What makes one SandForce-based SSD different from the others that appear to be just like it? We round up 10 models with 60 GB of capacity to explore the effects of NAND interfaces. We also stumble across some interesting data related to full drives.
Hardly a month goes by that we don't see another SSD launch into an already-crowded market. Most of the time, the introduction centers around a SandForce controller, and there's a good reason for that. The company's technology is fast. It's also designed to work alongside lower-quality flash memory, if need be, driving down the costs of SSDs at a time when price is the primary barrier keeping enthusiasts from adopting solid-state storage.
More than one year has passed since the controller company launched its line-up of second-generation logic, and its solutions are still at the top of their game. OCZ was the first vendor with a SandForce-based desktop-oriented drive way back then. And within the last 30 days, Intel even threw its hat into the ring with its SSD 520, built on top of the very same controller, but complemented with the company's own cherry-picked NAND. Truly, SandForce deserves kudos for remaining a relevant force, even in the face of newer controllers from competing sources.
Although the vendors selling drives centering on SandForce's hardware often sit at the top of our benchmark charts, there are, admittedly, a lot of them. On one hand, that's a good thing. Competition between many similar products pushes prices down as low as they can possibly go. But as you see in the picture below, consisting of only 60 GB SSDs, the number of choices can quickly get overwhelming.

Are all of those drives exactly the same? Decidedly not. Although each SSD employs the same controller and boasts the same capacity, there is a limited number of knobs and dials that vendors can tweak to affect pricing and performance. And that's the idea behind today's round-up. We want to explore how one SandForce-based drive differs from the next, and hopefully end up with a better idea of the 60 GB drive you'd want to boot from in your next PC.
On deck, we have:
- Adata S511 60 GB
- Corsair Force 3 60 GB
- Corsair Force GT 60 GB
- Kingston SSDNow V200+ 60 GB
- Intel SSD 520 60 GB
- OCZ Agility 3 60 GB
- OCZ Vertex 3 60 GB
- OWC Mercury Electra 6G 60 GB
- Patriot Pyro SE 60 GB
- RunCore Pro V 60 GB
As we dig into these 10 SSDs, know that there is a performance hierarchy distinguishing drives based on SandForce's controller hardware. Generally, two SF-22xx-based SSDs of a given capacity perform almost identically, provided that they both employ the same NAND interface. Vendors do use different NAND, though, and that's why there is variation between drives centering on the same controller hardware.

Second-gen SandForce SSDs are available with different flavors of memory, and this is their order of performance, from highest to lowest.
- SandForce controller with Toggle DDR NAND (Mushkin Chronos Deluxe, Patriot Wildfire, OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS)
- SandForce controller with Synchronous ONFi NAND (OCZ Vertex 3, Corsair Force GT, Kingston HyperX)
- SandForce controller with Asynchronous ONFi NAND (OCZ Agility 3, Corsair Force 3, Mushkin Chronos, Patriot Pyro)
Right off the bat, we're able to sort our round-up into two groups: one that employs synchronous memory for better performance, and the other that uses asynchronous flash in order to save money.
| Synchronous | Asynchronous |
|---|---|
| Adata S511 60 GB | Corsair Force 3 60 GB |
| Corsair Force GT 60 GB | Kingston SSDNow V200+ 60 GB |
| Intel SSD 520 60 GB | OCZ Agility 3 60 GB |
| OCZ Vertex 3 60 GB | OWC Mercury Electra 6G 60 GB |
| Patriot Pyro SE 60 GB | |
| RunCore Pro V 60 GB |
How significant is the difference between the various memory interfaces? From there, can we distinguish between the drives in one group or the other? We’ll let the benchmarks do the talking.
- 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