The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Hey, There’s an Elephant in the Room
When the first X25-M reviews went live a few people discovered something very important, something many of us (myself included) missed and should’ve addressed: the drive got slower the more you filled it up. It’s no great mystery why this happened, but it seemed odd at the time because it went against conventional thinking.
LegitReviews was one of the first to spot the SSD slowdown phenomenon, good work Nate.
It’s worth mentioning that hard drives suffer from the same problem; just for a different reason.
Hard drives store data on platters; the platters rotate while an arm with read/write heads on it hovers over the surface of the platter and reads data while the platter spins. The diameter of the platter is greater the further out on the platter you go, that’s just how circles work. The side effect is that for the same amount of rotation, the heads can cover more area on the outside of the platter than on the inside.
The result is that transfer speeds are greater on the outer sectors of the platter than on the inner ones. OSes thus try to write as much data to the outer sectors as possible, but like beachfront property - there’s only a limited amount of space. Eventually you have to write to the slower parts of the drive and thus the more full your drive is, the slower your transfer rates will be for data stored in the innermost sectors.
Fragmentation also hurts hard drive performance. While modern day hard drives have gotten pretty quick at transferring large amounts of data stored sequentially, spread the data out all around the platter and things get real slow, real fast.
Randomness is the enemy of rotational storage.
Solid state drives aren’t supposed to have these issues. Data is stored in flash, so it doesn’t matter where it’s located, you get to it at the same speed. SSDs have +5 armor immunity to random access latency (that’s got to be the single most geeky-sounding thing I’ve ever written, and I use words like latency a lot).
So why is it that when you fill up a SSD like Intel’s X25-M that its performance goes down? Even more worrisome, why is it that when you delete data from the drive that its performance doesn’t go back up?
While SSDs are truly immune to the same problems that plague HDDs, they do also get slower over time. How can both be true? It’s time for another lesson in flash.
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Erickffd - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Also created an account just to post this comment.Really impressive and well done article ! Will stay tune for further developments and reviews. Thank you so much :)
Also... very impressed by OCZ's respond and commitment upon end users needs and product quality assurance (unfortunately not so commun by large this days among other companies). Certanly will buy from them my next SSDs to reward and support their healty policy.
Be well ! ;)
Gasaraki88 - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
This truly was a GREAT article. I enjoyed reading it and was very informative. Thank you so much. That's why Anandtech is the best site out there.davidlants - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
This is one of the best tech articles I have ever read, I created an account just to post this comment. I've been a fan of Anandtech for years and articles like this (and the RV700 article from a while back) show the truly unique perspective and access that Anand has that simply no other tech site can match. GREAT WORK!!!Zak - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
I just got the Apex. I'd probably cough up more dough for the Vertex after reading this. However, I've run it for two days as my system disk in MacPro and haven't noticed any issues, it's really fast. But I guess I'll get Vertex for my Windows 7 build.Z.
Nemokrad - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
What I find intriguing about this article is that these smaller manufacturers do not do real world internal testing for these things. They should not need 3rd parties like you to figure this shit out for them. Maybe now OCZ will learn what they need to do for the future.JonasR - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Thanks for an excellent article. I have one question does anyone know which controller is beeing used in the new Patriot 256GB V.3 SSD?
tgwgordon - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Anyone know if the Vertex Anand used had 32M or 64M cache?Dennis Travis - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Excellent and informative article as always Anand. Thanks so much for posting the truth!!IsLNdbOi - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Can't remember what page it was, but you showed some charts on the performance of SSDs at their lowest possible performance levels.At their lowest possible performance levels are they still faster than the 300GB Raptor?
Edgemeal - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
It's too bad Windows and applications don't let you select where all the data that needs to be updated and saved to is stored. If that was an option a SSD could be used to only load data (EXE files and support files) and a HDD could be used to store files that are updated frequently, like a web browser for example, their constantly caching files, from the sound of this article that would kill the performance of a SSD in no time.Great article, I'll stick to HDDs for now.