Intel X25-M SSD: Intel Delivers One of the World's Fastest Drives
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 8, 2008 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Application Loading Performance
You know what I hate about rebooting my machine? Starting all of my applications back up as soon as it boots, the OS is always crunching away at my disk long after I've hit my desktop and it takes forever to launch my mail application, IM client and start a web browser. These aren't complex requests, but they take forever on a conventional hard disk.
I ran a quick test to illustrate the point. I took my test image and booted it, as soon as I got a cursor in Vista I launched Adobe Photoshop CS3, PCMark Vantage, Google Chrome and Norton AntiVirus 2008. I timed how long it took for all four applications to come up. Note that this is actually a best case scenario, since my testbed image is very clean with a minimal number of applications installed. As you fill up your disk with more applications and files the disparity grows. Remember that HDD performance decreases as your drive fills up, SSD performance doesn't.
| Launch: Photoshop, Vantage, Chrome & NAV | |
| Intel X25-M (Intel, MLC) | 7 seconds |
| Western Digital Green 1TB | 15.6 seconds |
| Western Digital VelociRaptor | 12 seconds |
The differences in time here aren't huge on paper, but they are tremendous when you're actually using the machine. The funny thing about an SSD is you don't always appreciate the benefit when you've got it, but go back to a mechanical disk and it'll feel like something is wrong with your machine. The difference is noticeable.
Now let's look at individual application performance:
Google Chrome launches quickly on pretty much anything, the difference between SSDs is negligible but there is a slightly noticeable difference between running a simple, quick loading app on a HDD vs. a SSD. Again, the differences are small, but noticeable. On an SSD the application launches are instantaneous, on a HDD you can "feel" the load.
PowerPoint is similar to Chrome, but the application does take longer to load on mechanical disks. Again, the differences are noticeable - the X25-M will load PowerPoint in half the time of the VelociRaptor. You can argue that the price isn't worth it, but the point is that the load completes much faster...let's look at what happens when we're loading an application that does take a long time to start.
Photoshop takes its sweet time loading on a notebook drive, over 10 seconds on the Momentus 7200.2:
Even on the VelociRaptor it's a 6+ second ordeal. On the X25-M and all of the other SSDs, we're talking less than 3 seconds (the X25-M is naturally the fastest at 2.3 seconds).
My rule of thumb has always been that a good SSD will cut application launch times in half compared to a desktop hard drive, so if you have a particularly beefy application that takes a good while to load, expect that time to go down considerably. Remember, these are best case scenarios, in a little bit I'll start multitasking and then we'll separate the men from the boys.
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aeternitas - Thursday, September 11, 2008 - link
Converting all your DVDs to divx is a silly idea. Why would you want to lose dynamic range and overall quality (no matter the settings) for a smaller movie size when 1TB costs 130$?SSD = Preformance (when done right)
HHD = Storage.
johncl - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
Noise isnt a big problem on a 3.5" in a media pc as the other poster states. But heat can be a problem, especially if you plan on passively cool everything else in the computer. An SSD will solve both problems, but only if the SSD is the only disk in the system. From what I understand you want to have both in yours which makes sense since movies/music occupy a lot of space. In that case you will not experience any improved performance since the media would have to be read off the mechanical drive anyway.Your best bet would be to build yourself a small media server and put all noisy hot mechanical disks in that and use small SSDs on your media pc (and indeed any other pc). That way you get the best of both worlds, fast response on application startup/OS boot, silent and no heat - as well as a library of media. You would probably have to use a media frontend that caches information about all media on your server though so it doesnt have to wait on server harddisk spinup etc for every time you browse your media. Perhaps Vista Media Center already does this?
mindless1 - Thursday, September 11, 2008 - link
An SSD will not "solve" a heat problem. The hard drive adds only a small % of heat to a system and being lower heat density it has one of the less difficult requirements for cooling.Speed of the HTPC shouldn't be an issue, unlike a highly mixed use desktop scenario all one needs is to use stable apps without memory leaks then they can hibernate to get rid of the most significant boot-time waiting. Running the HTPC itself the OS performance difference would be trivial and the bitrate for the videos is easily exceeding by either storage type or an uncongested LAN.
