Great SSD Analysis by Anand
This is the article I’ve been waiting for that I didn’t know was coming. Anand has done a thorough analysis of performance in the ways that really matter.
Recommended reading!
Finally, Real-World Testing
What the article talks about is the two things that actually matter in real-world desktop and notebook scenarios: small block latency and change in performance over time. I’m really tired of seeing SSD stats about throughput and only print the lowest possible latency numbers. Let’s just assume all SSD’s are way faster than hard drives in synthetic tests. This is the fatal flaw with most online reviews.
So thanks to AnandTech for getting it right!
JMicron: Not So Bad
I have a Patriot Warp 2 drive that I got in December 08 when prices were a lot higher and pickings were slim.
The Warp 2 is based on the JMicron B series that the article says performs so terribly that it shouldn’t even be on the market. Based on my own experience, I think this judgment is way too harsh. This SSD absolutely destroys the old hard drive that was in my notebook. Everything is faster for me – boot times, loading apps (particularly gigantic dev tools that pull in 1000 dll’s), surfing the web, browsing pics with Picasa…
I do see Anand’s point about consistent performance being better than high performance and tend to agree. That’s why console games so often run at 30 fps: they couldn’t get their 60 to be absolutely solid. And I definitely am seeing the 10-20 second system lockups. Though rare, it’s super frustrating when one of those kicks in right in the middle of me typing an instant message to someone. And when I’m doing things that I know do a lot of small writes, particularly builds of our game and tools, performance goes into the toilet once the write cache is overwhelmed. Overall write performance has gotten worse over time too, though it’s levelled off since a few months ago.
All that said, performance is still vastly better than that old hard drive. So much that I’ve even turned my page file back on and have gone back to my old habits of routinely running 20 apps at once plus a lot of stuff in the tray. I had it turned off in the past with my hard drive because I’d get system lockups from the flurry of small block reads when resuming from hibernate. This is a non-issue with the Patriot. When it comes out of hibernate it’s simply ready.
This is why I disagree with the article in completely disregarding JMicron-based drives. Especially considering how horrifyingly bad ordinary notebook hard drives perform.
I continue to watch how angry and frustrated my wife gets with her brand-stinkin’-new notebook, all due to the hard drive. She doesn’t even hibernate the thing any more. For her, it’s faster to boot from scratch and load all the apps again than to deal with that flurry of page file activity after a resume. If she leaves Outlook or Photoshop open, and doesn’t resume the machine for a few days, we’re looking at 5-10 minutes (I’m not exaggerating) of solid hard drive lock while the stupid thing settles down and becomes responsive enough to do anything. I can’t turn the page file off on her machine or Photoshop won’t work. She has 3G of RAM on there but Photoshop is a fat hog.
The problem is that the performance of rotational media doesn’t scale linearly with more simultaneous jobs run on it. SSD’s do. There’s no waiting for the head to move or the disk to rotate into position. Hard drives appear to scale on some kind of exponential curve of badness, to the point of a total lockup after enough is going on. And with Vista, that point is easy to hit.
On my machine, this problem is totally a thing of the past. I have some frustrating things that happen on here from the Patriot’s terrible small block write performance, but I’m never going back to a real hard drive in a notebook. The 128GB Patriot drive is down to $260 on Newegg. Now that’s damn cheap for an SSD. For an older notebook I wouldn’t think twice before putting one of those in. It will significantly boost performance.
The OCZ Vertex: Win
After reading Anand’s article, and seeing the new stuff coming from these ex-Samsung engineers, I think the OCZ Vertex or another Barefoot-based SSD is what I’ll be putting in Ally’s notebook.
The performance of the Vertex looks right on with what I’m after. I don’t need the extreme performance of the Intel, but that problem with small block writes has to be solved. And the Vertex does it. Bonus: the price is already lower than what I had paid for the Patriot. By the time we get back in the States it will be even lower. I’d buy one today for her if we wouldn’t get bitch-slapped by the Peruvian government with a duty as high as the cost of the drive.
AnandTech has an update on new Vertex firmware that increases performance even further. I’m sold.
My VAIO’s Future
As for my own notebook, I can’t see changing out the Patriot. I have very specific performance problems on here that I think I can solve another way without buying new hardware. My only issue with this thing is when doing builds of large projects like our game.
I’m going to try pulling out the CDROM I never use on here and swapping in the old hard drive that the Patriot replaced. Then I’ll symlink over to that drive all the folders that get hit with these types of writes. For our builds, they’re all redirected underneath a single ‘temp’ folder. I’ll also do my profile’s %temp% folder and some other things based on monitoring with ProcMon. I might even turn back on desktop search and put the index there.
The drive is back in the States so I’ll have to wait till August before I can try this out. As it’s old, it’s gotten a little loud. I might have to pack it in some kind of sound deadening material. Lots of space in the CD bay for that. I don’t care much about weight.
But I definitely won’t spread the page file onto this other drive. Then I’ll be back where I started!
