Four SSDs Compared — OCZ, Super Talent, Mtron

MojoKid writes "Solid State Drive technology is set to turn the storage industry on its ear — eventually. It's just a matter of time. When you consider the intrinsic benefits of anything built on solid-state technology versus anything mechanical, it doesn't take a degree in physics to understand the obvious advantages. However, as with any new technology, things take time to mature and the current batch of SSDs on the market do have some caveats and shortcomings, especially when it comes to write performance. This full performance review and showcase of four different Solid State Disks, two MLC-based and two SLC-based, gives a good perspective of where SSDs currently are strong and where they're not. OCZ, Mtron and Super Talent drives are tested here but Intel's much anticipated offering hasn't arrived to market just yet."

Comments

Re:1+1+1 != 4

[Zymergy]

They tested two (2) different OCZ SSD models, one with SLC NAND Flash memory chips, and the other with MLC NAND Flash memory chips. 2+1+1=4
I know, I RTA...

Oh For God's Sake

[SQL Error]

Yet another SSD review by clueless PC dweebs.

The whole point of SSDs is that they have no moving parts, so they don't have the seek time and rotational latency of spinning disks. That translates into faster random access. As the review says:

What was absolutely impressive however, were the random access and seek times, along with the benefits that come with them and Solid State Storage in general.

So what do they measure? Sequential transfer rates.

Gah.

Re:Deconstructing solid state.

[Yvan256]

Well, let's see:
- Magnetic hard drive = solid state (ICs, buffers, etc) + magnetic platter + mechanical (rotating platter(s) + moving heads)
- SSD = solid state

As soon as the price per GB of SSDs is at parity with the magnetic drives, I'm switching. It probably puts out less heat and require less power, meaning quieter drives too.

Re:Deconstructing solid state.

[eln]

There are some steam trains out there that are running and are over 100 years old... do we really think that a CPU or a RAM or a motherboard can live that long?

I agree completely. I, too, am dismayed at the lack of development in steam-powered computing.

Re:Disagree

[Ngarrang]

Someone wake me up when there's a 1TB SSD for $250 that can do unlimited rewrite ops.

Um, even mechanical hard drives cannot promise unlimited rewrite ops. Maybe you want lower your sights jut a tad?

Article without 60 pages of ads

[Taibhsear]

http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?articleid=1211

Re:Deconstructing solid state.

[mapsjanhere]

I noticed they claim 1,000,000+ h MTBF, but they only warranty for less than 10,000 h (or 20,000 in some cases). What makes you wonder why they have so little faith in their product (or in their own reliability estimate).

Re:1+1+1 != 4

[Holi]

RTFM? Shit... comments, articles, now I have to read a damn manual too. Jesus Slashdot is getting harder and harder these days.

Re:Deconstructing solid state.

[xZgf6xHx2uhoAj9D]

It's a good point. SSDs are so new that we can't really say empirically that they'll last for a lot of years. If nothing else, though, they'll be relatively safe against dropping your laptop on the floor.

Re:Deconstructing solid state.

[maxume]

Are those steam trains really running with 100 year old parts?

Or do you regularly go in and maintain the various components of you hard drives?

Re:Deconstructing solid state.

[ericspinder]

As soon as the price per GB of SSDs is at parity with the magnetic drives, I'm switching.

Actual price parity will likely only occur once the older technology become a rarity, and I suspect that for the next decade, magnetic drives will continue to be the cheapest mass storage out there. That being said, for me, I'll buy a SSD when I can get a decently rated 120 gig drive for less than $150.

I don't understand the problem

[erroneus]

I am not an expert by any stretch but it seems to me that write speed issues, at least when it comes to relatively small amounts of writing, could easily be mitigated with a very long on-board RAM buffer controlled by the drive... and by very large, I mean like 1GB at least. And to keep it stable, a capacitor should be enough to keep it alive when power drops to commit any changes in buffer to the SSD storage. Maybe what I speak of is impossible or ridiculously expensive, but I don't think either is the case.

Re:I don't understand the problem

[Courageous]

You're not the first person to think of such a thing. Problem is: it's pretty risky.

Most high end RAID controllers do this already, if you set to write-back. But they also have big batteries attached to them, and even then, you have something like 24 hours to power back on or total system corruption can occur. This means that mentioned systems must be affirmatively managed.

Can you imagine what a hassle this would be for the HD makers, particularly in the notebook use case? It would be a never ending chain of angry users blaming the HD maker for their data loss...

I think the right place to do this is way up in the OS, with a file system that is aware of the issues of small page commits to these devices, and therefore doing some kind of page-coalescence thing. Sun's ZFS can do this. Now we just need something over in consumer space.

C//

Re:Disagree

[Gewalt]

Someone wake me up when there's a 1TB SSD for $250 that can do unlimited rewrite ops.

Let me guess, you want a car's drivetrain to promise "unlimited mileage" and your homes A/C refrigerant to promise "unlimited compression/decompression cycles".
 
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but words like "unlimited" are marketing words only. EVERYTHING is limited and finite. In this case, consumer protection laws state that 7 years of normal usage is long enough to be considered "lifetime" or "infinite" or "unlimited" and all sorts of other key words and tricky phrases.

Those mechanical drives you are comparing SSDs to? They don't offer "unlimited rewrites" except in the marketing sense. 7 years of normal usage. In that same sense, SSDs are already offering unlimited rewrites as they have enough rewrite cycles to last 7 years of normal usage. Just like the mechanical drives.

Re:1+1+1 = 4 if 1, 1, 1, and 4 are rounded numbers

[amdpox]

Lots. For a high-speed SLC (i.e. something that will equal a cheap 7200rpm spinning platter), you'll pay $400+ for a 64gb and $700+ for a 128gb at this point. Basically, they're completely economically infeasible at anything larger than the 4/8gb you see being used to store the OS and apps in netbooks, unless you have a critical need to access a lot of data at high speed while driving a truck over a small post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Re:1+1+1 != 4

[Hal_Porter]

By what WITCHCRAFT would thou know the article contents?

Re:Along with SSDs an optimized OS?

[Tumbleweed]

Man, I just realized how old I'm getting ...

No you didn't. You realized that awhile back but forgot.

I just bought an OCZ drive... now I'm selling it

[tezza]

I got a Core 64GB. I build large java projects. This is for my workstation, not a laptop. Power and quiet were not the reasons for my experimental purchase.

I aimed to slash my build time for complex scenarios.
I thought the Compile -> Jar -> War -> Deploy -> Expand -> Launch would be greatly spead up as the files would be accessed quickly.

I hoped effectively for a much more targeted and capacious file cache/ RAM disk.

Unfortunately, the hype does not turn out to be true.

The enormous time cost of writing files smaller than 8MB (!) [see footnotes] completely counters any read speed increase. Building a proect is making thousands of 2KiB files : one of the most pathological cases for these drives.

So is it slow? No, it's just as quick as a sluggish 7K250, but then again I just coughed up £179 for the privelege of the same speed.

So I'm ebaying mine to someone who wants it for a light and quiet laptop, perfect.

-----------------
Some "Terrible small write performance" links I found during research:

* http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/ssd-iram_6.html
* http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106