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| Introduction and the OCZ Vertex | ||||||
The SSD market is incredibly hot at the moment. Not only is there a consistent influx of new products that seemingly leapfrog the previous generation in nearly every way, but already established products have been treated to firmware updates that enhance their performance and capabilities as well.
OCZ's Vertex Series of SSDs use Samsung MLC NAND flash memory, coupled to 64MB of cache and a new IndiLinx IDX110M00-LC controller that does away with the many stuttering and performance issues that plagued early JMicron controllers. The drives feature the same 2.5" form factor as all of OCZ's previous SSD offerings and are available in capacities ranging from 30GB to 250GB. The drive you see here is the 120GB model, but we should point out that its actually a 128GB drive--OCZ branded it as 120GB drive because that is its formatted capacity within the OS.
According to OCZ, the Vertex Series drives have varying read / write speeds. The 120GB model, is rated for read speeds up to 250 MB/s, with write speeds up to 180MB/s and sustained writes of up to 100MB/s. |
| Corsair P256 | ||||||
| If you remember back to January of this year, Corsair quietly launched a 128GB SSD. Like that drive, the recently released P256 model features Samsung technology, but with a new controller and integrated cache that should offer significantly increased performance.
The drive you see here is branded as a Corsair S256, but the official name of the product, now that it has hits store shelves, is P256--the "S" was changed to a "P". As the product name implies, the drive features a 256GB total capacity, with SATA 3.0Gb/s connectivity, and a heavy-duty aluminum enclosure.
Corsair's specifcations for the drive claim sequential read and write speeds of 220MB/s and 200MB/s, respectively, with max shock resistance of 1500G and a mean time before failure of over 1 million hours. |
| Super Talent Ultra Drive ME | ||||
Next up we have the Super Talent UltraDrive ME, model number FTM64GX25H. Super Talent's UltraDrive ME series of SSDs are the company's fifth generation of solid state products for desktop and mobile applications.
As you can see the drive uses the same 2.5" form factor as the vast majority of other consumer oriented solid state drives. It features SATA II connectivity and hard metal shell. With the drive disassembled, you can see that it too is based on Samsung NAND flash technology. An Elpida 64MB memory chip acts as cache for the drive and it is controlled by a Super Talent branded IndiLinx controller, that sits adjacent to the cache memory.
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| Kingston SSD Now M Series | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The drive you see pictured here comes by way of Kingston, but it is essentially a re-branded Intel X25-M. This particular model is known as the SSDNow M Series Drive in Kingston's product line-up, and features the same 80GB capacity as Intel's popular desktop SSD offering.
With the drive cracked open, you can see the Intel PC29AS21AA0 drive controller and flash memory chips, along with a single 128Mb Samsung DRAM chip that's used as temporary scratch-pad storage for the Intel flash memory controller ASIC. The Intel PC29AS21AA0 provides access to 10X NAND Flash channels and offers features like Native Command Queuing and up to 32 concurrent read/write operations. In addition, Intel's controller also offers a wear-leveling algorithm so that the erase/re-write cycle endurance of the drive is evenly spread across all memory locations and it is adaptive to specific workloads patterns, which is to say the drive's performance will adapt to the user's specific workload.
According to its specifications, the drive is capable of read speeds of up to 250MB/s with up to 70MB/s write speeds. What the specs don't show, however, is that Intel has done significant work in regard to random write speeds, which is a strong point for this drive. |
| Test System, IOMeter, and SANDRA | ||||||||||||
Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark installations. The SSDs were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test. In the table above, we're showing two sets of access patterns; one with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and one with IOMeter's default access pattern of 2K transfers, 67% reads and 100% random access. What you see in the table above is an example of how random write operations kill I/O throughput of most SSDs in IOMeter. There is no question random write performance is the Achille's Heel of most MLC SSDs, though SLC-based SSDs have a much easier time with it.
