Intel X25-M SSD: Intel Delivers One of the World's Fastest Drives
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 8, 2008 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The Killer App: Multitasking Performance
Here's where things get interesting. I ran two tests, in one I extracted a 5GB archive and tried to run Photoshop after 30 seconds of extraction and in the second test, I extracted a 5GB archive and tried to scan my system for viruses using NAV 2008. Simple enough, right? I'm reporting the times of each task individually.
The extraction task took the longest to complete but the standings speak for themselves:
Here's one area where the Samsung SLC based devices actually come out ahead, by a good margin. The Samsung SLC SSD finished the extraction in 102 seconds, compared to 161 seconds for the X25-M. Even the VelociRaptor did better here at 116 seconds, but remember you need to look at both tasks for a complete picture:
Launching Photoshop took 5.2 seconds for the Samsung SLC SSD, it was like we weren't even running another test in the background. The X25-M did fine at 12.2 seconds and the VelociRaptor was much slower at 27.3 seconds. The JMicron based MLC drives didn't do too bad here either, although they were a little slower than Intel's MLC offering.
The real stress test was this next multitasking scenario. Quite possibly one of the most annoying thing about viruses is having to run real time scanning and protection software all the time, especially with a traditional HDD in your system. The extraction task is the same as before, but the other task is a full system scan in Norton Anti-Virus 2008. I timed both:
The WD 1TB drive would always complete the extraction task quicker than all of the other drives, but paid the penalty in the scan test (which is why you have to look at both charts for a full analysis). The Samsung SLC drive is still the overall winner here, followed closely by Intel's X25-M. The JMicron based MLC drives do horribly here, taking over twice as long to complete as Intel's MLC.
The mechanical disks however do a lot worse. While the Intel X25-M took 3.5 minutes to extract the 5GB archive, the VelociRaptor took over 17 minutes. The Seagate Momentus 7200.2 took over 23 minutes!
Let's look at the NAV results:
The X25-M took around 5.3 minutes, the Raptor needed more than 23 minutes and Seagate Momentus made me wait over 40 minutes. It's these sorts of usage scenarios that really make SSDs worthwhile, and they are the most realworld you can get. When we started looking at real world performance the PCMark Vantage numbers may have looked a bit ridiculous, but by now you should see that they are more of the middle ground when looking at performance of these drives.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
I think the question was: how much more performance is left untapped by current controller designs? The JMicron issues are a limited case, what will truly be telling is what happens when we see Intel vs. Samsung with SLC drives...The dominating the charts line was in reference to the Crysis results. If you've ever run the Crysis GPU bench you'll know that it is extremely disk intensive (particularly the first run). As I mentioned in the article, it over emphasizes the importance of disk performance but that's not to say that the results aren't valid.
I do see your point however, let me see what I can do about clarifying that statement.
-A
yyrkoon - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
Ok, I guess I missed the JMicron 'thing', but to be perfectly honest I dislike *anything* JMicron and try to avoid them whenever possible. I guess I am just so interested in these Intel drives, I just tuned everyting else out. However, I did read what you mentioned about 'trouble-shooting' the JMicron MLC issue.Never ran Crysis, and do not plan on running it anytime soon if ever, but I am somewhat of a hardcore gamer.
Keep up the good work, and PLEASE do keep us informed on at least these Intel SSD drives :)
BD2003 - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
If the achilles heel of the JMicron MLC is the random write speed, why couldnt a ram buffer be used to cache writes? Sure this would cause a serious problem if the power went out, but thats an issue some would be willing to live with.I'm fairly sure vista has an option for this in the device manager in the properties tab of a drive - "enable advanced disk performance". I wonder if that would have any effect on the results?
DigitalFreak - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
Yet more proof that JMicron products are shit.ggordonliddy - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
For the love of all humanity: If you are going to write for a living, please learn basic comma usage!It is NOT okay to just stick a comma in the middle of a sentence anytime you want. And it gives readers a headache.
