The SSD Update: Vertex Gets Faster, New Indilinx Drives and Intel/MacBook Problems Resolved
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Real World Sanity Check
I wouldn’t dream of just relying on iometer tests to make sure that the new firmware actually made things faster - it’s far too easy to optimize for just a couple of tests. I spot checked the Vertex’s performance with the 1275 firmware using a few application launch benchmarks:
The Fresh Test is the 3-application launch benchmark I used in the original review. For those who don’t remember, I fired the testbed up and immediately upon hitting the Windows desktop I launched three applications (Photoshop CS4, Pinnacle Studio 12 and IE7). Pinnacle also had a large project to load on top of all of that. I reported the time it took to load all three applications.
As you can see, performance is about the same between 0112 and 1275. So far, so good.
I ran a couple of application launch tests and the 1275 firmware performed similarly to the original:
I used PCMark Vantage as another spot-check for performance. While application launch tests are mostly random read benchmarks, Vantage stresses both reads and writes - the latter showing a large improvement on the new firmware:
Vantage showed a close to 10% improvement in overall performance, and 23% when we’re just looking at the synthetic HDD benchmarks. Surely the performance increases are all due to the Vertex’s improved write speeds; in some scenarios the gains are large enough to be noticeable in normal use of your machine.
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AtenRa - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
Intel X25-M 80GB $4.29OCZ Vertex 120GB $3.49
OCZ Vertex is 120GB not 80GB ;)
strikeback03 - Tuesday, March 31, 2009 - link
Also not sure where those prices came from, as cheapest PriceGrabber finds the X25-M 80GB is $359, for $4.49/GB. The Vertex 120GB seems to be the best deal at the moment, at $2.91/GB before rebate, $2.66/GB after.nubie - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
Nice, these Vertex drives are looking even hotter :)That Super Talent drive is $108 on Newegg after a mail-in-rebate of $20, if you try to keep your main drive/partition under 30GB it might be the perfect way to speed up your machine.
Keeping media off of the main drive it should be simple to stay under 30GB, even putting games on a different (platter) drive you should see a much faster computing experience.
deputc26 - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
Anand your SSD coverage has been second to none. I trust your reviews more than anyone elses on the web but it sure would be nice to see real-world power consumption figures for SSDs as this is an important factor in notebooks._Nate
gwolfman - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
Great followup to the amazing SSD Anthology article. You win in my book.turrican2097 - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
I wonder if those JMicrons were low-cost for very specific scenarios, firmware and the like. And then it was the SSD manufacturer that cheaped out.I wouldn't blame JMicron without investigating
strikeback03 - Tuesday, March 31, 2009 - link
They probably are OK for some scenarios, but you can still blame the companies for using them in a manner they are not really fit for. If some company started selling 15"+ laptops for several hundred dollars using Atom processors, you wouldn't blame Intel for making the Atom, but the company for misusing it.Mumrik - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
Page 3: "The Intel drive can still crunch through over 3.5x the number of IOs per second as the Vertex, but it also costs nearly 2x per GB"Not true at all according to page 2 where price/GB is 4.29 for Intel and 3.49 for OCZ. That means that the Intel drive costs 23% more than the OCZ - nowhere near 2x.
sideral - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
Anand,Unfortunately I had not read about the issue when I read you fantastic article on the Vertex, which made me buy a couple of X-25Ms for my machine.
I contacted Intel through support right now after reading they might have a fix for the issue the drive has under Bootcamp on one of the new Macs with nVidia chipsets. They aren't answering (yet), do you have some color on the fix though ?
inolvidable - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
I'm following ssd's progression throught your articles. I think they're the next big evolution in computer performance so I have much interest on them