In our SiSoft SANDRA testing, we used the Physical Disk test suite. We ran the tests without formatting the drives and read performance metrics are detailed below. Please forgive the use of these screen captures and thumbnails, which will require a few more clicks on your part. However, we felt it was important to show you the graph lines in each of the SANDRA test runs, so you are able to see how the drives perform over time and memory location and not just an average rated result. |
| ATTO Disk Benchmark | ||||||||
ATTO is a more straight-forward type of disk benchmark that measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes over a total max volume length of 256MB. This test was performed on blank, formatted drives with NTFS partitions.
As you can see, none of the solid state drives we tested really hit their stride until transfer sizes exceeded the 64kb mark. Once again, the OCZ Vertes Series SSD came out on top in terms of average read and write scores here, followed by the Corsair P256, and then the Super Talent Ultra drive. The Kingston drive actually led in terms of read performance, but writes couldn't quite keep pace with the other drives. |
| HD Tach Testing | ||||||||
Simpli Software's HD Tach is described on the company's web site as such: "HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives, flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device being tested."
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| PCMark Vantage | ||||
Next we ran the OCZ Apex SSD through a battery of tests in PCMark Vantage from Futuremark Corp. We specifically used only the HDD Test module of this benchmark suite to evaluate all of the drives we tested. Feel free to consult Futuremark's white paper on PCMark Vantage for an understanding of what each test component entails and how it calculates its measurements. For specific information on how the HDD Test module arrives at its performance measurements, we'd encourage you to read pages 35 and 36 of the white paper.
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| PCMark Vantage (Cont.) | ||||
Our next series of Vantage tests will stress the current weakness of most SSDs, that being write performance. Applications like video editing, streaming and recording are not what we would call a strong suit for the average SSD, due to their high mix of random write transactions. We should also note that it's not so much a weakness of the memory itself, but rather the interface and control algorithms that deal with inherent erase block latency of MLC NAND flash. SSD manufacturers are getting better at this, but still today, especially with consumer grade SSDs, spinning drives have the edge with respect to some write intensive applications over MLC-based Flash drives, but not as much over SLC-type SSDs. Or so it would seem if you look at the current offerings from other manufacturers. However, it appears Intel has found a way around this bottleneck.
The rest of our PCMark Vantage results are somewhat mixed. Once gain, the Corsair P256 drive takes the pole position, folowed by the Kingston and OCZ drives which trade placed for the second position depending on the particular test. |
| Power Consumption | ||||
Power consumption for all of the drives we tested was minimal, with only a watt or two separating the drives depending on the workload. |
| Our Summary and Conclusion | ||||||||||||||
Performance Summary: When we first took a look at the Intel X25-M SSD a few months back, it finished significantly ahead of competing offerings available at the time. Today, the Kingston SSD Now M Series drive, which is based on Intel's technology, comes out on top in a number of key tests like IOMeter, but the OCZ, Corsair, and Super Talent products featured here now offer competitive or even better performance in some other areas. The OCZ Vertex Series SSD offered strong performance in the ATTO, HD Tach, and SANDRA tests, while the Corsair P256 surged ahead in the PCMark Vantage test. The Super Talent UltraDrive ME generally trailed the OCZ and Corsair drives, but its performance was still very good.
While Solid State Drives are becoming more and more mainstream with each passing day, they are still much more expensive than traditional hard drives and offer much smaller capacities. As such, price is an important consideration and a significant differentiating factor with the current crop of SSDs. While fast, high capacity hard drives like Western Digital's 1TB Caviar Black hard drive can be had for under $100, or about $.10 per gigabyte, solid state drives currently command a few dollars per gigabyte.
We have the current prices for the four solid state drives we've featured here outlined in the chart above. As you can see, while the Corsair P256 is the most expensive overall, its cost per gigabyte is the best, and it has the largest capacity. The Super Talent UltraDrive ME is the least expensive overall and comes in second in the price per gigabyte category. OCZ's Vertex Series SSD is the second most expensive drive both in overall price and cost per gigabyte, and at almost four bucks per gigabyte the Intel-based Kingston drive is clearly the most expensive according to that metric.
Kingston SSD Now M Series SSD (Intel X25-M) Corsair P256 OCZ Vertex Series SSD Super Talent UltraDrive ME |
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