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
Final Words
TRIM is a huge step forward in SSD maturity and readiness for the masses. There are only so many people who have the patience to listen to a NAND flash explanation to understand why their luxury storage device gets slower the more you use it. TRIM not only simplifies the problem but it makes SSDs work the way they should. When you delete a file TRIM ensures that the file is no longer tracked by the SSD. And it just works.
The driver limitations are a bit annoying, especially given Intel knew this was coming. Difficulty in coordinating schedules is one of the downsides of having such a huge organization.
It's also ridiculous that Intel has done nothing to take care of it's original X25-M G1 customers. Those who spent over $600 on Intel's first SSD deserve to be taken care of but instead they get no TRIM support and no SSD Optimizer. Both of these are things that Indilinx has offered it's customers before Intel. Vertex owners have had a wiper tool since before Intel ever announced intentions to enable TRIM on the G2.
The write speed improvement that the Intel firmware brings to 160GB drives is nice but ultimately highlights a bigger issue: Intel's write speed is unacceptable in today's market. Back when Indilinx first arrived there was no real threat, but today Intel is facing a much more mature group of competitors. Our heavy trace benchmark is a prime example of why this is an issue. I fully expect Intel to address it with the third gen drive next year but it makes buying a drive today unnecessarily complicated.
From a compatibility standpoint, Intel has the advantage. It's just a much larger company than Indilinx and has the ability to do more compatibility/reliability testing.
The performance side is a bit more difficult to break down. The more sequential writing you do to your drive the more you'll stand to benefit from Indilinx's higher write speeds. In nearly all other situations the two controllers perform similarly or Intel is in the lead. The fact that both controllers support TRIM makes it even more difficult.
The easiest way to decide continues to be to buy the largest drive you can afford. 64GB? Indilinx. 80GB? Intel? 128GB? Indilinx and 160GB Intel. If you're buying an Indilinx drive the rate of firmware releases pretty much dictates that you'll want to buy from OCZ or SuperTalent. None of the other Indilinx manufacturers have Windows 7 TRIM support yet (Crucial has now posted a firmware update with TRIM support). The additional testing and exclusive agreements that OCZ/ST have with Indilinx provide their customers a tangible advantage in this case.
Kingston's 40GB option is super interesting. Anyone who's sold on SSDs will probably opt for a bigger drive but if you're on the fence, the Kingston solution might be for you. The write speed is disappointing but for application launches and boot time it's got the speed. If Newegg can keep these things in stock at $85 after rebate it's a gold deal. I'd prefer the price without the rebate but these things are still selling at a premium unfortunately.
Next year SSDs will get even more interesting. I attended a couple of Intel's SSD tracks at IDF this year and got a glimpse into what Intel is working on. Through TRIM and other architectural enhancements Intel is expecting to deliver much higher consistent performance on its future SSDs, regardless of how full they are. We can also expect to see a decoupling of capacity from the number of channels the controller supports; right now Intel has a couple of oddball sizes compared to the competition, but future designs will allow Intel to more closely mimic HDD capacities regardless of controller configuration.
I still firmly believe that an SSD is the single best performance improvement you can buy for your system today. Would I recommend waiting until next year to buy? This is one of the rare cases where I'd have to answer no. I made the switch last year and I wouldn't go back, it really does change the way your PC behaves.
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Voo - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
Ok I was a bit surprised and tried it myself with my 160gb Intel G2 (no firmware update yet)Copy 10gb file onto drive, MSE full scan and extracting a 4gb file with 7z while the usual stuff (FF, PS, eclipse and winamp) running in the backgorund and I got a maximum QD of under 8, which is higher than I expected it to be, but still far away from a QD of 16.
And when doing more multitasking stuff I'd probably tax the rest of the system more than the SSD so at least for my usual behavior a QD >8 is unrealistic, but I see your point.
There are probably some people who could get a QD of 10-12 in a normal workload, so that could be interesting for them :)
GullLars - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
There is a big difference between average queue and queue during operations. The IO queues are relatively low for all the background operation the OS does, and sequensial read/write, but when you do things like open administrative tools, open a program, or install something, you will se queue spikes of easily 50-60.After i commented this article i had a discussion with some other benchmarkers, and we found that normal use generates IO queue spikes almost whenever you interact with the OS. It doesn't take much effort to generate a queue above 100. Running a couple of virus scans on folders of small files while installing a program and opening a folder with lots of pictures will get you a massive queue.
NeBlackCat - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
Nice work again Anand - I just don't bother reading SSD reviews/features on other sites any more.HOWEVER...
Many people reading this will be developers wondering which controller best favours typical development activities, eg. checking out and compiling large projects. It's a hard one to guess - lots of random reading, sequential reading, random writing (temp files) and sequential writing (output files).
So how about a "typical developer" benchmark of, say, compiling the Linux kernel while concurrently encoding some H.264, grepping all the sources for a string, and watching some por..er, I mean, youtube.
Has anyone else evaluated the best SSD type for s/w development?
clarkn0va - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
Not a reply to your question, but I've taken on the habit of mounting my temp files to a ramdisk. Besides the speed improvement, this should help to reduce unnecessary write cycles to the SSD. Similarly, I run without swap (or page file), RAM being as affordable as it is.lamo - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
TRIM support aside, I wonder how would a pair of $85 Kingston drives in a RAID 0 striped array compare against a $225 X-25M dollar/performance-wise.cosminliteanu - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
So - "Your best bet is to install Windows 7 with your I/O controller in AHCI mode (for Intel chipsets)" this means you set in BIOS sata controller as AHCI not as IDE ?????Or just leave as IDE and after Win7 install, update intel storage driver as normal...? which is the best solution?
LuMax - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Can I use Intel IMSM RAID on just the data storage drives in my PC and retain TRIM functionality on the W7 Pro OS (X-25M G2) SSD?My new PC build plan was to use a single 80GB G2 for the OS and programs and two 2TB HDDs in a RAID1 array for my data/photo/video/music storage. Although I read the relevant part of this article 3 times I am still not certain if this is doable. Yes/No?
LuMax - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
I heard back from Intel today:"Thank you for contacting Intel Technical Support.
I understand your question about the Intel(R) Matrix Storage Manager and the SSD. Since the drives you will be using in RAID are non-solid state disks, and the SSD you will be using will not be part of the RAID, there should not be any problem with TRIM."
somedude1234 - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
I would not expect this to be possible. It sounds like you have 3 drives hanging off of the same SATA controller. You want 2 of them in RAID 1 using the IMSM driver, and one of them using the MS driver.In my experience it would be impossible to get Windows to load 2 different drivers for different ports on the same controller.
Even if they were physically independent but identical controllers (for example if you had 2 identical SAS cards plugged into the same system), as soon as you update the driver on one controller, a reboot results in all instances of that controller using the updated driver.
DoveOfTheSouth - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
I'd like to know this too.I'm considering a similar set-up (SSD for systems drive, RAID for data storage HDD) - seems best of both worlds.