64GB SSD on the Desktop: Samsung and OCZ go mainstream
by Gary Key on May 15, 2008 11:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Test Setup
| Standard Test
Bed Performance Test Configuration |
|
| Processor | Phenom 9850BE |
| RAM | GSkill PC2-8500 (2x2GB) - 4GB |
| OS Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar SE16 640GB SATA 3Gb/s |
| System Platform Drivers | ATI - 8.4 |
| Video Cards | MSI HD 3870x2 |
| Video Drivers | ATI - 8.4 |
| CPU Cooling | Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme |
| Power Supply | Corsair CMPSU-520HX |
| Optical Drive | LG GGCH20L - Blu-ray / HD-DVD Combo |
| Case | Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 |
| Motherboards | MSI K9A2 Platinum |
| Operating System | Windows Vista-64 Ultimate SP1 |
| . | |
DVNation provided the latest Memoright MR25.2-032S GT drive for comparison in our HD Tune tests. This drive features 120/120 MB/s read/write specifications and with a total of eight of these drives on-hand, we will have a special RAID performance article shortly. We will also update this article with results from this drive in the near future; in the meantime, we are using the Mtron 32GB SSD for application benchmark comparisons as it features specifications near the Samsung/OCZ offerings.
Our testbed uses an MSI HD 3870 video card to ensure that our graphics benchmarks are not GPU bound. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 at High Quality settings. All of our tests run in an enclosed case with a dual optical/hard drive setup to reflect a moderately loaded system platform. We fully patch the OS and load a clean drive image for each platform in order to make sure that driver conflicts are minimal.
We format before each test run and complete five tests on each drive in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark results. We remove the high and low scores and report the remaining score. The Vista swap file is set to a static 2048MB and we clear the prefetch folder after each benchmark.
Software Test Suite
With the variety of disk drive benchmarks available, we need a means of comparing the true performance of the hard drives in real world applications. Our abbreviated benchmark suite for today's article will include:
- HD
Tune
- Thermals
- WinRAR
- Nero Recode
- Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
- Crysis
- PCMark Vantage
Our benchmark suite is suited for desktop applications. Our next installment will feature a notebook-oriented suite.
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38 Comments
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Ender17 - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link
I'm not surprised. The 334 MB platter drives are fast.Just look at this review of the Samsung F1
http://www.storagereview.com/samsungs_spinpoint_f1...">http://www.storagereview.com/samsungs_spinpoint_f1...
Beats the old ADFD Raptors across the board. And I don't know why anyone expects the Seagate drives to be fast, they're consistently at the bottom in performance.
Griswold - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link
Why? It has the same platter density.Noya - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link
Yes, and I'm using my $59 WD 640gb just for games (the first 150gb of it anyway) and the load time is very quick compared to my old 250gb 7200.8 sata.PlasmaBomb - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link
Thats probably because your old drive was nearly full and speed drops off towards the inside of the platter.semo - Saturday, May 17, 2008 - link
aren't new data stored on the inside tracks of the platter and then move outwards?Zefram0911 - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link
Is anyone disappointed in the load times for games? Only beats my old raptors by 3-5 seconds.Calin - Tuesday, May 20, 2008 - link
Load time for game levels is mostly sequential - I suppose game developers take pains in having the load level as a big sequential read (in which case solid state drives have no advantage). I am surprised about the file compression tests (which have reads and writes from different areas of the disk)retrospooty - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link
"Is anyone disappointed in the load times for games? Only beats my old raptors by 3-5 seconds."Ya, I have to wonder what the various gaming tests like "Vantage HDD Gaming" are measuring. SSD's consistantly blow HDD's out of the water scoring 300 to 500% higher on those tests (Gary's article is consistent with others I have seen)... Then real world game load and level load times are only like 5% higher.
What gives?
lemonadesoda - Wednesday, May 21, 2008 - link
It's a very easy answer: file compression. The data files (e.g. maps and textures) on disk require a lot of CPU processing before they are "ready to play".A trick used in the days of Quake engines was to unzip the .pk3 files. Then delete the .pk3. This improved load times enormously.
Perhaps game designers should have an install option to "full unzip game asset data on install". It would require a lot more HDD space. But load times would shrink.
JarredWalton - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link
It's the nature of the benchmark: access a large amount of data in a fairly random fashion and don't do ANY processing of the data, and you end up with the theoretical performance of the hard drive. That's pretty much what IPEAK-based testing accomplishes.Games have been mostly bottlenecked by CPUs, GPUs, and RAM for a long time - load times with 2GB RAM are substantially faster than with 1GB of RAM, and even 4GB of RAM can show some speedup in certain newer games. The reason for the CPU bottleneck on level loads is that most games compress data in order to conserve space; decompressing all the textures and models and such takes a fair amount of CPU power, to the point where the hard drives probably only need to sustain around 15-25MB/s.