piroroadkill - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
To be honest most decent HDDs don't make significant noise anyway, even further quelled by grommets or suspending the drive.Also, the reads will occur on the drive you're reading the movie from - so if you plan to use an external HDD as the source, this will make no difference whatsoever.
dickeywang - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
Imaging you have a 80GB SSD, with 75GB been already occupied by some existing data (OS, installed software, etc), so you only have 10GB space left, now lets say you write and then erase 100GB/day on this SSD, shouldn't the 100GB/day data all be written on the 5GB space? So each cell would be written 100GB/5GB=20cycle/day, so you will reach the 10000cycle/cell limit within less than 18months.Can someone tell me if the analysis above is correct? I guess when they say "100GB/day for 5 years", they should really take into account how much storage space that is un-occupied on the SSD, right?
johncl - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
A good wear leveling algorithm can move about "static" blocks so that their cells are also available for wear. I do not know if the current implementations use this though. Anyone know this?Lux88 - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
I remember reading a number of SSD reviews, but it's first time I read about the pauses. Indeed, quick search revealed 5 articles, starting from May 2007, but the conclusions only mentioned a high price and a small capacity as drawbacks. Nothing about freezing nor pauses. Some of these 5 probably were SCL-drives, some MLC.It's funny how a simple multitasking test can reveal an Achille's heel of large group of products, just when a product appears that doesn't suffer from this particular drawback.
Overall good article and good info. So good that all the previous articles on the matter of SSDs on this site seem bad in comparison. Thanks for the info anyway, better late than never ;).
eva2000 - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
If the OCZ Core controller does indeed have 16KB on chip cache for read/writes maybe that's the problem as OCZ Core pdf states for their SSD"each page contains 4 Kbytes of data, however, because of the parallelism at the back end of the controller, every access includes simultaneous opening of 16 pages for a total accessible data contingent of 64 Kbytes"
????
araczynski - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
looks quite promising. maybe within about 2 years they'll get the bugs worked out, a more realistic price, and an extended life span, and i'll replace my regular drives.yyrkoon - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
"No one really paid much attention to Intel getting into the SSD (Solid State Disk) business. We all heard the announcements, we heard the claims of amazing performance, but I didn't really believe it. After all, it was just a matter of hooking up a bunch of flash chips to a controller and putting them in a drive enclosure, right? "You mean you did not pay attention? I know I did, because Intel has always been serious with things of this nature. That and they are partnered with Crucial(Micron) right ?. . . Now if this was some attempt at sarcasm, or a joke . . .
Seriously, and I mean VERY seriously, I was excited when Anandtech 'reported' that Intel/Micron were going to get into the SSD market. After all affordable SSDs are very desirable, never mind affordable/very good performing SSDs. That, and I knew if Intel got into the market, that we would not have these half-fast implementations that we're seeing now from these so called 'SSD manufactures'. Well, even Intel is not impervious to screw ups, but they usually learn by their mistakes quickly, and correct them. Micron (most notably Crucial) from my experience does not like to be anything but the best in what they do, so to me this seemed like a perfect team, in a perfect market. Does this mean I think Micron is the best ? Not necessarily. Lets me just say that after years of dealing with Crucial, I have a very high opinion of Crucial/Micron.
"What can we conclude here? SSDs can be good for gaming, but they aren't guaranteed to offer more performance than a good HDD; and Intel's X25-M continues to dominate the charts."
Are we reading the same charts ? These words coming from the mouth of someone who sometimes mentions even the most minuscule performance difference as being a 'clear winner' ? Regardless, I think it *is* clear to anyone willing to pay attention to the charts that the Intel SSD "dominates". Now whether the cost of admission is worth this performance gain is another story altogether. I was slightly surprised to see a performance gain in FPS just by changing HDDS, and to be honest I will remain skeptical. I suppose that some data that *could* effect FPS performance could be pulled down while the main game loop is running.
Either way, this is a good article, and there was more than enough information here for me(a technology junky). Now lets hope that Intel lowers the cost of these drives to a more reasonable price(sooner rather than later). The current price arrangement kind of reminds me of CD burner prices years ago.