
6 months later, the Intel SSDs are still massively better - blasdel
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531
======
sqs
Wow. AnandTech has always been great, but this was especially well-written and
informative. If you think 31 pages is too long, well, it's worth it. The
article gives really good technical explanations of how SSDs work and how they
compare to disk drives, tells about an interesting back-and-forth with OCZ (a
Taiwanese SSD manufacturer), and gives you the info you need to make an SSD
purchasing decision. And it's a shining example of tech journalism at its best
(which we rarely see).

~~~
gnaritas
Agreed, I'm getting ready to buy some SSD's for my production servers, and
after reading this I know exactly what I want to buy and why and what to
avoid. This was a great article.

I wish I'd read this before buying my SSD for my workstation, an impulse buy
while at Fry's with my boss. I've largely avoided the write stuttering that is
problematic for these low end MLC SSD's by using my old HDD for all my data
and the SSD for OS/Programs so writes are fairly rare to the SSD; it still
kicks the shit out of the old HDD.

For a database server however, buying a non intel MLC SSD would have been a
huge mistake that I'm now well informed enough to avoid.

~~~
hboon
There was a blog post recently about the performance improvements of using the
very same SSD drive for Gemstone/S
[http://gemstonesoup.wordpress.com/2009/02/28/approaching-
the...](http://gemstonesoup.wordpress.com/2009/02/28/approaching-the-speed-of-
light-ssd-drives-for-gemstones/).

~~~
gnaritas
Yea, that's the post that made we get the SSD to begin with.

------
blasdel
While I was cooking dinner after posting this, I came up with an awesome
solution to OCZ's dilemma. They're driven to boost streaming large-block
bandwidth so that they have big numbers to advertise, but they're doing that
at the expense of crippling random small writes. So they should do do this:

    
    
      * Offer two different lines with the same hardware but differing firmwares optimized for each.
      * Sell the IOPS-targeted one as 'Enterprise Grade' for %50 more.
      * Release regular firmware updates for both, and ensure that only a trivial (but *WARRANTY VOIDING*)
        modification keeps you from flashing your consumer drive with the 'enterprise' firmware.
      * Bask in the glow of heavily-dugg tutorials about how to 'mod' your consumer drive for low-latencies
      * Have vendors purchase your cheaper-than-intel 'Enterprise' drive for CYA reasons.

~~~
jodrellblank
That's an acceptable "solution" from OCZ's point of view, but it's a much
worse solution from my POV.

In order for me to get around the simplistic marketing of MB/s, that leaves me
paying 50% more or voiding the warranty.

I'd rather they fought simplistic marketing with honesty rather than
profiteering.

~~~
ars
All they need to do is not enforce voiding the warranty, or make it possible
to undetectably undo the change.

~~~
blasdel
The main point of the 'warranty voiding' would be to get a ton of hype from
"hack your ssd" blogspam, which would instantly distinguish them in a crowded
market.

Being able to extract more money from PHBs is just gravy.

------
jpcx01
Watch out. My 80 gig Intel X25m just crapped out on me. All data gone. Lost
about a weeks worth of data (I now back up more often).

However I bought a 160gig Intel X25m in its place. Going back to a spinning
disk was unacceptable (almost 10x slower). The drive f*$&ing rocks, even if it
is unreliable (hopefully that was a fluke)

~~~
gb
That's worrying, I thought one of the advantages of SSDs is they're supposed
to fail gradually...

~~~
Andys
Thanks for the data point. In theory Intel SSDs should fail about as often as
a motherboard or stick of RAM, excluding the graceful failure you talk about.

The graceful failing is where there are no free sectors left for wear
levelling or bad block remapping. When it fails this way you should still be
able to read your data off it.

EDIT: I've just received an anecdotal comment from a friend who works at Intel
that high temperatures affect MLC flash life rapidly in an negative way. I
can't find any data to back this up.

------
Radix
Thanks, I didn't go through all of it, but I really enjoyed the back story on
OCZ. It's great that they would fix their firmware and work with this guy to
build a better product. I like seeing that business is really done like that
outside of the small local businesses.

------
davidmathers
Massively better? No.

If you create an imaginary baseline SSD with the X25-M's 80 GB and the
Vertex's 9836 PCMarks and then compare both drives against the baseline you
get:

Intel: 20% faster

OCZ: 50% larger

Both cost $350. Given that the slow one is faster than the fastest desktop HD
but the big one is only 1/3 the size of a standard laptop HD, I think I prefer
the extra space.

~~~
blasdel
Ignore the 'PCMark' bullshit benchmarks, the point of this article is random
write latencies, which are ridiculously awful on a lot of common SSDs, several
orders of magnitude worse than common spinning rust!

The only non-Intel drive that's not awful at random writes is the OCZ Vertex,
and it's a few times better than an HD. The X25s are still an order of
magnitude quicker than the OCZ Vertex once used.

~~~
davidmathers
On random writes the Vertex is 48% faster than the VelociRaptor, a 10k rpm
hard drive. Right now I have a 5.4k rpm hard drive in my laptop. That kind of
performance would make me ecstatically happy.

Even if the X25 was overall 100% faster than the Vertex, and according to
Anand it isn't, I would still trade that to have 120 GB rather than 80 GB.

This is Anand's conclusion:

"with the Vertex I do believe we have a true value alternative to the X25-M.
The Intel drive is still the best, but it comes at a high cost. The Vertex can
give you a similar experience, definitely one superior to even the fastest
hard drives, but at a lower price."

