The SSD Diaries: Crucial's RealSSD C300
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 13, 2010 12:39 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench
The first in our benchmark suite is a light usage case. The Windows 7 system is loaded with Firefox, Office 2007 and Adobe Reader among other applications. With Firefox we browse web pages like Facebook, AnandTech, Digg and other sites. Outlook is also running and we use it to check emails, create and send a message with a PDF attachment. Adobe Reader is used to view some PDFs. Excel 2007 is used to create a spreadsheet, graphs and save the document. The same goes for Word 2007. We open and step through a presentation in PowerPoint 2007 received as an email attachment before saving it to the desktop. Finally we watch a bit of a Firefly episode in Windows Media Player 11.
There’s some level of multitasking going on here but it’s not unreasonable by any means. Generally the application tasks proceed linearly, with the exception of things like web browsing which may happen in between one of the other tasks.
The recording is played back on all of our drives here today. Remember that we’re isolating disk performance, all we’re doing is playing back every single disk access that happened in that ~5 minute period of usage. The light workload is composed of 37,501 reads and 20,268 writes. Over 30% of the IOs are 4KB, 11% are 16KB, 22% are 32KB and approximately 13% are 64KB in size. Less than 30% of the operations are absolutely sequential in nature. Average queue depth is 6.09 IOs.
The performance results are reported in average I/O Operations per Second (IOPS):
In our custom test suite we can finally put to rest concerns about the real world behavior of SandForce’s drives. Our light test case makes it pretty clear: in practice the Vertex 2 performs within 3% of the 256GB C300, and is a good 20% faster than the Intel X25-M G2. Keep in mind that we’re looking at raw IO performance and not total system performance here.
If there’s a light usage case there’s bound to be a heavy one. In this test we have Microsoft Security Essentials running in the background with real time virus scanning enabled. We also perform a quick scan in the middle of the test. Firefox, Outlook, Excel, Word and Powerpoint are all used the same as they were in the light test. We add Photoshop CS4 to the mix, opening a bunch of 12MP images, editing them, then saving them as highly compressed JPGs for web publishing. Windows 7’s picture viewer is used to view a bunch of pictures on the hard drive. We use 7-zip to create and extract .7z archives. Downloading is also prominently featured in our heavy test; we download large files from the Internet during portions of the benchmark, as well as use uTorrent to grab a couple of torrents. Some of the applications in use are installed during the benchmark, Windows updates are also installed. Towards the end of the test we launch World of Warcraft, play for a few minutes, then delete the folder. This test also takes into account all of the disk accesses that happen while the OS is booting.
The benchmark is 22 minutes long and it consists of 128,895 read operations and 72,411 write operations. Roughly 44% of all IOs were sequential. Approximately 30% of all accesses were 4KB in size, 12% were 16KB in size, 14% were 32KB and 20% were 64KB. Average queue depth was 3.59.
Our heavy downloading workload involves more heavily compressed files and thus we see the Vertex 2 perform like a 128GB C300. The 256GB C300 just can't be touched.
The gaming workload is made up of 75,206 read operations and only 4,592 write operations. Only 20% of the accesses are 4KB in size, nearly 40% are 64KB and 20% are 32KB. A whopping 69% of the IOs are sequential, meaning this is predominantly a sequential read benchmark. The average queue depth is 7.76 IOs.
Our gaming workload has been SATA bound for the high end SSDs for some time now. If you happen to be baller enough to play games off of an SSD, any of these high end drives will perform the same. Although our custom tests don't work with the 6Gbps Marvell controller, the boost to sequential read speed should be quite visible in gaming workloads with the C300.
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deardeerlulu - Monday, July 19, 2010 - link
I am kind of confused about the figures shown in that page, what axis X represents? Does it mean how much capacity has been filled? Or anywhere I can find explanations?If yes, then for crucial drive, why the performance dropped more than 50% just after less than 10GB data is filled? Since from my understanding, if there are only a small percentage capacity is filled, there are still a lot of free space, the random performance should not drop so rapidly?
Anand, or someone else here can explain my confusion? Thanks!
zzing123 - Monday, July 26, 2010 - link
Here's a question. If you have Windows 7 running under BootCamp on a Mac, and have an SSD that's partitioned with 1 partition being the Mac OS X boot drive (HFS+) and the other being the Windows 7 boot drive (NTFS), and finally have an HFS driver like Mediafour's MacDrive to read the HFS+ partition, will TRIM work on that SSD?Since I know Anand has a couple of Macs, and possibly other readers, can anyone verify this?
