Why Size Matters For Your SSD Purchase

Vigile writes "Performance analysis on solid state drives is still coming into clarity as more manufacturers enter the fold and more of the drives find their way into users' hands. While Intel's dominance in the SSD market was once undoubted, newer garbage collection methods from Indilinx and Samsung are now balancing performance across the the major players. What hasn't been discussed in great detail yet is the effect that drive capacity can have on overall performance. Some smaller drives (64GB versus 128GB) will actually use fewer data channels from the controller chip and thus will have lower transfer speeds. The article compares drives using controllers from Indilinx, Samsung and Intel." Note that PCPer greedily spans this review over 12 pages. Next time maybe they can keep it down to something more reasonable.

Comments

The short story

[symbolset]

Intel X25-M 160GB totally dominates in IOPS and doesn't suffer in the other categories. A clean win.

SSD can be a pain because of extra work

[damonlab]

I have never bothered with firmware updates and additional configuration steps with standard IDE, SATA, SCSI, and SAS drives. While looking around at various SSD, I found that you need to go though all of this additional crap to get things working right. OCZ, for example, has a whole forum dedicated to help tweak out their drives. http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=186

Re:SSD can be a pain because of extra work

[Bigjeff5]

This is the problem - 20 years ago you DIDN'T need a driver for your monitor, or a flashing utility for your hard drive, or any of the other ridiculous things caused by not sticking to standards and/or designing the hardware badly.

I wasn't using computers 20 years ago (I was 6 at the time), but I was a computer tinkerer 15 years ago, and I certainly remember needing drivers for things like monitors (not the video card, the monitor, it was a pain), driver updates for hard drives, etc. Without the drivers you had a standard, very basic functionality because the OS had a built in generic that would just barely work.

Ever heard of a Plug 'n Play monitor? Of course you have, it's what all monitors are now. But there was a time when there was no such thing. When PnP came out, it was revolutionary, because you didn't need drivers for the stupid simple stuff, like monitors and hard drives. To use PnP required a PnP capable motherboard, hardware device, and OS. A lot of BIOSs still have the setting to disable PnP if the OS isn't capable of it - then you'll need drivers. And of course, even after PnP for many years it was dubbed "Plug 'n Pray" because you were never sure it would actually work right, if not you'd better have drivers on hand.

Hell, Windows XP still won't run a SCSI drive unless you have the driver for it, and SCSI has been around FOREVER.

You may not know this, but even today you need drivers for your ATA/SATA hard drive to work properly. Some companies even send you a disk still, just in case. You don't recognize it, because after 20+ years the technology has been pretty well nailed, and new drivers are rarely - if ever- necessary. 99.9% of mass storage drivers are built in to any OS later than XP, but under certain cirumstances it's good to be aware of them and which ones you need (it comes up when using Sysprep sometimes, specifying your drivers can really speed up a re-image). Most of the drivers are contained in one or two INF files, but without them your drive will not work.

In other words, STFU, it's new technology, and even at its worst it's better than what we have currently. Soon things will be pretty well standardized, and the only substantive difference between brands will be the number of channels, chips, and levels which determine speed, capacity, and price.

Kinda like hard drives now, where we look at RPMs, cache, and seek times to find the best drives.

fewer pages = better server performance

[SethJohnson]

Stuffing it all into 1-6 pages would do nothing more than insure that when they got slashdotted, they'd drown their server faster.

Actually, fewer pages with more text content delivered per http request would reduce the load on the server. The bigger impact on the server is repeated visits to the hard drive and trips to the database. When one article requires 12 separate page requests, that cranks up the number of http requests coming in that have to be responded to with hard drive file reads and database queries.

Not knowing their specific server architecture, the above is a generalization. Caching, virtual memory mapped file systems, etc. can alleviate these bottlenecks.

Seth

Re:Size.

[BronsCon]

Click the score. Insightful mods do affect karma.

News?

[sexconker]

How is this news?

The number of channels increases the theoretical and actual read and write speeds.

Did anyone NOT know this?

No one needs to look at capacity to guess the number of channels, and no one needs to dig around for a review site that cracked the bitch open / contacted the Chinese manufacturers to get the number of channels used.

All you need to look at is the specs, and in case they're lying, benchmarks. No guess work. No hunting for obscure information that might not apply to your particular hardware revision of the same SKU. No bullshit.

Re:But...

[BronsCon]

You also have twice as many points of failure. Three times as many, if you count the RAID controller. Four, if you count the firmware in the RAID controller. Five, if you consider the increased load on your PSU, having to power the additional drive and RAID controller.

That's ignoring the additional traffic on the bus. That RAID controller doesn't work on FM[1], you know. Then again, it probably doesn't matter; it's not like you'd want faster disk access in a machine being used for video or audio capture, where bus congestion may be an issue.

Oh... That's precisely where you'd want it. Well, there, and servers; again, bus-congestion could be a bitch.

[1] F*cking Magic

Re:Pussy hurt much?

[Locke2005]

Back when I was a kid, books used to come in a nice, easily scrollable format. Of course, that was before Gutenburg came along and messed things up with his new-fangled page-at-a-time printing... now get off my lawn!

Re:Multi-Page = Horrible

[publiclurker]

Well said. I only block ads that are obtrusive like that. I've actually purchased thousands of dollars of services for my company based on an ad in Opera, so I actually find a lot of them useful. However, if you pop up a window over what I'm trying to read or start up sound clips when I'm browsing late at night, then you get your ads blocked.