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Test: How much better are solid-state drives over hard disks?
I have seen the future, and it is solid state. The solid-state disk (SSD) computing revolution has arrived, almost. Solid-state drives are, of course, like the flash drives in your camera, only bigger, and now, much faster. Devoid of moving parts, cool-running, quiet as a church mouse, energy-sipping and data crunching at light speed, these hard drives will be our medium for data storage for the foreseeable future.
We snagged a quartet of these mind-boggling wafers of goodness, and they gave us a fascinating peek into the future. Just how fast are they? We benchmarked them in a group of four, all lashed together in a single volume that uses teamwork to speed things up (known to geekdom as a RAID 0 array), and then we loaded up a singleton to see how it compares. Click on Continue Reading to see how they fared.
They're small. The four Intel X25-E SATA solid state drives we tested are actually 2.5-inch drives (each now selling for $848) adapted by Western Digital to fit into 3.5-inch drive cages. Surrounding the small and thin enclosures are heat sinks, hardly needed because these drives barely heat up at all.
They are completely silent. We loaded Windows XP onto an array of four of these drives, and the only drive noise we heard was the whine of the DVD as it offloaded its data onto the 4-SSD volume. Once the data was onto the drives, there was none of that mechanical grinding, clinking, humming and groaning that normally emanates from fast spinning drives. It's an eerie silence, but wonderfully serene.
They're fast. Intel's figured out how to get these NAND chips to access small files, a former weakness that was holding SSDs back. Using "Native Command Queuing" with a 10-channel flash controller, seek time is minimized, and the result is some lickety-split performance. It's almost as fast as RAM, but unlike RAM, that data permanently sticks to the solid-state disk, rather than going away when the PC is shut down as it does with RAM.
Read 'em and weep. Look at these numbers! TK per second for a single drive vs. TK for a SAS (serial-attached SCSI, the fastest) drive spinning at 15,000 rpm. And the clincher, TKMB/s when you strip four of the babies together in a RAID 0 array. Goodness gracious.
We tested the drives using four different benchmarks, and all the results were similar to these from the Passmark PerformanceTest (download a free 32-bit or 64-bit trial here to test your system — we used the 64-bit version).
(Click each image for enlargement) The spinning drive almost keeps up with the SSD in sequential reading, but look how it gets manhandled with random seeks — it's 93.4% slower. Ouch.
When you gang up the SSDs in an array, they're substantially faster, especially the sequential reads, 202% faster than a single drive.
We gave the 15,000 RPM spinning disk array a head start, striping together six of them against the four SSDs. They still got smoked, especially in random seeks.
But boot time isn't affected as much. Check out these numbers, where shutdown time was strangely longer with the solid-state drives.
Bootup time to first cursor:
SSD:1:22
15K: 1:34
Shutdown:
SSD: 00:28
15K: 00:11
They're still not perfect. While we didn't see any degradation in our four "single-level cell" (SLC) drives' performance after multiple tests, other reviewers have seen that problem in multi-level cell (MLC) devices such as Intel's 80GB and 160GB drives, saying that they slowed down as more data was written to them, and defragmentation utilities only made matters worse. But Intel's working on this problem, and recently released new firmware for those 80GB and 160GB SSDs that reportedly fixed the problem. Still, this is new tech, and not everything about it is perfect yet. Sounds like a good reason to wait awhile before jumping into the SSD game. Here's one last, and very big reason to wait:
They're crazy expensive. It's definitely not time to buy these suckers, oh no. Just watch and enjoy the tech for now and let the early adopters spend $1000 apiece for 64GB drives. That's roughly 4x-4.5x the price of already-pricey 15K SAS drives. Two years from now, many more drives will be solid-state, because prices will have plummeted to an affordable level, and those pesky fragmentation issues will be solved. Until then, rest assured that you've seen the future, and it's solid state.
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By MooseBoys at 9:13 AM ON 04/16/09
I've got to say I'm going to miss the audible cue of those write heads that tell me whether my computer's frozen or if it's just thinking furiously. After all, there's a lot more information in that clicking noise than you get from the little HDD activity LED.
