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
Final Words
My recommendation still stands: the Intel X25-M is by far the cream of the crop of the desktop SSD world. The Indilinx based drives have the potential to be good, lower cost alternatives to the Intel drive but you still have to approach them with caution. While the OCZ Vertex drive worked fine in my tests and on my testbed, this is a brand new drive with a controller from a company without a proven track record.
In the coming weeks I will be looking at the latest updates to Samsung’s MLC controller. While I haven’t been terribly impressed with the performance of Samsung drives thus far, they are at least reliable and compatible.
While I’ve heard that the JMicron based drives are no longer selling very well, it looks like at least a few manufacturers are going to be using the JMF602B controllers to deliver 512GB SSDs in the coming months. Buyer beware.
I will say this: outside of Intel, Indilinx appears to know what is important when it comes to SSD performance. With more companies releasing drives based on the Barefoot controller, we should hopefully see any compatibility problems get sorted out faster.
There is some even better news that has surfaced since last week. If the 1275 revision ends up being problem-free, it does deliver more than 3x the random-write performance of the Vertex I first previewed and a more than noticeable 10% boost in application performance. That’s not enough to dethrone Intel, but it is more than enough to make the Vertex even more desirable.
The gotcha still applies: this is the first version of an Indilinx controller we’ve seen in the desktop market. Compatibility and longevity have yet to be proven; so far my experience has been positive but that’s merely one datapoint. We have a long way to go my friends.
I’ll keep you posted.
...and Thanks
I spent a few hours last weekend responding to every single email I received about The SSD Anthology. I've got some recent ones that came in while I was at GDC that I still need to get to. For the first year or so of AnandTech I responded to every single email; it didn’t take too long for me to start getting a few hundred a day and for me to have to curb that a bit in order to actually get work done.
The outpouring of support and appreciation in response to my latest article was too good for me not to respond to every single person. To those of you who wrote me, commented, or just took the time to read the article - thank you.
Your words and support are what inspire me to, even today almost 12 years since I started AnandTech, continue to work on things like The SSD Anthology or The RV770 Story. Thank you.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
73 Comments
View All Comments
The0ne - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
imo, flash memory is going to be pretty big this year and the coming years. I'm already anticipating very high capacity flash memory since the technology is already there to push it up to 2TB. It's just a matter of time, cost and market to be able to get to those levels. As for SSD I think it's picking up but not as quickly as most had hoped for, myself included. And again, IMO, I think SSD technology is still in the infant stages where there are still lots of improvements to be made. Speed (write/read) and capacities are the two major ones of course.iwod - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
It seems Samsung's Controller wont be that good at all. At least from the look of it, it will be worst then Vertex's one.Which is strange since they are the largest Flash manufacture in the world. Does it make sense to develop the best SSD conrtoller to improve Flash sales?
siuba - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
it seems slow peroformance on intel x25-m, i can get 38xxx PCMark Vantage HDD Score after HDD Erase, but the overall i can say vertex can outperformance x25-mduploxxx - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
2 very nice articles regarding ssd, although i am not so convinced what to buy, ocz or intel one, since both have similar performance in real world apps i believe it is more a price discussion.the one thing i miss in both reviews, is the failure rates, the burn in rate and the way they prevent the burn in by more capacity then rated, write, mixture, etc.....
Afterall that is one of the main reason why many large storage vendors are still offering this solution as a second line-up (except for the prcie/gb offcourse and the issue that few of those disks kill there global controller performance)
any news on that part and new enhancements in the future.
Denithor - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
Page 3 - midway down the page - you refer to 'firmware 0112' - should be 0122 (several instances in one paragraph).andreschmidt - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
Just as I were on the fence to try out the Intel X25-M I hear rumblings of their Solid State Drive roadmap.Would be a real shame to buy the relatively pricey X25-M 80GB ($481 in Denmark) only to see it replaced in the next month or two by an even better product by Intel.
Good follow-up article though.
7Enigma - Wednesday, April 1, 2009 - link
With this latest firmware update I would not be pulling the trigger on the Intel drive. Unless there are some serious defects with the latest Vertex firmware, 2 drives in RAID0 have to be superior in performance, not to mention the extra capacity.I would definitely wait, but not for the Intel drive, but rather for the confirmation the latest firmware for the Vertex is solid.
strikeback03 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Dunno, that difference in random writes (1st graph page 3) seems more than RAID would help. Combine that with the face that I have never had a good experience with onboard RAID and never seen it make a large difference in real-life timing, if Intel dropped their price to something closer to the OCZ I'd rather stich to a single drive (though the fact that Intel doesn't really have a drive capacity that suits my needs well doesn't help either).IntelUser2000 - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
It wouldn't be 1-2 months for the next generation Intel SSD drives. The previous SSD roadmaps indicate the 34nm SSDs at Q4 of this year. We might see the rumored 120MB/s firmware for X25-M though. Whether it can be updated to support the older firmware drives is another question.IntelUser2000 - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
Ehem, 120MB/s writes.