The SSD Improv: Intel & Indilinx get TRIM, Kingston Brings Intel Down to $115
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 17, 2009 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Overall System Performance using PCMark Vantage
Next up is PCMark Vantage, another system-wide performance suite. For those of you who aren’t familiar with PCMark Vantage, it ends up being the most real-world-like hard drive test I can come up with. It runs things like application launches, file searches, web browsing, contacts searching, video playback, photo editing and other completely mundane but real-world tasks. I’ve described the benchmark in great detail before but if you’d like to read up on what it does in particular, take a look at Futuremark’s whitepaper on the benchmark; it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to be a member of a comprehensive storage benchmark suite. Any performance impacts here would most likely be reflected in the real world.
The overall impact of the TRIM firmware is negligable, no real improvements here - something you'll see echoed in nearly all of the PCMark results. The 40GB Kingston drive does well for its price, delivering performance similar to an Indilinx drive as it is crippled by a small amount of free space.
The memories suite includes a test involving importing pictures into Windows Photo Gallery and editing them, a fairly benign task that easily falls into the category of being very influenced by disk performance.
The TV and Movies tests focus on on video transcoding which is mostly CPU bound, but one of the tests involves Windows Media Center which tends to be disk bound.
The gaming tests are very well suited to SSDs since they spend a good portion of their time focusing on reading textures and loading level data. All of the SSDs dominate here, but as you'll see later on in my gaming tests the benefits of an SSD really vary depending on the game. Take these results as a best case scenario of what can happen, not the norm.
In the Music suite the main test is a multitasking scenario: the test simulates surfing the web in IE7, transcoding an audio file and adding music to Windows Media Player (the most disk intensive portion of the test).
The Communications suite is made up of two tests, both involving light multitasking. The first test simulates data encryption/decryption while running message rules in Windows Mail. The second test simulates web surfing (including opening/closing tabs) in IE7, data decryption and running Windows Defender.
I love PCMark's Productivity test; in this test there are four tasks going on at once, searching through Windows contacts, searching through Windows Mail, browsing multiple webpages in IE7 and loading applications. This is as real world of a scenario as you get and it happens to be representative of one of the most frustrating HDD usage models - trying to do multiple things at once. There's nothing more annoying than trying to launch a simple application while you're doing other things in the background and have the load take forever.
The final PCMark Vantage suite is HDD specific and this is where you'll see the biggest differences between the drives:
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dcljpc - Saturday, November 14, 2009 - link
On that intel firmware that provide trim support but bricked people's drives, now intel said it is a problem specific to Win7 64bit. Does this mean that if you update the firmware from within Win7 64bit there could be a problem, or does it mean even if you updated the firmware in Vista or Win7 32, and then install Win7 64 on it, it could still cause a problem? Does anyone know the answer?I just bought a X25-M G2, I plan to use it in a new computer. Can you just update the firmware on an older computer first, and then install WIn7 64bit on it?
Thanks.
jaydops - Friday, November 13, 2009 - link
I am looking to purchase a ssd for a Dell Studio 15 i7 with 4gb ddr3 1333ghz.Anand recommends Indilinx (OCZ or SuperTalent) or Intel.
1) Are all OCZ drives good or only Vertex drives? If only Vertex then those are really expensive on newegg.
2) Why was the Corsair P256 not recommended? It seems to have good numbers in the charts. And newegg has a reasonably priced 128gb version here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
3) The Dell Studio 15 has a sata connection, will that work ok with sata2 ssds?
crobb100 - Tuesday, November 10, 2009 - link
No Kingston SSD for sale at NewEgg so far. Where'd it go?dullard - Tuesday, November 10, 2009 - link
It is at Newegg. But it isn't at the MSRP.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a...SSDNow%2...
I'm considering getting it for a new Win 7 build. But are SSDs ready for prime time yet? Or should I wait a bit longer?
lordstryker - Monday, November 9, 2009 - link
I was curious about the possible setup of these Kingston drives in a Raid 0 format. If they are roughly half the performance of an intel 80GB drive, it would be reasonable to think 2x of these Kingston drives would be comparable to a single Intel 80GB drive. However, I am not familiar with TRIM support on a Raid setup. Is there any info on this?spaceB - Monday, November 9, 2009 - link
Hi all,I have a x200 Thinkpad with a SSD inside. The SSD drive is a 128GB Samsung (OEM MMCQE28G8MUP-0VAL1). I noticed that the drive becomes slower after three month of use. So I use WIN XP SP3. Is it possible to use Trim or Garbage Collection in any kind of way on this older Samsung SSD drive? The Samsung support homepage and google couldn’t answer my question.
Big thx in anvance!
GreeTz
space
maraz - Wednesday, November 4, 2009 - link
Hi,I was very interested to see results from trace-driven I/O tests. Is the AnandTech Storage Bench mentioned in this article generally available?
Best regards,
Manolis.
Steney - Monday, November 2, 2009 - link
What would the performance of two of these drives in a RAID 0 array be like? Would there a single 80GB drive for $170 that would be better?abuda - Monday, November 2, 2009 - link
just found this stuff in mwavehttp://www.mwave.com/mwave/SKUSearch_v3.asp?px=IM&...">http://www.mwave.com/mwave/SKUSearch_v3.asp?px=IM&...
INTEL 160GB SSD G2 just US 599 with free shipping
kunedog - Monday, November 2, 2009 - link
That's only $159 MORE than the predictions we got from Anand over 3 months ago:http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=36...">http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=36...
Wow, indeed.
I wish Anand would acknowledge these extremely high prices and how wrong the prices in that article were (preferably in a follow-up). Especially since he is again making statements about Newegg's possible future pricing (of the Kingston).