pull 215 MB/s R/W from my 300GB Velociraptors in RAID0, and use these drives to install all my games on since game loading performance is largely determined by sequential reading of data from the disks (lots of big sequential files), and because I need around 400GB of space currently for all my game installs .Sequential reads for most SSDs are lower than the 215 MB/s reads I enjoy from my Velociraptors in RAID0. I have a Crucial C300 256MB in this same desktop and I also use an 80GB Intel G2 in my laptop; both of these drives are slower than my Velociraptors in RAID0 in terms of sequential read performance. Also, there is obviously a space concern, in that there isn't enough space on either of these drives to install my games to them.
Now for the host OS and all the random programs I run in parallel, a SSD gives you huge gains and the system just feels snappier. This is largely due to random R/W performance. Basically you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between sequentially reading 10MB of data or less at 215MB/s (Velociraptors in RAID0) vs 320MB/s (my Crucial C300 256MB average speed on a PCIe4x, SATA3, ASUS add-in card), hence the reason that sequential performance of SSDs doesn't matter much to me anymore.
Now if I could get a 512GB or bigger SSD with greater than 215MB/s sequential read performance for less than $1/GB, I might bite on that. So far this product has not come to market, so I'll stick with my Velociraptors until it does.
Golgatha - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I'd also like to add that you will however most certainly notice the difference of 3.15MB/s of random R/W performance my RAID0 Velociraptors put out versus the random R/W performance of pretty much any SSD. SSDs make a huge amount of sense as an OS and applications drive.
EddyKilowatt - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
"...the last thing SSDs are lacking is speed..."Amen. Ninety percent of us still have 3 GB SATA and are just waiting for the 25 nm devices to do their thing to the $/GB on more prosaic drives
mgl888 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I had high expectations from Intel.. now I'm a little disappointed.As the article said, random read is MOST important for a boot drive. Surely Intel should know this?
critical_ - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I'm not sure I agree.1. The SSD market still has a lot of growth ahead of it. Price per GB is the current issue and may be the new "performance per watt" buzz word in this space. Case in point, when I can grab a cheap Dell server for $350 and average notebooks are advertised everyday for $300-$600, are people really going to spend $300-$600+ on an SSD? If it was a much cheaper option then many would go with it.
2. Synthetic vs. Real-world. Synthetic benchmarks are great for bragging on the various overclocking forums but most of us get work done in the real-world. This is no different than people who tune cars for 1/4 mile races but must transport the car on a flat-bed carrier. For some this is a perfectly great trade-off for bragging rights but many of us prefer to get 90% of the 1/4 mile performance and be able to drive the car back and forth to a weekend outing. My point is that in real-world benchmarks there may be some minor deficiencies but will 95% of users notice? I doubt it.
3. I put an Intel X-25M G2 160GB SSD in my father's quad-core desktop that he uses for Photoshop work after listening to many months of complaints that his system was too slow. After the swap, he loves the performance and I love the fact that I'm no longer fielding "it's too slow" complaints. This was the best money I've spent in recent memory but the price is still an issue for most people.
4. Would a user like my father noticed a difference between the X-25M and either a 510 or Vertex 3? I doubt it. Besides we'd have to get him a SATA3 motherboard or an add-in card. Again, it's a price issue.
5. Not too long ago the must-have upgrade was adding RAM to a Windows machine. These days 3-8GB systems are almost the norm so the must-have upgrade is an SSD if a user can stomach the cost. Head on over to NewEgg and read the reviews of "value" SSDs and you'll get an idea of the disappointment for some people who transitioned from HDDs to SSDs in both desktops and laptops. The drives in this segment aren't changing the user experience as dramatically as those ponying up for the high-end devices. Then there is the issue of lack of TRIM support, 4K issues, firmware upgrades destroying data, and the list goes on. The segment needs to addressed by Intel.
6. Finally, hybrids. We see the Intel Z68 will support SSD caching along with higher-end stuff from Adaptec or HighPoint's RocketHybrid controllers trying to get the best of both SSDs and HDDs. Could this be a game-changer? Possibly.
The points that I'm making come down to both real-world performance and market segments. The SSD market would benefit from a better stragety on the entry-level and mid-range markets the way ATI and nVidia have done things. Whoever brings the price down to grab the majority of users will eventually win a good chunk of business. With all that aside, as it stands the 510 is fine for the types of loads I'd put on an SSD as a power user so I'm happy to trade a bit of real-world performance for Intel's reliability.
landerf - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Well that was disappointing. Unless intel prices themselves under OCZ they may do very poorly with this drive.semo - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
The sad thing is that they won't. They always have their "conroe" moment and then they sink up their product in the next generations but they still come out ahead. Even their Prescott cores did very well when they shouldn't have.vol7ron - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Yeah that was my fault. I shouldn't have bought a Prescottm.amitava - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I am really the biggest fan of Anand and his team (used to bypass my company firewall and risk losing my job just to read all the stuff here..) but it does seem like Anand is trying to smooth over the 510's seriously non-competitive random performance....IMO it showed badly enough that I finally decided to sign up and post a comment...
