A Look at Enterprise Performance of Intel SSDs
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 8, 2012 6:36 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- IT Computing
- SSDs
- Intel
Intel's SSD 520 in the Enterprise
I went through the basic premise of SandForce's controller architecture in our review of the 520. By integrating a real time data compression/deduplication engine in the data path of the controller, SandForce can reduce the number of physical writes it commits to NAND. It's an interesting way of combating the issue of finite NAND flash endurance. It works very well on desktop systems (BSOD issues aside), and for many enterprise workloads it should do similarly well. By writing less, you can get more endurance out of your NAND, making it an ideal technology for use in the enterprise where NAND endurance is more of a concern.
The limitations are serious however. You cannot further compress something that is already compressed and data sets that are truly random in makeup can't be compressed either. If your enterprise workload triggers either of these conditions, or if you're working with encrypted data, you're not going to get a big benefit from SandForce's technology.
There are still a lot of enterprise workloads (including portions of ours) that just revolve around reading and writing simple text (e.g. pages of a review, or tracking banner impressions). For these workloads, SandForce could do quite well.
Intel's SSDs have often been used in datacenter environments, including the consumer drives for reasons I've already described. Armed with a full set of Intel SSDs I put all of them through our newly created Enterprise SSD suite to see how well they performed.
| Enterprise SSD Comparison | ||||||
| Intel SSD 710 | Intel X25-E | Intel SSD 520 | Intel SSD 320 | |||
| Capacities | 100 / 200 / 300GB | 32 / 64GB | 60 / 120 / 180 / 240 / 480GB | 80 / 120 / 160 / 300 / 600GB | ||
| NAND | 25nm HET MLC | 50nm SLC | 25nm MLC | 25nm MLC | ||
| Max Sequential Performance (Reads/Writes) | 270 / 210 MBps | 250 / 170 MBps | 550 / 520 MBps | 270 / 220 MBps | ||
| Max Random Performance (Reads/Writes) | 38.5K / 2.7K IOPS | 35K / 3.3K IOPS | 50K / Not Listed IOPS | 39.5K / 600 IOPS | ||
| Endurance (Max Data Written) | 500TB - 1.5PB | 1 - 2PB | Not Listed | 5 - 60TB | ||
| Encryption | AES-128 | - | AES-256 | AES-128 | ||
| Power Safe Write Cache | Y | N | N | Y | ||
| Temp Sensor | Y | N | N | N | ||
It's worth pointing out that the Intel SSD 520 and 510 are both 6Gbps drives, while many servers deployed today still only support 3Gbps SATA. I've provided results for both 3Gbps and 6Gbps configurations to showcase the differences.
The Test
Note that although we debuted these tests in previous reviews, the results here aren't comparable due to some changes in the software build on the system.
| CPU | Intel Core i7 2600K running at 3.4GHz (Turbo & EIST Disabled) |
| Motherboard: | Intel H67 Motherboard |
| Chipset: | Intel H67 |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel RST 10.2 |
| Memory: | Qimonda DDR3-1333 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Card: | eVGA GeForce GTX 285 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 190.38 64-bit |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1920 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows 7 x64 |
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jeremyshaw - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - link
woah... I've been waiting for an article like this for a long time.Thank you Anandtech!
ckryan - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - link
Is AnandTech ever planning on doing a longer period SSD test? A long term testing scenario would make for interesting reading.Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - link
Technically all of our SSD tests are long term. We're still testing Vertex 2 class drives and I actually still have six Intel X25-M G1s deployed in systems in my lab alone. You only hear about them when things go wrong. Most of the time I feed errors back to the vendors to get fixes put into firmware updates. The fact that you aren't seeing more of this sort of stuff means that things are working well :-PBut the results of our long term tests directly impact our reviews/recommendations. It's one of the reasons I've been so positive on the Samsung SSD 830 lately. I've been using 830s 24/7 since our review published in September with very good results :)
Take care,
Anand
Samus - Thursday, February 9, 2012 - link
I've had an X25-M G1 in my Macbook since 2009, used daily, never a problem. Lack of trim support doesn't really seem to matter unless you're the type the writes/deletes a lot of data.jwilliams4200 - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - link
Since you found that the 520 does not really do any better than the 320 for endurance, does this also imply that the Sandforce controller was not able to achieve significant compression on the workload that you fed to it? In other words, Sandforce compression does not work very well on real data as opposed to artificial benchmark data.ckryan - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - link
SF is really good at compressing fake data. I suppose some logs could really benefit, but one of my personal SF drives has 10% more raw writes than host writes. I suspect I'm not alone with this either.People doing repeated incompressible benches could have WA higher than 1 with SF, but once you install the OS and and programs, every day writes are less compressible than promised it would seem.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - link
Keep in mind that only 10% more NAND writes than host writes is *really* good. It's not uncommon to get much, much higher than that with other controllers.We did an 8 month study on SF drives internally. The highest write amp we saw was 0.7x. On my personal drive I saw a write amp of around 0.6x.
Take care,
Anand
jwilliams4200 - Thursday, February 9, 2012 - link
Baloney!You just saw a write amplification of near 1 on this very article. Why do you dodge my question?
erple2 - Thursday, February 9, 2012 - link
I suspect that the workloads that they were testing for with the SF drives internally are not what is reflected in this article.That implies, then, that the SF drives have been doing other workloads like acting in desktops and/or laptop duties. For those kinds of things, I suspect that a 0.6-0.7x is more reasonable (assuming there isn't much reading/writing of incompressible data).
Given that some of the workload may be for mobile applications, and given a strong focus on WDE for laptops, I wonder how that ultimately impacts the write amplification for drives with WDE on them.
jwilliams4200 - Thursday, February 9, 2012 - link
The "8 month study" that he refers to is very hard to believe.Does he really expect us to believe that the people in Anand's test lab used these SSDs for 8 months and did not run any benchmarks on them?
Most benchmarks write easily compressible data, and a lot of it.
The real way to test the Sandforce compression is to write typical user data to the SSD and monitor the raw write and host write attributes. That experiment has already been done on xtremesystems.org, and the findings were that typical user data bare compresses at all -- at best raw writes were 90% of host writes, but for most data it was 100% or higher. The only thing that got some compression was the OS and application installs, and most people only do those once, so it should not be counted towards user data when estimating endurance.