Here is just one of numerous examples of improper comma usage I've seen so far (and I've only gotten to the 3rd page!):
"Intel certifies its drives in accordance with the JEDEC specs from 0 - 70C, at optimal temperatures your data will last even longer [...]"
The comma before "at optimal" should be replaced with a semicolon or a period (I prefer the semicolon).
Did you actually pass your English classes? I'm guessing that you probably did and you are just a product of our miserable public school system that refuses to hold students to any real level of accountability.
(And BTW, your quoting system is broken. When I enter text in the Quote Text dialog and click OK, nothing new appears in the Comment compose field.)
7Enigma - Friday, September 19, 2008 - link
Honestly man, you need to seriously relax. My personal rule of thumb for grammar is does the mistake make the understanding of the sentence difficult to comprehend.Writing something like, "Intel certifies its drives in accordance with the JEDEC specs from 0 - 70C, at optimal temperatures your data will last even longer [...]", while not grammatically correct is completely readable.
If it was something like, ""Intel certifies drives to accordance with the JEDEC specs from 0 - 70C, at optimal data your temperatures will last even longer [...]", now you have a legitimate beef.
The former can easily be forgiven, the latter makes my head hurt when I read it. Trust me, whatever you do, do not go to Dailytech.com and read the articles. Those even I get annoyed at frequently and I'm very forgiving.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
You're quite right, thanks for the heads up :) Some of the article was directly from my notes while I was working on the tests, so that's one source of unpolished bits. I know I'm far from perfect, so I do appreciate your (and anyone else's) assistance.Thanks :)
Anand
pkp - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
Thanks for posting, Anand. I see you're already aware of the problem, but I wanted to throw my two cents in.What is the usual editing process? I think a once over by a second set of eyes would have caught the bulk of the grammatical errors.
Of course, the ultimate issue isn't commas. It's readability. However, the problem was bad enough that I'm making this comment without having even gotten through the first page of this article.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
I'm often the content editor for posted articles, but often we skip that stage due to late nights and schedules. Doing a final thorough edit can require a couple hours (edit and then HTLM-ize), and when someone finishes an article at 5AM or whatever and it's an NDA type piece, delaying it any further is usually not desired by the readers or us.I do read all posted articles, and often I take the time to go through and fix any noteworthy errors. A few misplaced commas don't really detract from a 5000 word article, however, and depending on what else is going on I may or may not edit the text. If anyone takes the time to point out specific errors, i.e. "on page 3 you write "...." they always get corrected - at least if I see it. General complaints are much more difficult to address though, i.e. "You used passive voice and therefore you must DIE!" LOL.
I know personally that when you write a long article with lots of testing, certain thoughts tend to appear in multiple places and the final result isn't always as coherent as I would like. Trying to "fix" problems relating to flow and readability is difficult at best, and requires more time than we generally spend. If anyone wants to make specific suggestions, though, we're open for input as always.
Perhaps it's useful to compare the process to print publications. Magazines usually have several editors on staff whose job is solely to edit other authors' work; I can say that we don't have anyone at AnandTech in that position these days. (I edit some of the articles, but not all, and even then I make mistakes.) That's probably why we have more typos than magazines, but then we provide far more thorough coverage as well. Last I saw, most magazine hardware reviews end up being one page and ~1000 words, with a couple charts.
At the end of the day, I get most of my detailed information from the internet. Magazines might be more grammatically correct, and they make for great toilet reading, but I don't generally depend on them as a source of credible information. I'd say it's safe to say we won't see such an in-depth exploration of SSD performance and issues in any magazine. [Now I have to prepare to have someone point me to an article in some magazine that does exactly that.]
Cheers,
Jarred
KikassAssassin - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
Then I guess I should point you to an article in last month's issue of my favorite data storage magazine.http://www.solidstatedisksmonthly.com/2008/08/ever...">http://www.solidstatedisksmonthly.com/2...erforman...
Unfortunately, their website seems to be down at the moment, but keep checking it, I'm sure it'll be back up soon (and don't be fooled by the article's title. It's actually only 23 pages without the ads).