I hope I am mistaken...
Sigwulff - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Well isn't it the old debate regarding synthetic vs. real-world tests? I'll admit it looked bleak for the random parts, but looking at the heavy and light workload 510 looked somewhat shinier...I was 100% sure on the Vertex 3, but presently I'll have to wait and see about the pricing when it lands here in little Denmark :-)
Btw, mentioning the bundle you completely overlooked the very nice cabinet sticker Intel included. I would like some tests about glue adherency, how envious your friends look when they see the sticker on your pc-cabinet etc. :-)
ok just kidding, very nice and informative review! (why we love Anand so much :-)
semo - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
+1I'm still disappointed that Anand hasn't covered the OCZ Vertex 2 "25nm version" con. This is a consumer rights issue and should take precedence over any other development of a technical nature.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe everything regarding the 25nm issue has been resolved? OCZ has initiated an exchange program and is covering all associated costs for users that were affected.I'm still curious to look into the behavior of 25nm NAND however by the time I got back from MWC it looks like the bulk of what needed to happen regarding the 25nm issue already happened.
Is there a remaining aspect of the issue that hasn't been addressed that you'd like me to pursue?
Take care,
Anand
semo - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Hi Anand,Thanks for replying. Just to be clear, what I've been expecting is for you to write a news item or an article about OCZ and 25nm SSDs. It seems you thought I was asking for you fix the problem (it is not your problem and it isn't you who was supposed to fix it).
I still don't understand why all the review sites were silent even after the OCZ 25nm drives hit retail. Was I the only one excited about the new NAND flash tech, and itching to read an in depth review/analysis. Some time passed and some people started complaining that their 25nm V2s were somewhat slower than what reviews (and the packaging) were promising…still no in depth look at 25nm tech at that point.
The jmicron issue was resolved eventually as well but there were a lot of articles written about it.
I’m still stumped as to how hard it is to find a proper review about the 1st ever consumer 25nm SSD to hit retail (the OCZ V2).
m.amitava - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I am sure Anand has quite a lot of pull with OCZ and I believe users who have been stranded with 25nm drives will thank him for investing his time in sorting out the issue rather than writing on it....would like to hear your POV though Anand, so far you haven't given us your take on it....
FunBunny2 - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
-- Is there a remaining aspect of the issue that hasn't been addressed that you'd like me to pursue?Absolutely!!! Not so much the OCZ nonsense, but rather the impact we can expect on SSD acceptance and viability with 25nm parts. IIRC, IMFT NAND at 25nm has/will have ECC on die to deal with some of the issue.
What's not clear is whether an SSD can be built at 25nm that ends up being as "good" as one at 32/34nm at the same price point. We may have hit a corner case in Moore's Law: the reduction in price at 25nm may not be sufficient to overcome both the erasure and electrical issues which present at 25nm. The OCZ fix was to replace larger die with smaller die to get back channels. That's gotta hurt the profit equation. And this doesn't fix the erasure issue.
In other words, there's a whole lot to be delved into with regard to 25nm impact on SSD. A whole lot.
semo - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe everything regarding the 25nm issue has been resolved?"I've just done a quick search on newegg for a Vertex 2 and I still can't figure out at a glance which are the nerfed 25nm drives and which aren't. So the bait-and-switch games is still on as far as I can tell.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
It really boils down to the performance vs. reliability debate. The Vertex 3 is overall a faster drive (assuming you're not doing much in the way of incompressible writes), however it's unclear how much OCZ and SF have improved their reliability testing and validation. If the 510 is close enough in performance and can boast the same sort of reliability that the original X25-M did, then it may be a viable alternative for some users who aren't as interested in absolute performance but want a product that has gone through Intel's validation/testing.With the X25-M the performance gap was too great to really value the drive over the SF-1200 based offerings. The 510 is much more competitive, although our recommendation for pure performance is still obviously the Vertex 3.
As I mentioned in the conclusion, if OCZ can ramp and ship the Vertex 3 with a better reliability track record than the Vertex 2 (not that the latter was bad, it just wasn't quite as good as the X25-M) then this becomes a non-issue. The way I see it is this: the 510 pressures OCZ to work on validation and QA testing, while the Vertex 3 forces Intel to take performance much more seriously. Both are very important to have in the market.
