SSD roundup: Vertex 3 vs M4 vs C300 vs 510 vs 320 vs x25-M vs F120 vs Falcon II

[Gilgamesh]

Good review from hardware.fr

http://translate.google.it/translate...n&hl=&ie=UTF-8

Vertex 3 120/240Gb
Crucial M4 128/256Gb
Crucial C300 128/256Gb
Intel 510 120/250Gb
Intel 320 120/300Gb
Corsair F120
Intel X25-M 120Gb
G.skill Falcon II 128Gb

[Brahmzy]

Awesome - good golly the C300's are quick!!!

[Gilgamesh]

Awesome - good golly the C300's are quick!!!

Yes are quick, I bought mine 128Gb for Amd sb850, 6 months ago

But Crucial M4 128Gb, at same price, will became a better buy: little lower 4k random read, but higher 4k random write

[Computurd]

yes but look at M4 im tellin ya it looks like a 'sleeper'.
everyone is looking to the vertex 3, but in incompressible the M4 owns it. in compressible the M4 is right there. so you make a smart judgement and overall M4 should be faster.

i personally find it very strange that the M4 beats the vertex 3 in all of the 'old' anandtech profiles, so then he creates new profiles, in which the V3 wins. strange that.

EDIT: look at 4kqd1. the M4 smokes with 26 compared to V3 @ 17.

[alfaunits]

Quite strange that... the 128GB M4 is faster than the 256GB M4 in random reads. Results switched?

As far as Anand, eh... if this were a first... anyone remember when they switched VMmark for vApus benchmark to make Barcelona not look bad? (and thus showing Netburst was good really :P)

[Computurd]

look at this

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fea...iewed?page=0,0

PCMark Vantage, which mirrors real-world applications, actually gives the top spot to Crucial’s m4 SSD, with the Vertex 3 a close second.

unfortunately those 'bright minds' at maximum pc gave the V3 the overall win based on its max sequential LOL. oh yeah and its QD32 random performance. lol. in the qd32 though the M4 was right there.

there was a bug with compatibility and the M4 with certain controllers when the first round of reviews came out. now that bug has been addressed apparently, because in all current testing that i have seen the M4 is beating the V3 handily. ESPECIALLY with incompressible data. isnt even close there. but in real world stuff as well (ex. pcmv traces) it seems to be much better than initial reports......

you take into account the history of the reliability of a crucial controller vs the history of reliability in a SandForce controller and it becomes a no-brainer according to the latest data ive seen coming out....

this is exactly why i have been waiting around on the 25nm 'generation'. we need to let all of these drives out in the wild for a bit to mature, then we should see a clear winner emerge.

[Gilgamesh]

Quite strange that... the 128GB M4 is faster than the 256GB M4 in random reads. Results switched?

I think no.

This is explanation to hardware.fr (google translated ):

"The 128 GB version also gets results well above the 256 GB version of the explanation is actually quite simple, it is at the level of memory chips used. On the 128 GB, the chips used are organized with pages - the smallest readable - 4 KB, while the 256 GB version, the pages are 8 KB, therefore, to read 4 KB requested at the test, the 256 GB version should actually go to a full page of 8 KB"

[johnw]

"The 128 GB version also gets results well above the 256 GB version of the explanation is actually quite simple, it is at the level of memory chips used. On the 128 GB, the chips used are organized with pages - the smallest readable - 4 KB, while the 256 GB version, the pages are 8 KB, therefore, to read 4 KB requested at the test, the 256 GB version should actually go to a full page of 8 KB"

It could be a bad translation, but I don't think this explanation is correct. As far as I know, all 25nm IMFT flash uses 8KB pages, and all the m4 SSDs use 25nm IMFT flash. Therefore, there should not be a difference in page size for 128GB and 256GB Crucial m4 SSDs.

[Khoral]

It could be a bad translation

It's not, that's exactly what is said in the article.

Translated from french by myself (sorry for the mistakes) :

The Crucial M4 128 GB we tested combine a Marvell 88SS9174-BL02 controller, a Micron DRAM chip (on its back) and 16 Micron 29F64G08CFACB flash chips. These chips are 25nm and combine two 32 Gb dies. The page size is 4 KB, and the bloc size is 1 MB.

The Crucial M4 256 GB distinguish itself from the 128 GB version by the Flash chips, which are 29F128G08CFAAB. Their capacity is doubled from the use of two 64 Gb dies. This time the page size is 8 KB and the bloc size is 2 MB.

[johnw]

Thanks for the translation. They seem quite specific that the Micron 29F64G08CFACB flash chips use 4KB pages and are 25nm-lithography chips. That is certainly interesting if it is true. Everything I had read previously had implied that all 25nm IMFT flash would use 8KB pages.

[Ao1]

I like this review. Shame it is in French as the translation does not come out too well. Here is a chart using data from the benchmarks, but focusing only on QD 1, 2 & 4. Results are sorted from QD1. Lowest to the left, highest to the right. The C300 dominates as expected. Interesting to see that the Intel 310 performs consistently within this zone regardless of drive size.

