"Limited Edition" SSD Has Fastest Storage Speed

Vigile writes "The idea of having a 'Limited Edition' solid state drive might seem counter-intuitive, but regardless of the naming, the new OCZ Vertex LE is based on the new Sandforce SSD controller that promises significant increases in performance, along with improved ability to detect and correct errors in the data stored in flash. While the initial Sandforce drive was called the 'Vertex 2 Pro' and included a super-capacitor for data integrity, the Vertex LE drops that feature to improve cost efficiency. In PC Perspectives's performance tests, the drive was able to best the Intel X25-M line in file creation and copying duties, had minimal fragmentation or slow-down effects, and was very competitive in IOs per second as well. It seems that current SSD manufacturers are all targeting Intel and the new Sandforce controller is likely the first to be up to the challenge."

Comments

Re:oh god...

[goldaryn]

"I was so eager to test it that I pounded on this drive all night "

Possible poor choice of words?

"Er, I was testing IOs per second."

Re:Marketspeak, or as normal people call it: lies.

[MrNemesis]

If "almost a halt" is 200MB/s read speeds as opposed to 260, I think I can live with it before I upgrade to my TRIM firmware, which negates the whole issue... whoops, I started using TRIM on my home drives months ago.

Seriously, the SSD market has exploded in the last 12 months. It's gone from being an expensive tool useful to enthusiasts to a not-quite-as-expensive-but-faster-than-any-number-of-hard-drives-can-provide utility that's worth five times it's price, especially for enterprise users.

* Proud owner of 1 intel SSD, 3 OCZ SSD's and administrator of about 3TB of SSD SAN and >8GB FusionIO cache with a bunch of spinning magnetic domains in the background that we can't get rid of fast enough

Misleading title

[dnaumov]

The new OCZ SSDs, while a welcome addition to the market aren't anywhere near "fastest storage".
Crucial RealSSD C300: http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/3118/crucial_realssd_c300_256gb_sata_6gbps_solid_state_disk/index5.html
Fusion-IO: http://storage-news.com/2009/10/29/hothardware-shows-first-benchmarks-for-fusion-io-drive/

Re:Misleading title

[AllynM]

- We included some early C300 results with the benches. The C300 will read faster (sequentially) under SATA 6Gb/sec, but it is simply not as in most other usage.
- Fusion-IO - good luck using that for your OS (not bootable). Fast storage is, for many, useless unless you can boot from it.

Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective

How hard can it be?

[bertok]

I'm kinda fed up waiting for the SSD manufacturers to get their act together. There's just no reason for drives to be only 10-50x faster than physical drives. It should be trivial to make them many thousands of times faster.

I suspect that most drives we're seeing are too full of compromises to unlock the real potential of flash storage. Manufacturers are sticking to 'safe' markets and form factors. For example, they all seem to target the 2.5" laptop drive market, so all the SSD controllers I've seen so far are all very low power (~1W), which seriously limits their performance. Also, very few drives use PCI-e natively as a bus, most consumer PCI-e SSDs are actually four SATA SSDs attached to a generic SATA RAID card, which is just... sad. It's also telling that it's a factor of two cheaper to just go and buy four SSDs and RAID them using an off-the-shelf RAID controller! (*)

Meanwhile, FusionIO makes PCI-e cards that can do 100-200K IOPS at speeds of about 1GB/sec! Sure, they're expensive, but 90% of that is because they're a very small volume product targeted at the 'enterprise' market, which automatically inflates the price by a '0' or two. Take a look at a photo of one of their cards. The controller chip has a heat sink, because it's designed for performance, not power efficiency!

This reminiscent of the early days of the 3D accelerator market. On one side, there was the high-performing 'enterprise' series of products from Silicon Graphics, at an insane price, and at the low-end of the market there were companies making half-assed cards that actually decelerated graphics performance. Then NVIDIA happened, and now Silicon Graphics is a has been because they didn't understand that consumers want performance at a sane price point. Today, we still have SSDs that are slower that mechanical drives at some tasks, which just boggles the mind, and on the other hand we have FusionIO, a company with technically great products that decided to try to target the consumer market by releasing a tiny 80GB drive for a jaw-dropping $1500. I mean.. seriously... what?