Take care,
Anand
lyeoh - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Hi Anand, have you noticed any issues with hibernate for SSDs? Being able to hibernate is rather important for many mobile users.There are some people complaining that hibernate stopped working when they switched to their SSD drive, whereas others say they don't have probs.
As for reliability, how much more reliable are Intel really anyway? They did have problems with their previous drives too.
epicsnackus - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I have hibernated my laptop with Intel G2 160GB drive every day for more than a year, with no issuejimhsu - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I do have an issue with sleep though on an Intel SSD. On resume after sleep, the drive errors with KERNEL_NONPAGED bluescreens. Does not occur with hibernate. Any idea what is going on?aarste - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Not tried Hibernate, but sleep is working fine on my Intel X-25M 80GB (I put the PC to sleep every night), so the BSOD may be something else entirely.lyeoh - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Oh yeah, thanks for the max latency figures. They're very useful.The G2's max of 900ms is quite a long time. Nearly a second! What are the max latencies for say a velociraptor in similar tests? I know the theoretical figures would be based on seek time + RPM but often theory is different from practice.
I find it interesting that the Crucial RealSSD C300 does worse than the Intel SSD 510 in the "Anand Storage Bench 2011- Heavy Workload" despite getting better numbers in the random and sequential tests. Any idea why this would be so? Poorer max latency?
jimhsu - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Poorer sequential performance I guess. The C300 (which I just got) is very fast, but the sequential perf of the 510 is simply better, which impacts a lot of the sequential portion of the workload test. Random performance in typical desktop models has reached somewhat of a plateau, particularly since most applications currently out there are optimized for the dog-slow random performance of consumer hard drives.Creepwood - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
About reliability/compatibility: have you tested this drive in the new Sandy Bridge Macbook Pro? Any issues?davepermen - Monday, March 7, 2011 - link
Interestingly, one of THE main performance cases is when you need to quickly write lots of stuff, like in video editing. And there, all data is at least partially compressed, so i guess there the intel will be in a better place.RaistlinZ - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Intel is going to have to price this thing cheaper than the Vertex 3, or any other new Sandforce SSD for that matter. They can't use performance as a selling point. I'm sure the new SF controller will offer good stability. Unless you're an Intel fanboy I don't see any reason to get the 510 over the Vertex 3, unless they price it much lower.semo - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
This is an Atom alright!I think the conclusion, although critical in places was overall mild. “It looks like we may have hit the upper limit of what we need from 4KB random write performance”… Yeah, in the consumer/budget space. But what consumer/budget computer user would buy a 250GB SSD. I’ve managed to convince a few of my clients to go with an “expensive upgrade” and in the end they’ve been extremely happy… In those cases I’ve only installed 64GB drives.
At the moment SSDs are NOT mainstream and it’s mostly the enthusiast and pro crowd that will be buying consumer grade SSDs. I’ll be using my SSD for VMs for testing and studying and I do a lot of heavy random IO operations.
For a drive as big and as expensive as the 250GB 510, I expect much better across-the-board performance.
TSnor - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Hi, the article states "~900ms write operation, the 510 keeps the worst case latency to below 400ms. The Vertex 3 by comparison has a max write latency of anywhere from 60ms - 350ms"microseconds are usually abbreviated us, where the u has a funny tail on it. (the u is greek for something)
ms usually means milliseconds. I usually type 'mics' when on the keyboard and reserve the funny u for when handwriting. example, a good SSD write takes less then 100 mics.
saying something is around 900 ms means it takes about a second.
epicsnackus - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
The article is correct, the numbers are really in milliseconds. The microsecond numbers you're thinking of are 1) best case, and 2) usually readsChloiber - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
"Write speed with fully incompressible data is easily a victory for the SF-2200 based OCZ Vertex 3."I think you meant fully compressible?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Fixed! Thank you :)Take care,
Anand
TSnor - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Article says "Write speed with fully incompressible data is easily a victory for the SF-2200 based OCZ Vertex 3. "I think you meant "Write speed with compressible data is easily a victory for the SF-2200 based OCZ Vertex 3. "
Excellent article, I was interested in the 3rd gen intel SSD, but not at these specs. Wish you gave the read latency time (it can be inferred to some degree from the elapsed time charts which are good). Also, given the size of internal cache these devices use perhaps running for more than 3 mins would be a good idea. The average performance is still changing at 3 mins.
AstroGuardian - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
"I mentioned earlier that the 510 would go through Intel’s extensive validation testing, just like any other Intel product."Yea right! Just like the H67 and P67. Yea, that made me so happy.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
That's 100% a valid point and it does show that even with extensive validation errors can still get through.You'll remember that the X25-M was the first to have major firmware issues before any of its present day competitors were even created.
