HD Tach 3.01
MTRON 32GB MSP 7000
Western Digital Raptor 150GB
Our HD Tach test results heavily favor the MTRON unit in all aspects except the burst rates. The MTRON's sustained transfer rate of 108.5MB/sec is about 43% better than the WD Raptor drive at 75.5MB/sec. The biggest difference is the MTRON drive holds the 108MB/sec transfer rate across the entire drive while the Raptor progressively decreases to around 52MB/sec at the end of the drive. The previous MTRON STR results were 95.1MB/sec, which is about 13% slower than the new drive. The burst rates of the Raptor at 128.8MB/sec are slightly higher than the 115.7MB/sec rates on the MTRON drive, but burst rates are not nearly as large of a factor as other indicators. Access times greatly favors the MTRON drive at .1ms compared to 8.4ms on the Raptor drive.
HD Tune 2.54
MTRON 32GB MSP 7000
Western Digital Raptor 150GB
The difference is slightly lower overall with HD Tune versus HD Tach, but the story remains the same. In our HD Tune test, the Raptor's sustained transfer rate of 72.1MB/sec is around 30% lower than the MTRON MSP 7000 SSD drive at 102.8MB/sec. More importantly is the fact that the MTRON drive again holds the 102MB/sec transfer rate across the entire drive while the Raptor progressively decreases to 50.4MB/sec at the end of the drive. The previous MTRON STR results were 90.8MB/sec, which is about 12% slower than the new drive. The burst rates of the Raptor at 100.6MB/sec are about 12% better compared to the MTRON unit. Access time greatly favors the MTRON.
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DougDumitru - Monday, December 3, 2007 - link
Mtron rates their drives as >140 years @ 50GB write/day. This is 2,555,000 GB (2.5 Petabytes). At 80 MB/sec, this is 32,704,000 seconds or 378 days. So if you are writing linearly at full drive speed 24x7, it takes just over a year to kill the drive.I would be hard pressed to imagine an application that does this other than some data logging/capture specialty use. Even with an actively updated data, the drive should still last 5 years. In terms of failure modes, use Raid.
tynopik - Tuesday, December 4, 2007 - link
> In terms of failure modes, use Raid.if the failure mode is use of write cycles, all the drives in a raid are going to fail simultaneously . . .
DougDumitru - Tuesday, December 4, 2007 - link
Flash cells wear out statistically. When a chip manufacturer rates a chip, they will say something like "less than 3% of cell rows will error in fewer than 100,000 erase/write cycles". The SSDs themselves have ECC to correct small errors and extra cell rows for when the errors get too bad.This is not a case of a counter that hits 100,000 and everything dies. Different drives will last differing amounts of time, so raid should protect you. Just don't wait too long before replacing a drive.
DougDumitru - Monday, December 3, 2007 - link
A lot of people miss what is happening with Flash SSD write performance. When you do linear writes, the drives are very fast. When you do random writes, they are very very slow. How slow depends on the drive. This Mtron drive does about 125 writes/sec for "small" writes (up to about 64K blocks). This is actually very good compared with other drives. Other Flash SSDs that we have tested range from 13 to 40 writes/sec. We even tested one MLC Flash SSD that does 3.3 writes/sec (which is floppy speed).You can look at detailed benchmarks for this drive both single and Raid-5 at:
http://mtron.easyco.com/news/papers/07-12-01_mtron...">http://mtron.easyco.com/news/papers/07-12-01_mtron...
Bottom line is that, by themselves, Flash SSDs have trouble with small random writes. This in inherent in the organization of the flash cells themselves. If you want to see a "fix" for this, visit:
http://managedflash.com">http://managedflash.com
Doug Dumitru
CTO EasyCo LLC
Gary Key - Monday, December 3, 2007 - link
I know we really limited the benchmark results, but the full review will have significantly more content plus RAID results. We wanted to get the base numbers out after receiving a flood of emails about this drive series and others. Power consumption was 0.55W at idle and hit 2.92W at full load under the video streaming tests. PCMark05 total score was 15941 for the MSP7000 32GB drive, 15343 for the previous 32GB drive, and 7546 for the Raptor. We just received an updated Samsung 64GB SSD drive and will have the MTRON 64GB shortly. Also, Super Talent just sent their new high-speed 256GB SSD drive for review. I just got the final specs and it appears the Super Talent drive will offer read speeds around 60 MB/sec and write speeds around 42 MB/sec, not too bad.AnnihilatorX - Monday, December 3, 2007 - link
When will Intel fix the ICH8/9 chipset problem?I am reluctant to really buy the X38/P35 platform because of this
But I really don't have much choice if I am going for QX6600.
Gary Key - Monday, December 3, 2007 - link
I hope to have "final" answers from Intel this week, we have been on them for some time now. We thought it was drivers at first, but we have been through three driver sets without any changes to date. I just received a 945GM/ICH7 mobile platform and will see if that works differently. Another website did not have problems with this setup so we will start testing tonight with the same hardware.userfriendly - Sunday, December 9, 2007 - link
i'd like to second the question of AnnihilatorX. maybe this issue just isn't important for more than a tiny minority, true. but that doesn't help much if one belongs to that exact minority. <_<otherwise, can someone tell me why i can't just plug a penryn quadcore into an amd 790fx motherboard? (i'm only half kidding, this would be my dream team right now. alas...)
AnnihilatorX - Sunday, December 9, 2007 - link
Would you get the same problem if you buy an P35 board but use the SATA ports from a SATA PCI-E bridge chip, e.g. Marvell?jackedupandgoodtogo - Monday, December 3, 2007 - link
This SSD would be perfect as an OS/Application installation drive, while using a Raptor as the data drive. Fast read for booting and loading of apps, fast saves/writing using the Raptors as a data drive.