The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
OCZ Sends Me SSDs, Once More
As I mentioned before, after the X25-M article I was somewhat blacklisted from getting more SSDs to test. Since the Core V2, I hadn’t tested a single SSD from OCZ or anyone else for that matter. Everything on the market was either based on Samsung’s SLC drive, JMicron MLC or the Intel X25 series.
Needless to say, I was excited when I got a box from OCZ.
I got the drives early in the morning. Excited, I opened them up. Inside the box were three drives. The OCZ Apex (I’d never reviewed it, and OCZ reluctantly sent another JMicron drive to me), the Vertex and the Summit.
The Summit was based on Samsung’s latest MLC SSD controller, which I’d heard great things about. It’s supposed to compete with Intel’s drive.
The Vertex is the drive I was most interested in. A value SSD that didn’t suck, or at least that’s what it seemed to be on paper. Ryan even left me a little note on the box:
O RLY?
It’s worth noting that although other SSD makers will be making drives based on the Indilinx and Samsung controllers, OCZ was the first to get me drives based on both of these controllers. In fact, I was done testing the OCZ Summit based on Samsung’s latest controller before Samsung ever offered to ship me the drive.
I pushed the Apex and Summit drives aside for now. What I wanted to know was how the Vertex performed.
I cloned my system drive and used the Vertex in my personal machine. As soon as I hit the desktop I knew there was a problem; all of my icons took longer than they should’ve to load. It took about 30 minutes of actual usage for the drive to stutter and within a couple of hours performance got so unbearable that I had to pull it out.
Sigh, the Vertex was broken.
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zdzichu - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
Very nice and thorough article. I only lack more current status of TRIM command support in current operating systems. For example, Linux supports it since last year:http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_28#head-a1a9591...">http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_28#h...a9591f48...
Sinned - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
Outstanding article that really helped me understand SSD drives. I wonder how much of an impact the new SATA III standard will have on SSD drives? I believe we are still at the beginning stage for SSD drives and your article shows that much more work needs to be done. My respect for OCZ and how they responded in a positive and productive way should be a model for the rest of the SSD makers. Thank you again for such a concise article.Respectfully,
Sinned
529th - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
The first thing I thought of was Democracy. Don't know why. Maybe it was because a company listened to our common goal of performance. Thank you OCZ for listening, I'm sure it will pay off!!!araczynski - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
very nice read. the 4/512 issue seems a rather stupid design decision, or perhaps more likely a stupid problem to find this 4/512 solution as 'acceptable'.although a great marketing choice, built in automatic life expectancy reduction.
sounds like the manufacturers want the hard drives to become a disposable medium like styrofoam cups.
perhaps when they narrow the disparity down to 4/16, i might consider buying an ssd. that, or when they beat the 'old school' physical platters in price.
until then, get back to the drawing board and stop crapping out these half arsed 'should be good enough' solutions.
IntelUser2000 - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
araczynski: The 4/512 isn't done by accident. It's done to lower prices. The flash technology used in SSDs are meant to replace platter HDDs in the future. There's no way of doing that without cost reductions like these. Even with that the SSDs still cost several times more per storage space.araczynski - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 - link
i understand that, but i don't remember original hard drives being released and being slower than the floppy drives they were replacing.this is part of the 'release beta' products mentality and make the consumer pay for further development.
the 5.25" floppy was better than the huge floppy in all respects when it was released. the 3.5" floppy was better than the 5.25" floppy when it was released. the usb flash drives were better than the 3.5" floppies when they were released.
i just hate the way this is being played out at the consumer's expense.
hellcats - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
Anand,What a great article. I usually have to skip forwards when things bog down, but they never did with this long, but very informative article. Your focus on what matters to users is why I always check anandtech first thing every morning.
juraj - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
I'm curious what capacity is the OCZ Vertex drive reviewed. Is it an 120 / 250g drive or supposedly slower 30 / 60g one?Symbolics - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
The method for generating "used" drives is flawed. For creating a true used drive, the spare blocks must be filled as well. Since this was not done, the results are biased towards the Intel drives with their generous amount of spare blocks that were *not* exhausted when producing the used state. An additional bias is introduced by the reduction of the IOmeter write test to 8 GB only. Perhaps there are enough spare blocks on the Intel drives so that these 8 GB can be written to "fresh" blocks without the need for (time-consuming) erase operations.Apart from these concerns, I enjoyed reading the article.
unknownError - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
I also just created an account to post, very nice article!Lots of good well thought out information, I'm so tired of synthetic benchmarks glad someone goes through the trouble to bench these things right (and appears to have the education to really understand them). Whats with the grammar police though? geez...