Only time will tell how well Intel has learned from those experiences and how seriously it's taking the validation of the 510. Initial compatibility testing looks good but we've got a long road ahead of us.
Take care,
Anand
Ryomitomo - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
At least Intel's labs identified the problems themselves, disclosed the problem themselves, will recall and exchange to fix the problem.These things makes me feel very confident to buy future Intel products.
Nihility - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
A good point. Unlike certain NVIDIA mobile chipsets.Chloiber - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
...I think Anand is right. Many of you are complaining, but as he said on the final page: it is not clear, where the actual limits are for random speeds. Of course, it's always better to have more. The thing is, that your PC at home can't benefit from 60'000 IOPS. It just can't. You can run it through benchmarks which show high numbers, but as soon as you feed the drive and the CPU with real data, the drive is NOT the limiting factor anymore.I'm not saying that it's a good thing the Intel 510 has such low random speeds, compared to other, even older drives. But in the end, the question is whether or not you can actually benefit from 200MB/s random reads and random writes with QDs above 4.
Anand said himself, and I assure you that he is correct - you can trace it yourself if you want - that with standard workload on home desktop PCs, Queue Depth rarely exceeds 1 or 2, especially not with an SSD in your system. Not even during boot!
And now THINK AGAIN. What are the random 4k read speeds for low QD of EVERY SSD today? It's actually limited by the NAND being used and it's between 20MB/s and 30MB/s for EVERY SSD.
Again, I'm not saying that high IOPS aren't important. I'm just saying, they aren't as important as you think. Not anymore, not in the very high regions we are today and especially not with very high QDs.
The 510 seems to have very good performance in real world benchmarks - it seems that most of you rate synthetic benchmarks higher than real world benchmarks. This, I don't quite understand.
semo - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
The fact is, you will not be using a very competitively priced 250GB SSD for net browsing. When I get my SSD, I'll be using it to store my test VMs where I do a lot of software installations and snapshot jumping.The 510 is not a mainstream product where the QD rarely goes above 2. Not at that price at least. I've installed an SSD for a few average users but they were all 60GB drives. I could never justify the price of a 250GB SSD to them but a pro user might (i.e. someone who might make use of a high IOPS drive).
semo - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Meant to say "uncompetitively". Too expensive for the average computer user.tno - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
Spot on, and so a mainstream drive this is not. As workstation drive, however, this seems pretty solid.Nentor - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
If it (the 510) was very cheap everything you say makes sense, but since it is not they'd better make it as fast as possible.7Enigma - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Like Anand I'm shocked Intel went this route. After touting the random read/write so heavily (and for good reason) they pull this stunt and look horrible. I'm an owner of an 80gig G2 and love it but have been in the process of justifying an upgrade so I can put the 80gig in my laptop. I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of sequential performance (just like I did with the G2 over other competitors), but this is a complete step backwards.And remember the review unit was the larger drive. Put the 120gig version in those benchmarks and the critical numbers that are so low to start with are only going to become much worse. Just like all of the previous releases due to high cost the majority of people will be purchasing the smaller-sized drives (most people bought Intel 80gig when 160gig was out, etc.).
When you are competing on firmware only, and that firmware is not the best to begin with (in comparison to Sandforce), you have to be perfect, and in this case Intel just didn't produce.
Very disappointed indeed.
Concillian - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
"After touting the random read/write so heavily (and for good reason) they pull this stunt and look horrible."They don't look horrible, they are 2nd or 1st in most of the real world tests, Improving on the G2 performance.
Random performance is lower, but the real world tests demonstrate that random performance has reached a point where it is "enough" for typical workloads.
semo - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Whose real world are we talking about here? Average Joe "real world", mainstream "real world", enthusiast "real world"... you get the idea.As an average user (net browsing, office apps, flash gaming, etc...) this sort of performance is great. However, the same user would benefit just as much from a much cheaper 60GB SSD. The 510 is neither cheap overall or in $/GB sense. My "real world" is using VMs and lot's of tests involving high QDs and IOPS so this drive is not for me... At that price, capacity and performance, I don't know who this drive is for.
TEAMSWITCHER - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
It's a bit surprising that the Crucial C300 (on the 6 GB/s) interface did so well in the real world benchmarks. This drive is a year old and still competitive. Newegg had them on sale a couple weeks ago for only $480.00. Which is a bargain compared to the $615.00 for the Intel 510. This is an interesting technology to watch, with lots of plot twists and upsets. I can't wait to see the crucial M4.Lonesloane - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I see the price point of the new Intel 510 drives extremely critical. Intel have always charged more than the competition and got away with it due to the fact that on the other hand there was the good quality, compatibility and reliablity of their SSD products.Now it seems like a clear win for Sandforce, especially if we take the superior write amplification of the sandforce controller, which is a big advantage regarding the reduced write cycles of the new 25nm NAND.
Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
You have to tell them to stop sending you Ferraris because no one buys Ferraris. The 120GB versions of both the OCZ and Intel drives are much more relevant, and we dont have the foggiest clue how they line up. And even if we did, we would not know how the 40/60/80 GB versions stack up against each other. I am currently shopping for a 40-60GB SSD and I cannot even to this day get a clear answer on which product is better (performance per dollar). And all of these drives have been out for at least year....7Enigma - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Exactly. I posted above about this and it will seriously hurt Intel as the poor random read/write will only become worse.Concillian - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
"I am currently shopping for a 40-60GB SSD and I cannot even to this day get a clear answer on which product is better (performance per dollar). And all of these drives have been out for at least year.... "This is a concern and all you really need to know is how they reduce capacity.
They can do it by reducing the number of chips (usually will see a performance hit)
or
They can do it by using the same number of chips, but each stores less (usually will perform about the same)
When you look at the OCZ 25nm "debacle" it was this very decision that created the issue. The 25nm flash itself was not the problem (even though that got a fair bit of the blame)... it was how they implemented it. They used half the 25nm higher density chips in the drives, reducing performance. This also meant reserving one block for over-provision meant it was larger in size, so that ate into the usable capacity. The solution still uses 25nm chips, but they're the same number of chips as 34nm, so they perform at about the same level.
There probably needs to be a chart at the beginning like the video card articles showing details for each drive. It would clear up any issues, as well as something that can be referred to in the future. I refer to the old video card reviews when looking for things like ROP / texture counts, memory bandwidth, speeds, etc... because those charts have really useful information in them.
jnmfox - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
+1We need a round-up of OS boot drives (40/60/80 GB). I love my 80GB G2 but I’m not interested in paying more than $200, hopefully less, for an SSD.
Stargrazer - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I too would love to see the numbers for the 128(-ish) GB versions.Marlin1975 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
How about throwing in a AMD SB850 to see how they handle SSD's.AMD has had native SATA6gb longer than intel so like to see how that matchs up. Most only look at CPU and ignore the chipset.
DarkKnight_Y2K - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
+1tech6 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
So nothing has really changed. There still isn't one "perfect" SSD that does everything well and is proven to be reliable. I guess the disappointment stems from many that were hoping that the new Intel SSDs would tick all those boxes - speed, reliability and price. As usual YMMV - Samsung and Intel is the conservative choice and SF based drives are for those who want maximum performance in random I/O situations.tno - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
This, as always in the tech world, is a numbers and marketing game. Somewhere there is a user who is encoding video and really needs the bleeding edge for that. There is an artist working on large incompressible canvasses in Photoshop. These guys need this drive. They have a small Sandforce doing OS duties but they need a fast non -Sandforce drive for data. All those numbers mean squat without perspective and that's what's the text of Anandtech articles bring.So maybe for the consumer that is tech savvy enough to know they want an SSD but not enough to have read all that has been published with regards SSD drives they need a simple primer. Maybe a web app. Do you use you computer with VMs? Do you use it with games? Is your computer a netbook? I'm certain there is a way to ask a few questions and come up with a sensible suggestion for what drive is right for which user.
That would only work with a more comprehensive field of tested drives. Other posters are right, there is little to no way of knowing which is the best 40GB drive. So I volunteer myself to help. Anand, I am a soon to be new father that would love to work from home if for no other reason than daycare costs nearly as much as what I get paid as a paramedic. Send me a system, every SSD on the market and a small stipend and I will test anything and everything solid state.
Gigantopithecus - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
...with poor product differentiation. With Intel's adoption of the same controller others are using, SSDs become that much less interesting. I realize firmware and QC differences still exist, but without hard numbers (aside from the French site's), and given that major snafus can hit any maker at any time, it seems like the only real consideration is ye ole customer service. I've dealt with OCZ's 'support' department twice and that was enough for me. Intel and Crucial have always treated me right, so considering real world performance differences more or less don't exist anymore, they'll be getting my SSD $s.LeeKay - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
have had 100% Faliure and i have had 5 drives all failed.iwod - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I have been asking the question for a long time. Why an Toshiba SSD manage to beat Sandforce in some real world usage. And finally we got an answer.Given all SSD latency are roughly equal or the same.
Seq Read Write is EXTREMELY Important in Everyday usage. IT IS THE SINGLE MOST Important factor that gives you most improvement in SSD Real World usage benchmarks.
