The Intel SSD 330 Review (60GB, 120GB, 180GB)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 1, 2012 12:01 AM ESTPCMark 7
PCMark 7's secondary storage benchmark does little to show us differences between modern, high-performance SSDs as everything here scores within 5% of one another - but that's the point. For most mainstream client uses you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between two good 6Gbps SSDs. Worry more about cost and reliability than outright performance if you're considering an SSD for a normal machine. Anything you see here will be much faster than a mechanical drive.
Performance Over Time & TRIM
SandForce's controllers have always behaved poorly if you pushed them into their worst case scenario. Should you fill a SF-2281 based drive completely with incompressible data then continue to write to the drive with more incompressible data (overwriting some of what you've already written) to fill up the spare area you'll back the controller into a corner that it can't get out of, even with TRIM. It's not a terribly realistic situation since anyone using an SF-2281 SSD as a boot drive will at least have Windows (or some other easily compressible OS) installed, and it's fairly likely that you'll have other things stored on your SSD in addition to large movies/photos. Regardless, it's a corner case that we do have to pay attention to.
As we found out in our 520 review, Intel's firmware isn't immune to this corner case. I filled a 120GB SSD 330 with incompressible data. I then ran a 60 minute 4KB random write torture test (QD32), once again, with incompressible data. Normally I'd use HDTach to chart performance over time however HDTach measures performance with highly compressible data so we wouldn't get a good representation of performance here. Instead I ran AS-SSD to get a good idea for incompressible sequential performance in this worst case state. Afterwards, I TRIMed the drives and ran AS-SSD again to see if TRIM could recover the drive's performance.
| Intel SSD 330 - Resiliency - AS SSD Sequential Write Speed - 6Gbps | |||||
| Clean | After Torture | After TRIM | |||
| Intel SSD 330 120GB | 148.9 MB/s | 96.3 MB/s | 94.4 MB/s | ||
This is really the biggest problem with SandForce drives. If you're primarily storing large amounts of incompressible data, sequential write speeds suffer even further over the long haul.
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Ryan Smith - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
"I just wish Anand more honest by telling people the truth about SSD, specially SF based controller, because after trying more than 5 SF based SSD, I can say they're sucks! buy it only if you're planning to reformat your drive every now and then"So far every problem we've encountered with SF-2xxx has been documented, e.g. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5508/intel-ssd-520-r...
Beyond that we haven't encountered any additional SF-2xxx issues in our extended deployment testing. For example the 520 (330's sibling) is currently in one of my systems, having replaced a 120GB Vertex 2 that just recently passed 2 years of service.
amikey - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
I have a 180GB SSD 330 in my 2009 Macbook Pro 13". It's totally fine, and running better than ever.Haven't enabled trim or updated the firmware since I got it (no pc to use) either.
I don't use disk encryption though, if you were to do that go with something else.
angelsmaster - Tuesday, September 4, 2012 - link
hi, you didn't update it or whatever? is it still up and running? and i think, its not trim supported when i checked it in the S-ATA system report, btw, i am using a macbook pro 15" 2011... thanks..quanstro - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
how did you get this kind of experience with a just-released drive in a year-old computer?Jumpman23 - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
In terms of cost and reliability the 330 seems like a good deal. What about in terms of performance and reliability? I've been hearing not so good things about the SF drives in general. The M4's and Samsung's 830 seems to get good reviews. So is there any particular drive that stands out as the best of the best?Per Hansson - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
OCZ has a really poor track record when you look at RMA's:http://www.behardware.com/articles/862-7/component...
Weather this is due to the BSOD issue or other issue with their Sandforce drives I don't know.
But if you look at future data even OCZ's Petrol & Octane series has really bad RMA rates:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/862-8/component...
This makes me kind of weary of any Sandforce drive, we can see that since Intel has released Sandforce drives their failure rate has gone from 0.6% > 1.73% in the first link above.
This could be because of the "8MB bug" only but I am not convinced.
I would go for the Crucial M4 drive at this point, it has a great track record and only one known very specific problem (BSOD after 50k hours of ontime, caused by a bug in the SMART values & fixed by a firmware update)
Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
The problem with those statistics is that they are extremely limited. Only four manufacturers are listed, and only OCZ's numbers are reported for individual models. The only info on sample size is that there must have been over 500 sales (brand) or 100 sales (model).I'm not defending OCZ or any other brand, just pointing out that a more thorough study would be needed to really know what SSDs are reliable. I do agree that Crucial's m4 is a great buy at the moment, and Samsung 830 and Plextor's SSDs are too.
lyeoh - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Only OCZ's numbers are reported for individual models becausequoting the article: "only OCZ has models with rates of above 5%".
You may need a more thorough study, but it's good enough for me to avoid OCZ.
Per Hansson - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Yea, it's a limited sample size but it's all we have to go on.We can also look at Newegg reviews, sure it has it's drawbacks aswell but when you see stuff like this it paints a quite clear picture I think:
128GB OCZ Petrol: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
128GB OCZ Octane: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
120GB OCZ RevoDrive 3: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=20...
240GB OCZ Vertex 3: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
128GB OCZ Vertex 4: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
128GB Crucial M4: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
antef - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
I recommend the m4, it's been an amazing drive for me and the reviews on Newegg and Amazon are out of this world, the kind of thing you don't see very often. Don't fret over exact performance and worry that a newer drive might net you something slightly higher, all of these are crazy fast, my Windows machine with the m4 stays on the loading screen for all of 3 seconds, not even enough time to see the four colored orbs form together into the Windows logo.