SSDInq - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 - link
I've been wondering how this particular scenario would affect the performance of SSD's. I believe that many users fall into this pattern:- Laptop with smallish HD (same range as SSDs)
- A few months after purchase the drive is ~90% full (Original OS + Crapware, Updates,Office + files, Emails + archives, photos + videos, leftover crap from every app, etc)
At this point, every write request starts hitting the same area (some old data is deleted to free space and new data from emails, browser cache, downloads replaces it).
Will the write leveling algorithms affect the performance of SSDs ? How much?
alexwy - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
I am wondering why random read is slower than random write. Write operation is always slower than read, and sequential write is slower than sequential read. Why random read is slower? Is it because that the random read data is not 4K aligned?sor - Saturday, December 11, 2010 - link
With small random data, the overhead of looking up where the data is to retrieve it begins to show up, compared to simply identifying an empty spot to store something. This is somewhat related to why TRIM is important, keeps empty/no-longer-used blocks readily available.Nick932 - Sunday, August 8, 2010 - link
Does anybody know a laptop that has sata3 controller? Or any other solutions that would accomodate the use of this drive?deBlanc - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
I have two Crucial C300 drives in two different HP laptops. Both have ICH9, Intel GM/PM45 Chipsets. These work fine using the Microsoft AHCI 1.0 driver. If I use the Intel RST 9.6.0.1014 driver, I get BSODs intermittently on boot and almost always waking from sleep. These are known issues reported in several posts on the Crucial C300 forum and also seem to be a problem with the Sandforce drives as discussed on the OCZ forums. If I put an Intel SSD in the laptops, I have no problem with the RST drivers.So I sent and email to Crucial asking about the problem. I figure there is some type of firmware issue. Here is their response:
Hello - - - - - - - - -,
Thank you for contacting Crucial. It sounds like the C300 drives are functioning properly if you get them to work just fine with the Microsoft drivers. We haven't had any reports of issues with the our SSD and the Intel Rapid Storage driver. We will keep our ears open for similar issues. In the meantime I will refer you to Intel to see if they have had heard of an issue with their driver with our drives.
If you have further questions, please visit the Crucial Community at http://www.crucial.com/help. For sales questions, try our online chat service at http://www.crucial.com/company/contacts.aspx. Our hours are Monday through Friday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (Mountain Time). At Crucial, we are committed to providing high-quality products and reliable service and support.
KELLI
Technical Support Representative
Tel: (800) 336-8896
Fax: (208) 363-5501
mailto:crucial.support@micron.com
poohbear - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Anand you really should've mentioned in this review that the AMD AHCI drivers do NOT pass on the TRIM command, so even w/ Win7 this SSD will lose TRIM support w/ the AMD AHCI drivers, and we'll get the abysmal long term performance u highlighted in your TRIM sectino). AMD needs to feel the heat in this regards cause they've been lazy as hell & need to get their stuff together. This is not a problem w/ Intel chipsets, but im really peeved that as of October 2010, there is STILL NO TRIM support from AMD. really pathetic on their part, SSDs are becoming less than $100 & they dont care to implement TRIM support for us. We're stuck using the much less performing MS drivers.Anandtech really needs to emphasize this, otherwise i never would've bought this drive and went w/ a sandforce based one for its internal garbage collection, but i didnt realize AMD was so behind the times.