Random Write reaches the top with 50 MB/s. And while we would want further reduction in Write latency, but with the increase of Ram / Cache onbroad with SSD. This should not be an issue.
Random Read results shows we have still some head room to grow.
With further tweaking Intel may be able to squeeze out even more performance our of it.
tno - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
I think I missed something, while Seq Read Write is obviously the big number that makes the marketing materials, in terms of user experience (ooh, buzzword) the Random Reads are where lies the money, and as Anand said in the article, no modern OS stresses this enough to make the lower numbers a significant limitation.High sequential reading and writing is only going to be felt by those that are moving large files around within an already fast environment where a mechanical disk drive would be a bottle neck (encoding files locally for instance). And while for those users Seq Read Write might be considered "THE SINGLE MOST important factor" it wouldn't be for, say, the person that wants to add some oopmh to a dual-core laptop of otherwise mediocre specifications.
Certainly, aside from playing around with transferring files, my drives have probably never approached their max seq speed. As OS drives, they mainly spend their time hunting out small files for the OS to use.
Beenthere - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
These SSDs aren't ready for prime time just yet IMO. Maybe in another 2-3 years?tno - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
What's the hold up? Reliability? Speed?masterkritiker - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
When will we be able to buy $100+ SSDs @ 1TB capacity?gammaray - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
nevertno - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
+1Nihility - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
At least 4 years.ionis - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
It would be nice if some HDDs were also included in workload benches. They were in the random read/write benches so I don't get why they were left out of the other ones.dagamer34 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
HDDs aren't included because they'd throw off the scale pretty horribly. The number labeling the performance would be larger than the bar itself compared to all the other SSDs out there.ionis - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
I find that hard to believe, considering they were included in the random read/write graphs at 1/100 or less of the performance of some of the SSDs and the charts weren't scaled horribly.In the sequential reads/writes, they performed at 25%-80% which doesn't through the scale off much at all.
The heavy workload looked to involve a lot of sequential access (installs and downloads). So again, I don't see why they weren't included.
There are also other comments asking for more HDDs in the benches. For people like myself, who didn't start following storage benchmarks until SSDs came out, it's hard to tell what the performance gain is.
ionis - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
I find that hard to believe, considering they were included in the random read/write graphs at 1/100 or less of the performance of some of the SSDs and the charts weren't scaled horribly.In the sequential reads/writes, they performed at 25%-80% which doesn't throw the scale off much at all.
The heavy workload looked to involve a lot of sequential access (installs and downloads). So again, I don't see why they weren't included.
There are also other comments asking for more HDDs in the benches. For people like myself, who didn't start following storage benchmarks until SSDs came out, it's hard to tell what the performance gain is.
(sorry if double post, comment didn't seem to show up 1st time)
mateus1987 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
now you know.http://nzealander.blog.com/files/2011/03/6661.jpg
mateus1987 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
the satanic Apple logo.http://nzealander.blog.com/files/2011/03/6661.jpg
AnnihilatorX - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Anand you didn't clarify very clearly what is the difference of naming between 510 series and X-25 G3.The introduction leads me to believe 510 is X-25 G3, or is it not?
Is X-25 G3 going to use 25nm flash instead, so it's another drive? If so, when is the release date of that, and how do we expect its performance compared to 510 in this review? Will the X-25 G3 uses a custom controller?
strikeback03 - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
As the article stated, the G3 (whatever it is officially called) will be a lower-performance part whose aim is to bring lower prices and better reliability to more mainstream segmentsMrStromberg - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
So I've been waiting for quite some time now for the new intel drives since the reviews in the past about how reliable and how long life an SSD has, promising that all of this would be better with these new generation drives. Although now I am faced with the potential "problem" of a 3Gbit bottle neck in mi macbook pro and as mentioned in the review above "these next-generation SSDs not only use 6Gbps SATA, they really need it." So where does that leave me? Should a go for a cheaper older drive which might be less reliable in the long run (but nobody really knows right?) or buy a new generation drive which might be suffering from a bottleneck? I didn't really understand why the new drives really need the 6Gbit SATA to function well? Can someone please explain or give me some advice.thank you
Denithor - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Best right now would probably be an Intel G2 drive. Fast enough and very good durability.The next generation drives aren't really going to perform much better on a 3Gb SATA port than the current generation already does, plus you have the worse durability inherent in the 25nm NAND chips.