Seems like the Vertex 3 takes a performance hit with sequential writes after 30 seconds. The Intel 510 is the clear winner here.

Reality though is that in the practical tests there is no real difference between any of the SSD's. Even the Ramdisk shows little improvement when considering how much faster it is compared to an SSD.

[Ao1]

It's not, that's exactly what is said in the article.

Translated from french by myself (sorry for the mistakes) :

The Crucial M4 128 GB we tested combine a Marvell 88SS9174-BL02 controller, a Micron DRAM chip (on its back) and 16 Micron 29F64G08CFACB flash chips. These chips are 25nm and combine two 32 Gb dies. The page size is 4 KB, and the bloc size is 1 MB.

The Crucial M4 256 GB distinguish itself from the 128 GB version by the Flash chips, which are 29F128G08CFAAB. Their capacity is doubled from the use of two 64 Gb dies. This time the page size is 8 KB and the bloc size is 2 MB.

I too am intrigued by this. Could you ask the reviewer to confirm?

[Metroid]

4K Random Read is the most important thing for 97% of users.

So I would recommend the Vertex 3 only if it is the 240GB Version. If not then The M4 C400 128GB would be my best bet.

[Ao1]

I agree about the 4k, but primarily only at QD1. Highly compressible, aligned 4K stats at QD32 are completely worthless to a desktop user.

At QD1 the Vertex 3 sucks. It's the worst performing SSD according to that review.

EDIT:

Here is a summary showing the percent increase of 4K RR performance at QD1. A bit surprising that the Vertex 3 120 is coming out faster than the 240 version. The G Skill results are also a bit surprising.

The C300 is still the fastest at 4K reads from QD 1 to 4 and it stands its ground with 4K writes as well.

[SteveRo]

^^ amazing that the c300s look this good against the "newer" competition.

Buy.com has the c300/128 for $220 + shipping, the c300/64 can be had for ~120.

http://www.buy.com/prod/crucial-real...214560204.html

[Ao1]

The 25nm drives delivery higher sequential performance, but at the expense of QD 1 4K random read performance. You need to go above QD3 before you see a benefit. If that is progress or not I guess depends on your specific requirements.

From what I can see with hIOmon sequential xfers typically consists of multiple small xfers. This can be demonstrated quite well below.

General OS
Largest single read I/O xfer size = 1.14MiB (1 occurrence)
Black OPs single player
Largest single read I/O xfer size = 28.24 MiB (1 occurrence)
Black Ops MP
Largest single I/O xfer size = 0.88 MiB (1 occurrence)

The largest xfer monitored came out at 28.MiB. It does not take long to read that if you can read at 100MB/s or 500MB/s. Copying large Photoshop files also results in multiple xfers, most of which are 1MiB. (None larger, but a few much smaller ones as well).

What takes time is sequential xfers that are constructed from multiple small xfer sizes. We are talking kB not MiB.

[Brahmzy]

Reality though is that in the practical tests there is no real difference between any of the SSD's. Even the Ramdisk shows little improvement when considering how much faster it is compared to an SSD.

This is so true. I've had a TON of different SSDs in a ton of different systems and honestly, especially on an overclocked system, you REALLY have to be paying attention to see much of difference on normal day to day usage.

I've got a 60GB Vertex 1 and it actually boots far faster than 2 V3's (120's OR 240's) - like 3-4 seconds faster. Reason is it doesn't have a creative soundcard in the box. But boot times mean nothing to me, some folks it does, but any SSD is going to boot about the same within a second or two of each other.

As far as general browsing and light usage, in W7 x64, there's ZERO difference between my SSDs. ONLY when I'm doing heavy, heavy multitasking, application installs or large amounts of file copying do I see a difference - and that is maybe 2% of time spent. I can slow my X-25M G2 160 down to a crawl at work with about 40 things open at any given time. That's where I'd love to get a faster SSD. Gaming, yes, levels do load faster in R0 with fast SSDs - tested this a thousand times.

I think we've gotten to the point where unless you're a true 24/7 power user that's got applications or processes that hammer your storage up and down - only then will the fast drives really shine.

4K Random Read is the most important thing for 97% of users.

This is what we all agree on, yet do we see any REAL WORLD difference QD1 4K random reads between any one of those drives in this review make a difference in what we experience?
Yes, on paper and HiMon tell us what goes on in the background, but honestly, Windows does such a good job never exposing any of that to the end user - It has been optimized for spinning disks.

I mean if somebody could convince me that 2 C300 256GB's in R0 would out-perform my 2 V3 240GB's in overall snap/real world experience, I'd buy two, test 'em and sell whatever's the slowest pair. Vice Versa. I am vendor agnostic. I honestly think the collection of various benchmark tools we have along with what the reviewers show, still don't tell the whole story. We need a non-subjective "user experience" benchmark. I think Anand tries to do that in his light/heavy workload tests, but again I don't know if those results reflect real-world usage.