sin0822 - Saturday, October 16, 2010 - link
The degradation you Anand got with the c300 128gb after writes is not reproducible. Even without trim the c300's GC in rev 002 firmware was made extremely aggressive b/c the engineers knew that many people would use the drive without trim. I wanted to contact anand but i do not know how so i am posting here, if proof is needed it will be provided. After seeing results the GC is very aggressive and the drive will stand up to a beating stronger than a sandforce competitor, i was under the impression that this review is correct, but after seeing the results it is evident that those results cannot be reproduced and the write speeds go down only 5-10mb/s from original.woosh7 - Saturday, December 11, 2010 - link
Hi Anand. What really bugs me is that I got EXACTLY the opposite impression of the OCZ Vertex 2, 240GB. :-( In fact all I had to do is one of two simple things. One was to simply copy say 100GB or so of files, like my Flight Simulator X, or Crysis folder, along with 40GB of VMWare files to the hard drive, and my CrystalMark write score would drop. Also the simple act of partitioning the SDD so I had a 32GB OS partition (C:), and the remainder on D:, also helped to bring the read and write speed down on the OCZ when I reloaded an IMAGE backup of my OS. And this is a typical thing a lot of people in the know do. You could do all these things to a standard HDD and not lose anything.I tried every thing under the sun, including using Paragons align tool, also making sure my drive was reset with the toolbox first etc. Switching to AHCI and back. Nothing helped, except simply letting the Windows 7 DVD make it's partition, and making it ONE BIG 220GB or so partition. And then I only got about 220MB/s read sequential, and 145MB/s write. Random was also ok, but nothing great. Then I loaded a few GB's into this one big partition, and guess what? It too slowed down. It held up longer than my method of loading a cloned image to C:, but It only took me about 20 minutes to bring my drive to figures like 170MB for read, and 110 MB/sec write by transferring only ONE group of files to D: in the "Program Files" folder.
Then out of curiosity I deleted a 20GB folder, then transferred it back to the SSD and this resulted in having 85MB/sec, slow-as-a-cow-on-valium writes. I tried all sorts of things, and nothing short of removing the partition and clearing the drive brought the speed back up to 220MB and 145MB.. I think TRIM was working because I witnessed the scores improve very slightly when I left it over night. Or tried things I had read in forums, or even did "force trim" later on. But the improvements never got me back. I was stuck on 170MB/sec read and 128 or write.
Also this is on an i7 920 at 3.6Ghz, on an Asus board. This is no old or cheap machine! So my test on a clean install of windows 7 was the best, but disappointing as well. My image backups are also of clean installs and should also perform well, but they don't on OCZ.
Now here is where it gets VERY interesting. My first SSD was an barely known PNY 128GB with little support, documentation. It only supports TRIM, and no instructions, nothing on the net really. I beat the living c_rap out of it for 6 weeks. I partitioned it as above, and reloaded many, many cloned images of Windows 7 and Windows XP, over and over on C:. I made folders and deleted them on D:. At the end of 6 weeks, I got the SAME benchmark scores of 240MB/sec Read, and 150MB/sec write. No nonsense. But I had bought the OCZ Because I believed I was stepping up to higher quality and bigger size etc. This taught me that there is something right that PNY did and something very wrong with how OCZ handles their GC or Trim. I've also found reviewers saying the OCZ slows down too easily on Amazon. So again, I'm frustrated because your article is pretty much saying the opposite of what I experienced or expected.
I NEED an SSD that behaves like a REAL HD, except fast of course. Not something that slows down. I need to be able to make partitions and do my experiments etc. So because I know the PNY was fine, I figured it must be OCZ and I just went and ordered a Crucial C300 that isn't here yet. I figured it was a step above the OCZ and because it doesn't rely on sand force. I figured I wouldn't have a boat load of phony benches, along with ATTO with high marks because the data compressed so nicely as it did with the OCZ.
But now I read this article, and it's eluding to the fact that the C300 actually isn't so hot against the OCZ, which is obviously disappointing. The only thing I can hope for is that somehow the C300 won't mind me making a partition for operating system, and another for data. But then again, the OCZ slowed down even on one partition. I mean, who in their right mind is stupid enough to get stuck with 12GB of OS Plus 200GB of programs and data added into the SAME partition 2 years down the line? In the event they need to reload their OS, it makes it a huge task. I surely don't want to continually backup 200GB plus. My system can currently be reloaded in 5 minutes. That's why I do that. I just wish the SSD makers understood that not everyone wants to erase their HD every time and stick in a w7 disc and start all over to get their advertised speeds ( or even less)
And what happens if someone backs up their system (as they should), and then they need to reload it? Then what? Their SSD write scores will fall. I've seen the write speeds go below my green WD HD. I think this is an unacceptable problem that SSD's have and it needs to be resolved. If that Crucial C300 gets here next week and it slows down, you know what? I will return it along with the OCZ and I am going to buy back the PNY I mistakenly returned. Another thing is I am just amazed no one has done a review the PNY. It's not the best, but having an SSD that keeps its speed is worth more to me than anything. On the other hand, I have no clue as to why the PNY did so well, or how it works, and I'm sure it needs more testing. Thanks for the review. Anyway, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.