Back when I was a young kid first entering university, SGI came to do a sales pitch, targeted at people doing engineering or whatever. They were trying to market their "low-end" workstations with special discount "educational" pricing. At the time, I had a first-generation 3Dfx accelerator in one of the first Athlons, which cost me about $1500 total and could run circles around the SGI machine. Nonetheless, I was curious about the old-school SGI machine, so I asked for a price quote. The sales guy mumbled a lot about how it's "totally worth it", and "actually very cost effective". It took me about five minutes to extract a number. The base model, empty, with no RAM, drive, or 3D accelerator was $40K. The SSD market is exactly at the same point. I'm just waiting for a new ''NVIDIA" or "ATI" to come along, crush the competition with vastly superior products with no stupid compromises, and steal all the engineers from FusionIO and then buy the company for their IP for a bag of beans a couple of years later.

*) This really is stupid: 256GB OCZ Z-Drive p84 PCI-Express is $2420, but I can get four of these 60GB OCZ Vertex SATA at $308 each for a total of $1232, or about half. Most motherboards have 4 built-in ports with RAID capability, so I don't even need a dedicated controller!

Re:How hard can it be?

[Microlith]

It should be trivial to make them many thousands of times faster.

Not really. You're limited to the speed of the individual chips and the number of parallel storage lanes. They also target the 2.5" SATA market because it gives them an immediate in. Directly into new desktops and systems without consuming a slot the high performance people who would buy these are likely shoving an excess of games into. The high end is already using those slots for storage.

Believe me, the industry -is- looking into ways of getting SSDs on to faster buses, but it takes time and some significant rearchitecture. Also, NAND sucks ass, with high block failure rates fresh out of the fab outweighed by sheer density. And it's only going to get worse as lithography gets smaller.

The controller chip has a heat sink, because it's designed for performance, not power efficiency!

No, it's because the thing's running an Xilinx Virtex5 FPGA. It also costs a ton as it's using 96GB of SLC NAND, and is part of a fairly modular design that is reused in the io-drive Duo and io-drive Quad.

Today, we still have SSDs that are slower that mechanical drives at some tasks

If you're referring to the older JMicron drives that failed utterly at 4K random reads/writes, then you're mistaken. That was the case of a shit controller being exposed. Even the Indilinx controllers, which paled next to the Intel chip, outclassed mechanical drives at the same task.

on the other hand we have FusionIO, a company with technically great products that decided to try to target the consumer market by releasing a tiny 80GB drive for a jaw-dropping $1500. I mean.. seriously... what?

If you think that's bad, consider that the Virtex5 they're using on it costs on the order of $500 for the chip itself. You linked the "pro" model, which supports multiple devices in the same system in some fashion. You want this one, which is only $900. Both models use MLC NAND, and neither are really intended for mass-market buyers (you can't boot from them, after all.)

Re:Marketspeak, or as normal people call it: lies.

[MrNemesis]

Irish coffee's bring out the best in everyone ;)

Reason I started using them at home was due to video editing - not very useful for encoding when you can rarely outpace your CPU's capability to encode stuff, but for random seeking/non-linear stuff/extracting streams/muxing, SSD's are a boon. Depending on your workload you can even get away with using crappy SSD's that are shit at random workloads but awesome at sequential.

TBH though you'll get the most noticeable improvement with using it as your system drive; apps start almost instantly and there's never any thrashing as $bloaty_app loads. Heck, my linux machines boot in 5s with the comparatively cheap OCZ Agility drives; the difference is less noticeable in windows however. Try running a laptop off an SSD for a month and then go back to a mechanical drive - the apparent slowness will drive you crazy :)

The benefits for enterprise users are especially large because 20k of SSD can replace 100k of fibre channel whilst getting 10x the performance and greater reliability. Plus Picard totally loves SSD's as he can rest his tea, earl grey, hot, on them without risking Data loss.