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• SSD Summer Slam: 12 New 2.5" And 1.8" Drives Rounded-Up

  Hardly a week goes by in which we don’t receive information or updates about solid state drives (SSDs). These flash-based storage alternatives were introduced in 2006 when Samsung released a 32GB prototype that used UltraATA/66. The first drives available at retail were easily capable of outperforming hard drives when it came to I/O performance, but not all delivered greater throughput. Overall, first- and second-generation flash SSDs simply weren’t as efficient as promised. In addition, processing power seems necessary to reach maximum SSD performance, and all SSDs have demonstrated negative performance impacts over time due to write amplification, wear leveling algorithms, and the fact that flash memory cannot just be overwritten. It has to be read, erased, and rewritten. Older SSDs or those with older firmware are still susceptible to these problems. It wasn’t until late 2008, when drives arrived with built-in cache to sail around these issues, that we saw substantial progress. Today, key vendors are assidious about providing firmware updates every few weeks, so it was time for us to collect a dozen new drives and put them to the test. All have been added to our SSD Charts for easy comparison, as well. Why SSDs? Regular readers have probably visited this question several times already, but it’s important to point out that the future of fast storage solutions for your operating system does not lie with magnetic hard drives. System storage will increasingly be based on non-volatile silicon technology, such as flash memory, for speed and efficiency reasons. Hard drives will be around for many years to come, but they’ll increasingly be used for longer-term storage and archiving because they suffer from rather long latencies due to necessary head repositioning from one track to another (seek time) and rotational latency. SSDs are capable of providing much quicker random access. While hard drives require between 4 and 20 ms for average access operations, SSDs run between 0.05 ms and 2 ms in worst-case write access scenarios. Depending on the SSD model and firmware focus (desktop versus enterprise workloads), the resulting I/O performance can be up to 50 times faster than on hard drives. Finally, SSDs deliver throughput of up to 240 MB/s, while even the fastest enterprise hard drives are still limited to a bit more than 200 MB/s (Seagate's Cheetah 15K.7). Yet, it has to be said that hard drives are still much more reliable in delivering consistent and reproducable performance. Trends and Capacities While Western Digital has already announced the first 2.5” mobile hard drives with a 1TB capacity (12.5 mm z-height), SSDs are still limited to a maximum of 256GB in the same form factor (although Intel is expected to start shipping 320GB versions of its X25 drives soon). In contrast, even regular 2.5” mobile hard drives (9.5 mm z-height) deliver twice the capacity of the largest SSDs. More significantly, 500GB notebook drives are affordable at prices between $80 and $120. You can get an SSD drive for about the same price, but then your capacity will most likely not exceed 32GB (for example, the OCZ Vertex 30GB) or you might be stuck with outdated technology (PQI, Transcend, Crucial 32GB). Ultimately, with SSD, you’re buying 5% to 15% of a hard drive’s capacity at the same price, or you’ll pay up to $800 if you want 256GB. The Candidates We received several new SSDs between July and mid-August: A-Data’s 128GB S592 drive (Indilinx controller, MLC flash); two models from a Chinese vendor called Asax (1.8” and 2.5”, MLC flash); Cavalry’s SSD 32GB Pelican (JMicron JMF602); Corsair’s P256 (based on the Samsung PB22-J); the new Crucial M225 series (Indilinx, MLC); Intel’s new 34nm X25-M at 160GB; the OCZ Summit, Vertex and Vertex Turbo (Samsung, Indilinx); and lastly the Super Talent's UltraDrive ME (Indilinx). See more products Super Talent UltraDrive ME 32GB Solid... Newegg.com $119.00 SuperMediaStore.com $179.99

• Intel's X25-M Solid State Drive Reviewed

