The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The OCZ Vertex Turbo: Overclocked Indilinx
I’ll have to give it to OCZ’s CEO Ryan Petersen, he always tries. The SSD race is once again heating up and he’s determined to compete on more than just price. OCZ’s entire Indilinx line of drives are going to be cheaper (at least in cost per GB) than Intel’s, but OCZ is also adding new drives to the lineup.
The Vertex and Agility we’re both familiar with. The Vertex EX is the SLC version and now we have the Vertex Turbo. The Turbo is a Vertex but with a faster controller and DRAM cache: 180MHz vs. 166MHz for the stock Vertex. It's not a physically different controller, it's just one that has been binned to run at 180MHz. OCZ helps Indilinx validate its drives and in exchange for that, Indilinx gives OCZ the exclusivity on 180MHz controllers.
We’re talking about an 8% increase in controller and DRAM frequency. If we’re lucky, we might reduce the time some instructions take to complete by a few nanoseconds. The problem is that we’re fundamentally bottlenecked by the performance of the NAND flash itself, which operates on the order of microseconds. In other words: don’t expect a performance boost.
We've already seen that these Indilinx drives can vary in performance by a few percent from drive to drive, so in order to make the comparison as accurate as possible I did all of my tests on the Vertex Turbo. After I was done running my Turbo tests I simply threw on the standard Vertex firmware, which specifies a 166MHz controller/DRAM clock.
| New Performance | OCZ Vertex | OCZ Vertex Turbo | Turbo Advantage |
| 4KB Random Write | 13.2 MB/s | 13.6 MB/s | 3% |
| 2MB Sequential Write | 175.9 MB/s | 184.2 MB/s | 4.7% |
As expected, there’s very little performance difference here. You'd see the same sorts of differences between two different Indilinx MLC drives. My Torqx sample from Patriot was as fast as my Vertex Turbo sample. OCZ charges a huge premium for the Turbo drive though:
| Price for 128GB | |
| OCZ Vertex | $369.00 |
| OCZ Vertex Turbo | $439.00 |
| Turbo Premium | 19% |
It's up to the price of a 160GB Intel X25-M G2, absolutely not worth it. I talked with Ryan Petersen, OCZ's CEO about the Turbo and its lack of value. As usual, we argued a bit but eventually gave me his vision. He wants to bring 180MHz controllers to all Vertex drives, and not charge premiums for it. His intentions are to improve how competitive OCZ's drives are in a sea of equal-performing Indilinx drives.
While I wouldn't recommend spending more money on the Turbo, if OCZ brings 180MHz controllers to all of its drives I won't complain.
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zodiacfml - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - link
Very informative, answered more than anything in my mind. Hope to see this again in the future with these drive capacities around $100.mgrmgr - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - link
Any idea if the (mid-Sept release?) OCZ Colossus's internal RAID setup will handle the problem of RAID controllers not being able to pass Windows 7's TRIM command to the SSD array. I'm intent on getting a new Photoshop machine with two SSDs in Raid-0 as soon as Win7 releases, but the word here and elsewhere so far is that RAID will block the TRIM function.kunedog - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - link
All the Gen2 X-25M 80GB drives are apparently gone from Newegg . . . so they've marked up the Gen1 drives to $360 (from $230):http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
Unbelievable.
gfody - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - link
What happened to the gen2 160gb on Newegg? For a month the ETA was 9/2 (today) and now it's as if they never had it in the first place. The product page has been removed.It's like Newegg are holding the gen2 drives hostage until we buy out their remaining stock of gen1 drives.
iwodo - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
I think it acts as a good summary. However someone wrote last time about Intel drive handling Random Read / Write extremely poorly during Sequential Read / Write.Has Aanand investigate yet?
I am hoping next Gen Intel SSD coming in Q2 10 will bring some substantial improvement.
statik213 - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Does the RAID controller propagate TRIM commands to the SSD? Or will having RAID negate TRIM?justaviking - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Another great article, Anand! Thanks, and keep them coming.If this has already been discussed, I apologize. I'm still exhausted from reading the wonderful article, and have not read all 17 pages of comments.
On PAGE 3, it talks about the trade-off of larger vs. smaller pages.
I wonder if it would be feasible to make a hybrid drive, with a portion of the drive using small pages for faster performance when writing small files, and the majority of it being larger pages to keep the management of the drive reasonable.
Any file could be written anywhere, but the controller would bias small writes to the small pages, and large writes to large files.
Externally it would appear as a single drive, of course, but deep down in the internals, it would essentially be two drives. Each of the two portions would be tuned for maximum performance in different areas, but able to serve as backup or overflow if the other portion became full or ever got written to too many times.
Interesting concept? Or a hair brained idea buy an ignorant amateur?
CList - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Great article, wonderful to see insightful, in depth analysis.I'd be curious to hear anyone's thoughts on the implications are of running virtual hard disk files on SSD's. I do a lot of work these days on virtual machines, and I'd love to get them feeling more snappy - especially on my laptop which is limited to 4GB of ram.
For example;
What would the constant updates of those vmdk (or "vhd") files do to the disk's lifespan?
If the OS hosting the VM is windows 7, but the virtual machine is WinServer2003 will the TRIM command be used properly?
Cheers,
CList
pcfxer - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Great article!"It seems that building Pidgin is more CPU than IO bound.."
Obviously, Mr. Anand doesnt' understand how compilers work ;). Compilers will always be CPU and memory bound, reduce your memory in the computer to say 256MB (or lower) and you'll see what I mean. The levels of recursion necessary to follow the production (grammars that define the language) use up memory but would rarely use the drive unless the OS had terrible resource management. :0.
CMGuy - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - link
While I can't comment on the specifics of software compilers I know that faster disk IO makes a big difference when your performing a full build (compilation and packaging) of software.IDEs these days spend a lot their time reading/writing small files (thats a lot of small, random, disk IO) and a good SSD can make a huge difference to this.