SSD vendors selling SandForce-based drives are incredibly enthusiastic about differentiating their offerings. There are three aspects of solid-state storage that affect performance: the controller, the NAND, and the firmware. We all know that these drives center on the same firmware. We've seen that the flash does have some affect on performance, though two drives with the same configuration are pretty much comparable. So, they try to sell us on custom firmware with home-brewed optimizations not offered by other vendors.
Can we create of list of what those tweaks entail? Unfortunately not. No SSD vendor has ever gotten specific with us about what its "golden" or "purely in-house" firmware includes that other vendors don't have.
What we do know is that the basic core of SandForce’s compression technology cannot be altered. We tested for this in Intel SSD 520 Review: Taking Back The High-End With SandForce by measuring endurance by writing highly compressible data. What we found were close to identical values for write amplification. When write amplification is similar, then we know that two drives (in this case, the oldest and newest SandForce-based SSDs) are benefiting from the same level of compression.
| 128 KB Compressible Sequential Write 1 Hour, QD=1 | Intel SSD 520 60 GB | OCZ Vertex 3 60 GB |
|---|---|---|
| Host Writes | 1258 GB | 1301 GB |
| NAND Writes | 176 GB | 182 GB |
| Write Amplification | 0.13990 | .139892 |
In the time between publishing our SSD 520 review and now, we've seen similar results from all of the 60 GB SF-22xx-based SSDs in our lab, suggesting that every vendor using SandForce's technology enjoys the same degree of compression, which most influentially affects the performance of these drives.
- The Great 60 GB SandForce SSD Round-Up
- Test Setup And Firmware Notes
- 4 KB Random Performance
- 128 KB Sequential Performance
- Incompressible Sequential Write Performance: SandForce's Weakness
- PCMark 7 And Power Consumption
- Endurance Testing
- Exploring The Performance Of A Full SandForce-Based SSD
- Performance Is Defined By Flash

Ms-Office
Adobe pdf reader
a web browser, a photo manipulating program
a music/video player.
Install a game from a ISO.
An antivirus
And all these apps should be installed from the SSD itself (meaning their setups should be on the SSD).
Then you should test the startup and shutdown times.
All these synthetic benchies dont make much sense, IMHO.
Ms-Office
Adobe pdf reader
a web browser, a photo manipulating program
a music/video player.
Install a game from a ISO.
An antivirus
And all these apps should be installed from the SSD itself (meaning their setups should be on the SSD).
Then you should test the startup and shutdown times.
All these synthetic benchies dont make much sense, IMHO.
A lot of operations use only a single core and the SSD cant use its true potential. That is, the CPU cant process data as fast as the SSD can provide.
This is just reverse of what happens in case of mechanical HDD's.
You're not going to see a major difference.
Well, it is pointless though since everything you are doing is so fast that it doesn't matter anymore. I however see your point since I can be loading a program and my SSD is not even at max speed my CPU frequency is maxed out. The only way to get more speed is to just overclock as much as you can.
that is the point of buying a cheaper SSD based on a chepaer NAND.
I'd also like to see small drives benchmarked as swap drives in video editing machines. Currently I'm using a raid 0 array of 1tb samsung drives that keeps up well enough, but I'd be interested to see if there are tangible productivity differences.
For a future SSD review/roundup could you take, for example, 10 real-life traces from 10 different editor's machines (the more variation in workload, the better), and then compare the %change in execution time vs. a reference drive?
Great article.
Can we get a "Best motherboards for the money" type?
Thanks.
You can comment on, wish for, or suggest a product be tested without implying there's some kind of intentional skewing or fault in the data collected.
I recommend upping your budget to a larger drive. Otherwise m4.
I already do that, just pick up a cheap 30-64GB SSD and move the virtually memory over to it. As for killing the page file well good luck as that doesn't work. If it did there would be 36gb worth of more free space. As for using a ssd for only page file well it really does work and it doesn't degrade as quickly as you might think. When there is no static data for the controller to deal with while there is high read/write the drive tends to not have the same issues as most get. Just under 6,000 hours of heavy use and my 30gb kingston ssd is holding up.
It's a bloody long test that I've decided to reserve for comparing between different SSDs employing different controllers. It would have probably taken a full week to test all the SSDs and that only would happen if we were test 24x7 and perfectly timed the drive swaps ;p
We sent an invitation to Mushkin. They did not respond in proper time for this roundup. In any event, Toggle at 60 GB is quite rare. Though, I agree, it would have been an interesting contender. Unfortunately, we didn't want to put the roundup on the back burner any longer, because we've made multiple postponements to accommodate this that and the other.
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com
I believe you're referring to our Best SSDs column? If you want something different, feel free to suggest it.
Sure! Read our controller agnostic 60 GB roundup.
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com