The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Why You Absolutely Need an SSD
Compared to mechanical hard drives, SSDs continue to be a disruptive technology. These days it’s difficult to convince folks to spend more money, but I can’t stress the difference in user experience between a mechanical HDD and a good SSD. In every major article I’ve written about SSDs I’ve provided at least one benchmark that sums up exactly why you’d want an SSD over even a RAID array of HDDs. Today’s article is no different.
The Fresh Test, as I like to call it, involves booting up your PC and timing how long it takes to run a handful of applications. I always mix up the applications and this time I’m actually going with a lighter lineup: World of Warcraft, Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Firefox 3.5.1.
Other than those three applications, the system was a clean install - I didn’t even have any anti-virus running. This is easily the best case scenario for a hard drive and on the world’s fastest desktop hard drive, a Western Digital VelociRaptor, the whole process took 31 seconds.
And on Intel’s X25-M SSD? Just 6.6 seconds.
A difference of 24 seconds hardly seems like much, until you actually think about it in terms of PC response time. We expect our computers to react immediately to input; even waiting 6.6 seconds is an eternity. Waiting 31 seconds is agony in the PC world. Worst of all? This is on a Core i7 system. To have the world’s fastest CPU and to have to wait half a minute for a couple of apps to launch is just wrong.
A Personal Anecdote on SSDs
I’m writing this page of the article on the 15-inch MacBook Pro I reviewed a couple of months ago. I’ve kept the machine stock but I’ve used it quite a bit since that review thanks to its awesome battery life. Of course, by “stock” I mean that I have yet to install an SSD.
Using the notebook is honestly disappointing. I always think something is wrong with the machine when I go to fire up Adium, Safari, Mail and Pages all at the same time to get to work. The applications take what feels like an eternity to start. While they are all launching the individual apps are generally unresponsive, even if they’ve loaded completely and I’m waiting on others. It’s just an overall miserable experience by comparison.
It’s shocking to think that until last year, this is how all of my computer usage transpired. Everything took ages to launch and become useful, particularly the first time you boot up your PC. It was that more than anything else that drove me to put my PCs to sleep rather than shut them down. It was also the pain of starting applications from scratch and OS X’s ability to get in/out of sleep quickly that made me happier using OS X than XP and later Vista.
It’s particularly interesting when you think of the ramifications of this. It’s the poor random read/write performance of the hard disk that makes some aspects of PC usage so painful. It’s the multi-minute boot times that make users more frustrated with their PCs. While the hard disk helped the PC succeed, it’s the very device that’s killing the PC in today’s instant-on, consumer electronics driven world. I challenge OEMs to stop viewing SSDs as a luxury item and to bite the bullet. Absorb the cost, work with Intel and Indilinx vendors to lower prices, offer bundles, do whatever it takes but get these drives into your systems.
I don’t know how else to say this: it’s an order of magnitude faster than a hard drive. It’s the difference between a hang glider and the space shuttle; both will fly, it’s just that one takes you to space. And I don’t care that you can buy a super fast or high flying hang glider either.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
wow I misspelled my own name :) Time to sleep for real this time :)Take care,
Anand
IntelUser2000 - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Looking at pure max TDP and idle power numbers and concluding the power consumption based on those figures are wrong.Look here: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...px?i=3403&a...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...px?i=3403&a...
Modern drives quickly reach idle even between times where the user don't even know and at "load". Faster drives will reach lower average power because it'll work faster to get to idle. This is why initial battery life tests showed X25-M with much higher active/idle power figures got better battery life than Samsungs with less active/idle power.
Max power is important, but unless you are running that app 24/7 its not real at all, especially the max power benchmarks are designed to reach close to TDP as possible.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
I agree, it's more than just max power consumption. I tried to point that out with the last paragraph on the page:"As I alluded to before, the much higher performance of these drives than a traditional hard drive means that they spend much more time at an idle power state. The Seagate Momentus 5400.6 has roughly the same power characteristics of these two drives, but they outperform the Seagate by a factor of at least 16x. In other words, a good SSD delivers an order of magnitude better performance per watt than even a very efficient hard drive."
I didn't have time to run through some notebook tests to look at impact on battery life but it's something I plan to do in the future.
Take care,
Anand
IntelUser2000 - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Thanks, people pay too much attention to just the max TDP and idle power alone. Properly done, no real apps should ever reach max TDP for 100% of the duration its running at.cristis - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
page 6: "So we’re at approximately 36 days before I exhaust one out of my ~10,000 write cycles. Multiply that out and it would take 36,000 days" --- wait, isn't that 360,000 days = 986 years?Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
woops, you're right :) Either way your flash will give out in about 10 years and perfectly wear leveled drives with no write amplification aren't possible regardless.Take care,
Anand
cdillon - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
I gather that you're saying it'll give out after 10 years because a flash cell will lose its stored charge after about 10 years, not because the write-life will be surpassed after 10 years, which doesn't seem to be the case. The 10-year charge life doesn't mean they become useless after 10 years, just that you need to refresh the data before the charge is lost. This makes flash less useful for data archival purposes, but for regular use, who doesn't re-format their system (and thus re-write 100% of the data) at least once every 10 years? :-)Zheos - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
"This makes flash less useful for data archival purposes, but for regular use, who doesn't re-format their system (and thus re-write 100% of the data) at least once every 10 years? :-)"I would like an input on that too, cuz thats a bit confusing.
GourdFreeMan - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Thermal energy (i.e. heat) allows the electrons trapped in the floating gate to overcome the potential well and escape, causing zeros (represented by a larger concentration of electrons in the floating gate) to eventually become ones (represented by a smaller concentration of electrons in the floating gate). Most SLC flash is rated at about 10 years of data retention at either 20C (68F) or 25C (77F). What Anand doesn't mention is that as a rule of thumb for every 9 degrees C (~16F) that the temperature is raised above that point, data retention lifespan is halved. (This rule of thumb only holds for human habitable temperatures... the exact relation is governed by the Arrhenius equation.)Wear leveling and error correction codes can be employed to mitigate this problem, which only gets worse as you try to store more bits per cell or use a smaller lithography process without changing materials or design.
Zheos - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Thank you GourdFreeMan for the additional input,But, if we format like every year or so , doesnt the countdown on data retention restart from 0 ? or after ~10 year (seems too be less if like you said temperature affect it) the SSD will not only fail at times but become unusable ? Or if we come to that point a format/reinstall would resolve the problem ?
I dont care about losing data stored after 10 years, what i do care is if the drive become ASSURELY unsusable after 10 year maximum. For drives that comes at a premium price, i don't like this if its the case.