  Looking back at recent developments in the flash solid state drive (SSD) market, we could tell that it was only a matter of time until Intel jumped in feet-first. Flash-based hard drives are about to assail the hard drive market from the very high end, where conventional hard drives are being outperformed by flash products, and from the low end, where cost and low power consumption count most. However, the mainstream has remained largely ignored, due to insufficient capacity, the intolerable cost of flash SSDs, and shortcomings, such as the absence of the power savings promised by many flash SSD makers. Being a true flash memory vendor—as opposed to so many others out there—Intel has the advantage of being able to design and refine its own product. And that’s what it has done. The X25-M is a multi-level cell (MLC) flash based drive that is capable of competing with the best single-level cell (SLC) drives on the market. Flash SSD Facts and Overview A solid-state drive means that the unit doesn’t include any moving parts as conventional hard drives do. As a result, flash SSDs are robust and potentially much more efficient. They’re also capable of providing almost instant access to data, while hard drives have to spend time moving arms and spinning disks to access individual blocks. We looked at the first flash-based SSD by Samsung exactly two years ago. It reached the 50 MB/s transfer speed that was offered by comparable 2.5” drives at that time, but it required half the power to operate. The first retail products appeared a year later from Sandisk, Samsung and Ridata, and others followed a few months later, offering nice performance and attractive efficiency. But they still did not truly beat the magnetic hard drive. M-Tron was the first company to ship a flash SSD that is actually capable of outperforming a hard drive very clearly. MemoRight followed up with increased performance, clearly positioning high-end flash SSDs to replace enterprise hard drives, but we found that most of the flash-based SSDs, despite being faster than hard drives, still could not provide improved energy efficiency (with a few exceptions). For us this is a huge issue, as everyone speaks about power savings, which, in fact often weren’t there. Our last article, which compared 14 flash SSD products, only recommends the latest offering by Samsung (also sold by OCZ), which combines impressive performance with excellent efficiency. The cost issue, however, has remained: good flash SSDs are expensive, to the point of being unaffordable to mainstream buyers. The Intel Promise: 175x Better Disk Performance Back at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco last August, Intel provided an insight into its flash SSD family, and spelled out the main performance points. One of the claims was a 175x performance boost over hard drives, which have only shown incremental performance increases over the last 10 years. This reflects our findings in the article Capacities Outran Performance, which we released almost two years ago. Some of you may already know the key data from various news and announcements: Intel intends to reach 250 MB/s read speed at 0.085 ms access time and revolutionary lower power consumption. This clearly is a challenge to the big guys in the flash market, namely Samsung, Toshiba and Hynix. Intel, which takes the fifth position behind its joint-venture partner Micron, obviously wants to change the balance of power by entering the storage business. Others, such as Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital, are certainly watching closely. Let’s look at Intel’s first shake up of this competitive market.