By Old Man Dotes at 11:15 AM ON 04/16/09
The G.Skill 64GB SSD is significantly less expensive; $139 at New Egg. 2.5-inch form factor, and a 2.5-to-3.5-inch adapter is nowhere close to $700, so I think the Seagates are priced like a Dell XPS - you pay a whole lot of money for the same thing everyone else has, but you get to claim it's better because it costs more.
By aalex at 11:22 AM ON 04/16/09
Forgive me for any naivete, but the Patriot Warp drive is 128gb, and only $240! Is there not a clear reason to just get one of these suckers now?
By anon at 12:56 PM ON 04/16/09
@MooseBoys
+1
When I first got my computer and heard that clicking sound I thought something was broken, because usually at school and other places the ambient sound level is usually enough to cover the seek heads. But the computer I have has a badly constructed chassis which can make it start whirring randomly. But it also used to amplify the seek heads and I could often tell what was going on. I had almost learned a custom signature for each event. I wonder how many people will have viruses (virii?) for longer because they don't realise their disk is thrashing (not that it would thrash if it was a decent ssd).
Actually, someone should make a program that accurately simulates the seek sound. This would allow users to get the best of both worlds. You could have silence whenever required (which would likely be most of the time) but if your computer seems to be acting suspiciously then you could use the tool to emulate the sound it would make if it was a hard drive or go one better and create custom access sounds that might not be so annoying at times. I might have started babbling on a bit so I will just stop now
By Jon Bach at 2:20 PM ON 04/16/09
Measuring the throughput on the drives is a great start, but it only tells part of the story. You also have to take a look at IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second). This is where you can see some real problems with SSD. If the SSD can't keep up with a large number of requests, you'll experience some pretty serious slowdowns and lags. With the way modern operating systems run massive amounts of background tasks (especially Vista), the IOPS a drive is capable of can become a real bottleneck.
There's definitely a wide variation in the performance of SSD drives. The Intel units are excellent, easily the top performers today. Beware of the cheaper models. They're all going to hype up their throughput numbers, but the cheap drives suffer greatly in IOPS. My advice is to not bother with the cheap drives. You're likely to experience slower performance than a traditional hard drive, except for select operations like file copying. If you're going to use a SSD, do it right and get a quality one. The prices are constantly falling, and I can't wait until the quality drives are more affordable!
Jon Bach - President
Puget Systems
http://www.pugetsystems.com
By Jonathan at 3:18 PM ON 04/16/09
The X25 is the flagship of SSD drives currently. The other, cheaper, counterparts like those found on newegg for a much more reasonable price are much much slower. Most are slower than a 5400 RPM laptop drive. If you want to see the true speed of an SSD drive you need to pony up the bucks for the Intel X25.
By Fatal Error at 6:04 PM ON 04/16/09
"Actually, someone should make a program that accurately simulates the seek sound."
for the amiga emulators, which i dont need beacuse i still have my 1200, there was an option to enable emulated disk drive sounds, not the same but similar.
By MacGizmoGuy at 4:14 AM ON 04/19/09
How much better ARE SSD's over solid-state disks? By and large: dramatically. For the AVERAGE person with a stock hard drive in their computer, you simply replace it with nearly ANY current SSD on the market at immediately start reaping speed benefits from startup to app launch to smooth operation. You don't need a bleeding edge solid-state drive, you don't need to benchmark it, you don't need to calculate numbers, you don't need 2 or 4 or 6 or 8 of them striped in a Raid.
As I scour the net assessing the state of Solid-State storage, it seems 1% of the computing population is obsessed with splitting-nanosecond-hairs benchmarking these SSD's to death, when the reality is the rest of the world doesn't really care. They just want their computer to start up quicker - and big bloated apps to launch faster. And for barely more than $100, you can easily find a SSD that will do just that.
By bobabrams at 7:09 AM ON 05/05/09
It is all about reliability, data security and cost-most do not really care about a fairly small performance hit.
Are there MTBF stats available?
The current spinners do pretty well in this area.
If the SSD's do OK above, they are the way to go.
'Cheaper' stuff is usually just that.....IMHO
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bobabrams:
It is all about reliability, data security and cost-most do not really care about a fairly small performance hit. ...More »