Similar experience. I can't find the part about massively better.

~~~
lasthemy1
The X25 comes in 160GB varieties too, but I understand the trade-off at
comparable prices. With a technology that changes so quickly, I set myself a
couple requirements before I'd buy an SSD:

-Performance had to be equivalent or better than a WD Velociraptor across the board (the OCZ Vertex achieves that with firmware updates, the Intel is slightly slower on max sequential writes, but makes up for it in every other benchmark).

-It had to be at least 120GB for my personal laptop.

-It had to be around $300. I assume any SSD purchase made now is going to be replaced in 1-2 years, so purchasing anything more than necessary is hard to justify.

------
jon_dahl
OT, sort of, but thanks for linking to the printer-friendly version.

~~~
blasdel
Anandtech doesn't even have prev/next links, you have to use the <select>
every time!

------
barredo
Quote "SSDs make Vista usable."

I guess the best thing to do right now is to have your OS (or multiple OS's)
in an 32GB SSD for instance, and a big HDD as second drive for multimedia and
general storage. Right?

Edit: Like other people say, thanks for linking to print version :-)

~~~
jbm
I have a NEC w/ a solid state HD. It was dying under Vista - couldn't even
load an image file in less than 10 seconds. Think about it - a miniscule 40kb
jpeg would take 10 seconds to load.

I switched to Ubuntu and most of my problems went away.

~~~
barredo
A tiny jpeg takes 10 seconds to load? That's weird. Does Vista have issues
with your SSD's drivers or something?

Nice to hear that it worked as it should with Ubuntu

------
parenthesis
There's a very important general lesson here: optimise for real-world usage
patterns.

------
thaumaturgy
Thanks for the article.

Just as a completely useless data point, I suffered two different disk crashes
in rapid succession a couple of months back, and out of frustration got one of
the Transcend SSDs that were cheap and available at the time (ATA for an old
PBG4).

It works great, I love it, and I no longer have to fear data loss when stupid
software drives me to banging my fists on the desk.

------
ars
Something I don't understand:

Have some free space on the drive. When you need to write to the drive, write
it to the pre-erased, free space. Then merge in the pages from a different
block, and then erase that block.

Wouldn't this ensure that you would always write to pre-erased area? And avoid
the slowdown completely?

~~~
wmf
Yes, that's how better FTLs work, but the details are difficult. You have to
have a logical-to-physical mapping table and keep it consistent.

------
silentOpen
I understand the problem in the article but the solution doesn't necessarily
seem to be better hardware (though, that would help).

From what is described, it sounds like the problem is with the poor block
provisioning algorithms that the drive controller uses. Where is the operating
system in this? Why can't frequently updated files be put on blocks of their
own? Why can't block deletes be done online? Why must file modification modify
the block(s) where the file currently resides and block for delete instead of
writing to empty space and deferring delete until the controller is idle?

Anyone?

------
raintrees
Has anyone worked out how long 10,000 erases works out to in a server or
workstation "typical" environment? I expect developers to reach it sooner than
non-developers...?

~~~
ealar
I was wondering exactly this last night and did some napkin calculations.

Assuming the "10,000 writes" commonly claimed for SSD's is accurate, 5 year
lifespan = 4.37 hours between writes on one page.

------
jsrfded
Please, HN people, stop linking to the print only versions. It takes me work
to navigate back to the version that shows the publisher navigation conext,
proper reading width, and makes the publisher happy that you linked to them.
If I want to get an unformatted, often less tested version with missing
images, I'll choose to click on 'printer version' myself.

~~~
blasdel
Not when the navigation is so absurdly awful, and with all the informative
images present in the print version.

There's no fucking way I'm going to link to something that requires 62 clicks
to page through the article.

------
ilaksh
In the article he mentions Super Talent drives. Did this guy try the old Super
Talent SSDs or the ones they just came out with today (32GB, 64GB, and 128GB
UltraDrive LE and 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB UltraDrive ME)?

Because Super Talent put a bunch of benchmarks in their whitepaper, comparing
very well to Intel X25-M.

~~~
lasthemy1
They use the same Indilinx controller that the OCZ Vertex uses. It would be
interesting to see a comparison between the OCZ Vertex and the Super Talent
drives, it would essentially be a comparison of firmware.

~~~
wmf
According to the article, the same Indilinx firmware is available to all
vendors, so there's probably no difference.

------
nazgulnarsil
I'm a little confused about why SSD's aren't a massive performance boost.
Regular HDD's are limited by mechanical interaction. SSD's have no such
problem so why can't they read/write everything in parallel rather than
sequentially?

~~~
wmf
They are parallel, but an individual flash chip is so slow that even eight of
them in parallel is less than ludicrous speed. Also, Intel claims that they
are limited by SATA in some cases.

------
jambalaya
I learn a lot about SSD's from Storage Search

<http://www.storagesearch.com>

~~~
lasthemy1
I've found Storage Search to be the best information hub for enterprise-class
SSDs; first saw the ioDrive there, and it's the only site I've seen mention
SAS drives in development.

------
nazgulnarsil
one bit that's kind of funny is that with flash based memory you want data for
any given application spread out over as many blocks as possible so you can
take advantage of parallel access. In the future we may see a "fragment drive"
maintenance option instead of "defragment". :)

~~~
wmf
SSDs perform striping internally, so storing data on "contiguous" sectors will
still give you parallelism.

------
jpcx01
Also: [http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/19/intel-x25-m-ssds-
slowing-...](http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/19/intel-x25-m-ssds-slowing-down-
with-extensive-use)

Not sure if its FUD or not, as I havent experienced any problems. But its a
potential red flag

~~~
gommm
They talk about that and explain why it happens in the article....

------
coderrr
summarized:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=523775>

------
neilo
well that took my entire morning "reading time", but it was WELL worth it!