• Our MacBook shipped with the Toshiba MK1653GSX SATA-II 160GB drive. MacBook 2.4 GHz machines with 250 GB also ship with Toshiba HDDs.  These drives have some of the highest areal densities per platter (254 gigabits per square inch). The 160 GB drive is a single platter design with two data heads. Average seek time is 12 ms with a track-to-track of 2 ms to a maximum of 22 ms seek. Seeks require 2.2 watts, read/write eats up 1.9 watts, while idle power consumption is 0.85 watts. MTTF is a disappointing 300,000 hours. We also tested a MacBook that shipped with a Fujitsu MHZ2160BH SATA-II 160 GB drive. Track to track time is a faster at 1.5 ms and idle power consumption is better at 0.6 watts. Read/write is slightly worse at 2.1 watts. Seek power consumption is not reported. MTBF is also a disappointing 300,000 hours. The unibody MacBook Pro ships with a different 5,400 rpm drive. We’ve seen MBP’s shipped with Hitachi Travelstar 5K320 drives (HTS543232L9SA02). While this specific model is not listed in Hitachi’s product documentation, the “SA0” designation typically refers to SATA 1.5 Gb/s designs as opposed to SATA 3.0Gb/s. This only makes a difference when transferring data from the cache to the host as 5,400 rpm notebook drives are unable to saturate a SATA 1.5 Gb/s connection. In theory, SATA 1.5 Gb/s connections require less power than SATA 3 Gb/s connections. Average seek time is also 12 ms, but the track-to-track time of 1 ms and a maximum full stroke of 20 ms is slightly faster. Seeks require 2.2 W, read/write is superior at 1.8 W, and active idle consumption is 0.8W. MTBF is not disclosed. In general, these are run-of-the-mill notebook HDDs and we recommend upgrading to aftermarket HDDs. Time Machine makes it extremely straightforward to migrate your computer from one HDD to another (provided that you have an external drive). One good choice is the Seagate Momentus 7200.4. Not only is this a 7,200 rpm drive for added performance, but power consumption is improved to 1.554 W for seeks and 0.67 W at idle. MTBF is 500,000 hours. The Seagate drive offers a 5 year warranty as opposed to the 3 year of the Toshiba, Fujitsu or Hitachi drives that ship with the MacBook and MacBook Pro. Solid State Storage For our setup, we elected to go with solid state drives. SSDs are available in two formats: SLC and MLC. SLC is more expensive but offers added reliability and performance. MLC allows higher density memory chips to be produced, resulting in higher capacity drives at relatively affordable prices. Many of the early budget MLC solid state drives have been reported to have poor performance with small files (“stuttering”). The newer MLC drives that ship from Apple directly (manufactured by Samsung), the Intel X-25M, and the OCZ Vertex SSD line are all expected to have good performance because they use a different memory controller. We elected to go with the OCZ SATA-II 64 GB SSD. Based upon Samsung’s SLC SSD technology, the OCZ solid state drive features a flagship 2,000,000 hours MTBF. In addition to the added performance and reliability that solid state drives can offer, the OCZ drive also adds considerable performance benefits over the standard 5,400 rpm hard drives. Power consumption during read/writes is just 0.5 W and 0.35 W with an idle of 0.2 W.The Intel X-25E is expected to offer the same level of reliability as the OCZ drive (2M hours MTBF) with even greater performance. The enthusiast-priced Vertex SSD drives from OCZ have an MTBF of 1,500,000 hours and use a new memory controller which is supposed to prevent the stuttering that has plagued the other budget drives. The Intel X-25M has an MTBF of 1,200,000 hours. The Samsung MLC drives available in 128 GB capacities shipping in current MacBooks have an MTBF of 1,000,000 hours. Going to SSD halved our boot times to about 25 seconds as compared to 56 seconds off the 5,400 rpm drive. Interestingly, the time it took to write a 2GB file was nearly equivalent to the boot time: Time to Write 2GB File (1k blocks) Factory installed HDD: 50.577 seconds (42.46MB/sec): OCZ SATA-II SSD: 25.076 seconds (85.63MB/sec) Time to Read 2GB File (1k blocks) Factory default HDD: 49.915 seconds (43.03MB/sec) OCZ SATA-II SSD: 18.935 seconds (113.41 MB/sec) Stock HDD (5400 rpm)OCZ SATA-II SSDWrite 2GB File (1k blocks)42.46 MB/sec85.63 MB/secRead 2GB File (1k blocks)43.03 MB/sec113.41 MB/secSequential  Uncached Write (4k blocks)62.07 MB/sec85.56 MB/secUncached Write (256k blocks)46.28 MB/sec77.91 MB/secUncached Read (4k blocks)19.76 MB/sec17.5 MB/secUncached Read (266k blocks)55.82 MB/sec95.34 MB/secRandomUncached Write (4k blocks)1.26 MB/sec5.2 MB/secUncached Write (256k blocks)26.58 MB/sec69.41 MB/secUncached Read (4k blocks)0.46 MB/sec10.58 MB/secUncached Read (266k blocks)21.01 MB/sec93.82 MB/sec