As far as Anand's 2011 new tests somehow favoring the V3's - I don't think that's on purpose - some say Anand has a preference for the intel drives, if any.

The M4 128GB drives do have me very interested - especially if what they're saying - 4k pages on the smaller NAND, is true.

[SteveRo]

^^ for competitive pcm05 and pcmv it matters but yes i agree in every day use I couldn't tell a difference between most SSDs.
I can tell a difference between SSD vs acard - but thats flash vs DDR2 - probably not a valid compare.
Using two acard 9010s (4xR0) on P67 PCH is probably the hotest bootable set up but not really practical.
Edit - using acard as your os drive has other problems as well - huge cost and losing power = losing data.

[SteveRo]

^^ Mr. OneHertz - have you written a .bat to xfer files to your iodrive?
The thought was to write a little script to move all frequently accessed files to the iodrive (or ramdisk?) at start up?
Put the .bat in the startup folder?
An x58 board maxed out with DDR3 for a large triple channel ramdisk?
Ramdisk should be faster than either iodrive or acards I would think.

[Vapor]

I mean if somebody could convince me that 2 C300 256GB's in R0 would out-perform my 2 V3 240GB's in overall snap/real world experience, I'd buy two, test 'em and sell whatever's the slowest pair. Vice Versa. I am vendor agnostic. I honestly think the collection of various benchmark tools we have along with what the reviewers show, still don't tell the whole story. We need a non-subjective "user experience" benchmark. I think Anand tries to do that in his light/heavy workload tests, again I don't know if those results show in real-world testing.

IIRC, Anand's 2011 real-world tests are a 'replay' of 1-2 weeks worth of normal use from him. The difference in disk-busy time between the top disk is a matter of seconds...spread out over the course of days in the real world. So yeah, if Anand's 2011 tests are fully indicative of real-world use, we have gotten to the point where SSDs are so fast that they're just not noticeably different any longer (in real usage).

[Ao1]

I just can't understand how Anantech come up with an average QD of 6.09 for the typical workload, 3.59 for the heavy load and 7.76 for the gaming work load.

Replicating weeks of I/O activity and applying them at those QD's (and over a short duration) completely invalids the results for me in context of something that could demonstrate tangible real life performance benefit. I rarely see max QD's at those levels and avg is always 1 or a fraction above 1 for reads. Av QD writes QD's are a bit higher. Anything from 1 to 3.

Maybe he was using a floppy disk when he recorded his I/O activity.

At least in this review the guy took the time to monitor real life applications, which show hardly any difference between SSD's, conflicting completly with what the graphs from Anandtech portray. I know which set of results I have more faith in.

[bluestang]

I'm curious on what the 60GB V3 specs/performance are going to be like. I'm moving to Sandy Bridge in a week or so and will probably want to upgrade my 2x64GB Crucial M225 setup to SATAIII drive(s). Just not sure if I want to do 2x60-64GB drives in RAID 0 again or just a single 120-128GB drive. At least I've narrowed it done to Crucial (C300 or M4) or OCZ (V3)What are your guys thoughts?

[Ao1]

It's not, that's exactly what is said in the article.

Translated from french by myself (sorry for the mistakes) :

The Crucial M4 128 GB we tested combine a Marvell 88SS9174-BL02 controller, a Micron DRAM chip (on its back) and 16 Micron 29F64G08CFACB flash chips. These chips are 25nm and combine two 32 Gb dies. The page size is 4 KB, and the bloc size is 1 MB.

The Crucial M4 256 GB distinguish itself from the 128 GB version by the Flash chips, which are 29F128G08CFAAB. Their capacity is doubled from the use of two 64 Gb dies. This time the page size is 8 KB and the bloc size is 2 MB.

Can you translate/ explain a bit more by what Marc is talking about when he describes benchmark traces being content with indentifying the type of access without considering content. (Page 6)

I don't really understand what he is talking about or how big the advantage is. There is a delay whilst the data source is validated, which does not occur in a benchmark, or the trace time/ sequence allows compression to take place in the time saved by not validating (with a SF drive) ?

[alfaunits]

What takes time is sequential xfers that are constructed from multiple small xfer sizes. We are talking kB not MiB.

Even if they are at 64KB (which is a typical pre-Vista cache manager buffer size), it won't change too much. A typical copy can use async I/O, which would essentially turn the 64KB sequential transfers into a QD>1 "randoms".
Well, on an SSD, there is really no sequential after some point, since the NAND gets rearranged and the LBA sequential mapping is hardly ever physically sequential.
Non async 64KB "sequentials" would therefore be essentially random 64KB at the physical level. Or random 4KB with higher QD at physical level.

[Computurd]

Well, on an SSD, there is really no sequential after some point, since the NAND gets rearranged and the LBA sequential mapping is hardly ever physically sequential.

true, i have thought of this many times. Sprinkle in some NCQ at the OS level and you should have truly random I/O all the time when doing actual work. not benchmarking.