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
How SSDs Work
The building block of NAND flash is the N-channel MOSFET:
Each "cell" is made up of one of these transistors. In a single-level cell (SLC) flash device, one of these transistors can hold 1-bit of data. You write data to the cell by electron tunneling; apply a high enough voltage to the gate, create a powerful enough electric field, and electrons will tunnel through the oxide and into the floating gate. Remove the voltage and the electrons will remain in the floating gate. Apply the voltage across the channel instead of the gate, reverse the bias and the electrons will go in the other direction. Simply put, that's how flash works - you've got two states, 0 and 1, and the state is preserved even if the cell has no power, making it ideal for a storage device.
Programming flash is an iterative process. The controller will apply voltage to the gate (or the channel), allow some electrons to tunnel and check the threshold voltage of the cell. When the threshold voltage has reached some predetermined value, it’s now programmed and your data is stored.
MLC vs. SLC
There are two forms of NAND flash used in SSDs today: Single-Level Cell (SLC) and Multi-Level Cell (MLC). The difference between the two is the amount of data stored per cell, with SLC it's 1-bit per cell and with MLC it's 2-bits per cell. The key here is that both SLC and MLC take up the same amount of die area, so MLC effectively doubles your capacity at the same price.
Intel actually uses the same transistors for its SLC and MLC flash, the difference is how you read/write the two. With SLC there are only two voltages to worry about, since there are two states (0 or 1). With MLC, there are four states (00, 01, 10, 11) and thus it takes longer to access since you don't want to accidentally write the wrong bit of data; you've got the same min and max voltage, you simply have more graduations in between the two now:
SLC (left) vs. MLC (right)
Below is a table of some basic stats on SLC vs. MLC performance:
| SLC NAND flash | MLC NAND flash | |
| Random Read | 25 µs | 50 µs |
| Erase | 2ms per block | 2ms per block |
| Programming | 250 µs | 900 µs |
Erasing performance is the same between the two, read performance takes twice as long on MLC flash and write performance can take almost four times as long. If you've ever heard people complain about MLC write speed before, this partly why. Do keep in mind though, the numbers we're talking about here are ridiculously low - even 900 µs to write to MLC flash is much faster than writing to a mechanical hard disk.
The biggest advantage of SLC ends up not being performance, but lifespan. To understand how flash wears, we first need to look at how it's organized in a storage device.
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mindless1 - Thursday, September 11, 2008 - link
Sometimes the cure is worse than the problem.Gannon - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
Don't worry derek I still heart you guys! :PHere's some cool software to check out (they have free trial version)
http://www.whitesmoke.com/landing_flash/free_hotfo...">http://www.whitesmoke.com/landing_flash...otforwor...
Maybe it will help escape complaints from the grammar nazi's, I think a lot of grammar is BS anyway. Language evolves constantly. It's a flexible tool to communicate.
Nihility - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
An excellent review. The benchmark results were always confusing in the past. No one would try to explain why an SSD with seemingly superior specs can't outperform a 7200 drive in media test. Thanks for putting the time in to resolve this issue.As for buying a drive like that, the price is still too steep for me to consider and you definitely made it clear that buying a jmicro SSD is out of the question.
As for further testing, I'm very interested in seeing how a good SSD performs as an external drive over USB. The robustness and sturdiness of the drive is very important for something you lug around. We all know how bad bandwidth is over USB but I wonder how the latency will fair.
Keep up the good work.
kmmatney - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
One of the other reviews I read said this SSD's controller will learn hard drive usage patterns, and get faster over time. Any tests of this feature?leexgx - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
not sure how thay can lerni did wunder why thay never put any DRAM buffer on SSD drives as i was expecting SSD to suffer badly from lack of buffer any MLC drives basicly suck (16kb buffer per flash chip) unless its the intel MLC drive lol or an SLC drive seem mostly ok, but an intel SLC going to rock when thay get tested
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
The Intel drive will learn hard drive usage patterns however it does so over an extremely long period of time, not something I could develop a test for in my time with the drive.Take care,
Anand
whatthehey - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
...that doesn't think too much about HDD performance, particularly when we're talking about insane prices. Sure, rebooting and reloading all of your apps will feel much faster. Personally, when I reboot I walk into the kitchen or bathroom, walk back a few minutes later, and I don't notice the delays. Not to mention, I only reboot about once a month (usually when nVidia releases a new driver that I need to install).Another major problem I have is the tests as an indication of the "real world". Take the whole antivirus thing. I hate AV software and software firewalls, which is why I don't use Norton, AVG, Avast, McAfee or any other product that kills performance, sucks up memory, and only prevents virii/trojans after an update. AV software is just a BS excuse to pay a $60/year subscription and get nags every time your subscription expires. So there's on "real" scenario I don't ever encounter.
Archive extraction can be pretty disk intensive as well, but how often do you need to extract a 5GB archive? Okay, so let's say you're a pirate and you do that daily... great. Now you can extract faster, but you have an SSD that can only hold 14 or so large archives. It's a nice illustration of SSDs being faster, but it's completely impractical. I have a 1TB drive just for all the movies, images, music, and disc images I have floating around.
The tests show that SSDs can help a lot, but I for one use capacity far more. Between several games, my standard apps, and Vista I think I would use most of the 80GB. Then I think of the price and I could grab a couple VelociRaptors or even four 1TB Samsung F1 drives. I'll be truly impressed when I can get at least 320GB of SSD for less than $200. Actually, it's more like I want a good SSD with a reasonable capacity for under $100. Until then I'll just stick with my slower drives and avoid worst-case situations where HDD performance is a problem as much as possible.
The article was good, and I appreciate the info on the MLC issues with JMicron. That confirms my suspicion that inexpensive flash drives are worse than standard mechanical drives. Intel has addressed the problem, but price is now back to where we were last year it seems. I guess the real problem is that I'm just not enough of an "enthusiast" to spend this much money on 80GB of storage... not counting stuff like that old 4GB hard drive back in the day that set me back over $200. Give it a few more cycles and I think I'll be ready for SSDs.
PS - Also, who cares about $600 CPUs when you can buy $200 CPUs and overclock to higher performance levels? I don't think we'll ever see overclocked SSDs or HDDs.
DerekWilson - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
i wouldn't be so sure about not seeing overclocked SSD ...as this article points out, intel puts a focus on reliability ... but to do so they do sacrifice performance. the voltage applied to the transistors to store data is calibrated to write the cells quickly while maintaining a good life span. a higher voltage could be applied that would allow the cells to be written faster but would reduce the number of writes that a cell could handle.
if intel says 100gb a day for 5 years ... i don't need that by a long shot. i would be very willing to sacrifice a lot of that for more speed.
i actually spoke with intel about the possibility of overclocking their ssd drives at idf -- it is something that could be done as it is controlled via the firmware of the drive. if intel doesn't convolute their firmware too much or if they allow enthusiasts to have the necessary control over settings at that level we could very well see overclocked SSDs ...
which would be very interesting indeed.
shabby - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
I was so close in buying one of those ocz drives, in fact the reason i didnt buy it was because it was a special order that took 2 weeks.Excellent write up, especially about the jmicron/mlc "glitch".
OCedHrt - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
Any reason why the WD GP drive does so well in the multitasking test? Even better than the VelociRaptor?