Nentor - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Wow, so Intel has a gap in it's road map and goes the 3rd party route and brings us a product that is essentially slower than a consumer product (Vertex 3) from another manufacturer.They could have gone Sandforce, why not?
mateus1984 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
http://forums.hexus.net/general-discussion/199892-...Drag0nFire - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Would love to see you run a traditional hdd through the new bench so we can see what sort of real world improvements can be expected from making the switch to an SSD...Great article. I'll be waiting for the x25-m G3. Keep on Intel about this!
wheel - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Thanks for the review Anand, but I am a little disappointed that there are a lot of synthetic benchmarks but no real world tests.By "real world tests" I mean separate tests for: booting into Windows; loading a web browser with 25 tabs of saved web page documents on the HDD; starting Star Craft and loading a map; copying a large amount of files to itself; running a batch Photoshop image transform job; starting IE6 from a stopped Windows XP Mode VM and opening a complex web page hosted on the local disk; running a intensive anti-virus scan on a specific (large) folder etc.
I know PC Mark and SysMark are meant to represent these real world test, but as individual consumers we have different usage profiles and by breaking down the results into individual tests we can better work out which drive is most appropriate for us, instead of studying the synthetic tests and making an educated guess.
Cheers,
Ian
Boogaloo - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Seconded.A lot of people are complaining about the performance of the drive, and I'd like to know how much of a difference it actually makes in real world scenarios. If this drive comes within 10 ms of a vertex 3 loading up starcraft 2, then who cares?
iwod - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
If you read carefully the Anand Benchmarks does exactly just that.aarste - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Those graphs on the TRIM test look nothing remotely close to ATTO, which I use. I checked HDTach as well and it wasn't that, but close.What app was it?
mino - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Please, be so king and include a fast HDD (say a WD Velociraptor) in EVERY SSD benchmark.While most readers here understand the difference between SSD and HDD, including a single fast HDD would make the article useful also as a reference/datapoint when talking to not-so-techy people.
strikeback03 - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
Then people would complain because the numbers are so small as to be unreadablenerex - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Maybe I missed it, but i didn't see any discussion of the power usage of the new drives- according the intel press releases, the new drives use 380mW/100mW active/idle and the G2 drives only use 150mW/75mW active/idle.This means the new drives would actually be worse on laptop battery life, correct?
DigitlDrug - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link
Hi Anand,+1
Power consumption figures would be great for us laptop users!
I find it interesting that a number of these drives report consumption of up to 3watts and others are in the mw range when browsing the Egg.
Some clarity on power consumption would be a great addition.
As always, great review!
ClagMaster - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
The Intel SSD 510 is not a bad drive but it cost more than a Vertex 2 or 3.The Intel Toolbox, and extensive compatablity and reliability testing are major pluses.
The SSD is still an extravagance for desktops though I can see its a no-brainer for laptops because of power conservation. Unless the cost per gigabyte is less than $0.80/gigabyte, the performance gain does not offset the mechanical harddrive.
neotiger - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I.e., an epic FAIL product priced at a premium to competing products that are far superior.What misguided priorities from Intel. People shell out the big bucks for SSD's for their RANDOM IO performance, NOT sequential IO. So the geniuses at Intel decided to release a "next gen" product that actually has WORSE performance than the last gen product. Really?
I'm speechless. The really sad part about this fiasco is that most people will still buy this piece of crap over far superior competing products just because it's Intel.
Just like NetBurst all over again.
strikeback03 - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
Did you actually look at the real-world results? the 510 is almost twice as fast as the G2 160GB in some tests.poohbear - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
nice review, but you're talking & comparing the Vertex 3 and this new drive, but where's the vertex 3 on the market? its not even released, its months away from release if im not mistaken? the C400 will be released before it, so what's the point of comparing tech today with tech months away from release (and in the SSD world months is a very long time!)sor - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
FWIW, we've deployed literally hundreds of X25-E drives, and our failure rate is well over 1%, closer to 2%. Usually they drop link, try to renegotiate at 1.5Gbps, and fail, so it's more likely the controller than a wear-out issue.someguy11 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Hey AnandI've been reading your SSD bibles for years, searching and keeping abreast of the latest SSD news so I'd know the best before taking the plunge.
Well, I took the plunge after reading some reviews of the Samsung SSDs elsewhere. The price of a 60GB ($90) was too hard to pass up. In short I'm happy. Very happy.
Why dont any Samsungs appear in these exhaustive SSD lists? Do you have plans to do so?
sequoia464 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I have to agree with some of the earlier comments on the size of the drives tested. Hopefully you can promptly add the Vertex 3 and this new Intel in the 120 GB flavors to your SSD BENCH when they are available. The larger capacity drives are just unafordable for quite a few of us, at least to me anyway.Too bad the manufacturers don't send you the smaller capacity drives as well initially, although I understand why they don't. All of the Vertex3 results that I have seen so far are on the 240 GB drive also.
As comprehensive as the SSD bench currently is I'm sure that the 120 Gb versions will eventually be in there.
Thanks for the review.
Rasta_Cook - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
It would be really nice if the corsair performance 3 could be benched and compared to intel 510, both use the same controller, however the corsair p3 has barely any reviews online even though it has been available for a while now.yekn - Sunday, March 6, 2011 - link
actually Corsair P3 has the same level high sequential number and poor random number, which lead me to believe P3 and 510 are using the same firmware with different Nand.looks like Intel not only uses 3rd party controller but also 3rd party firmware.
Ryomitomo - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
I would also like to find out how this SSD perform against the rest. This drive had been on the market for a while now. Thank you!RealGsus - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
Hi guys,I really hope you can help me out. I'm putting together a new system and am looking for a new SSD. I've been awaiting the arrival of the new intel drive, but I'm a little disappointed with its performance.
So I'm wondering which would be the best choice for a pretty much gaming-system.
Crucial C300 128GB
Intel G2 120GB
Intel 510 120GB
Guess it's narrowed down to these three, since the Vertex three is month away and also the C400 shouldn't be coming within the next weeks?
Thanks in advance for any opinions on this :)
Kind regards,
Gsus
princekermit - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
I have the C300 128 and I am very pleased with it.RealGsus - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
Hi guys,I really hope you can help me out. I'm putting together a new system and am looking for a new SSD. I've been awaiting the arrival of the new intel drive, but I'm a little disappointed with its performance.
So I'm wondering which would be the best choice for a pretty much gaming-system.
Crucial C300 128GB
Intel G2 120GB
Intel 510 120GB
Guess it's narrowed down to these three, since the Vertex three is month away and also the C400 shouldn't be coming within the next weeks?
Thanks in advance for any opinions on this :)
Kind regards,
Gsus
Sampleboy - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
Any chance we could get the benchmarks for the OCZ RevoDrive X2 thrown into the mix for comparison? It's about the same price point now as the Intel 510 so I'm debating between the two.hyperasus - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
I do not understand why Anand didn't include the latest Corsair drives in this review. Has Corsair done something to offend AnandTech?Squuiid - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
+1They were the 1st of this next gen to be available, yet NOBODY has reviewed them.
Based on the 2nd Gen Marvel controller I believe, a' la C400.
Luke212 - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
Anand,I am looking to implement SSDs in Application servers and I need to know how they go in Raid 1 over time. Noone seems to test this! So I am stuck with magnetic drives!!
sean.crees - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
Anyone else notice the Samsung 470 near or at the top of most benchmarks on a 3gb controller? Is this the SSD in current Macbook Pro's? I havn't seen a review posted to Anandtech about this specific device.daidaloss - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
I'm curious as to how does this SSD drive stacks up when compared to this unit SATA2 DDR2 HyperDrive5 from http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/.Maybe sometime in the future, Anand will consider this RAM drive.
tygrus - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - link
Not specific to Intel 510 SSD:Sequential performance after several full disk GB rewrites ?
The LBA remapping for wear levelling must make more of the disk look random (not sequential) after every block has been re-written several times. It's a torture test to see how it can handle reading large files that have been spread over several non-sequential NAND blocks. Or does it not matter as much because the controller can optimise access to several NAND dies at once? Does it only remap 512KB at a time or does the 512KB blocks have non-sequential 4KB LBA's written to them?
Does SSD performance approach random R/W performance after long term heavy use ?
gaffe - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - link
Just an anonymous tip. I happen to know this data is wildly inaccurate because my friend is a reliability engineer at a major company.WHY DON'T YOU DO A SMALL RELIABILITY TEST OF YOUR OWN TO SEE FOR YOURSELF HOW UNLIKELY IT IS THAT THIS DATA IS ACCURATE.
It seems you have tested probably 20 SSDs for your reviews. So, how many of them have failed on you during testing? How many during the course of the past 3 years? What's the failure rate average across all manufacturers?
Even though manufacturers probably send you their best tested units for review, and your sample size is small, etc. I am willing to bet you REAL MONEY that the failure rate will be more than 3% even in a sample size of just 20.
How about we buy 20 SSDs today and in 3 years see who is right, loser buys em all, winner gets em (you can keep the failed ones)?
Any takers?
gaffe - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - link
Oh and P.S.You forgot to mention above that failure rates are generally PER YEAR. So that's a 3% chance it fails EACH YEAR. And it's still wrong by double or triple (it's closer to 9%).
gaffe - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - link
Sorry to keep piling on, but it bothers me so much that this inaccurate data is out there and people are believing this that I also want to mention this data does not even say which models were tested. This is probably all enterprise grade drives that does not even apply to consumers that are reading this article, and, as I said above, it's STILL INACCURATE!