Benchmark Results: Power Consumption
Power consumption is very relevant for laptop users who intend to get an SSD as a replacement for their hard drive. As a general rule, SSDs are lower on power when it comes to idle power (active idle) with a few extreme examples from Crucial, Intel, and Toshiba. The other power consumption results were tracked at specific workloads, which makes more sense than trying to hunt down one peak power consumption number you'd never encounter in real life.
The undisputed lowest-power drives, at idle, are the Intel X25-M models and Toshiba’s HG2. Crucial’s RealSSD C300 is great as well, but only when discussing the low-capacity 64 GB model. The 256 GB flagship requires much more power in active idle.
Streaming read power consumption reflects the power the drive needs to deliver data at peak throughput. Once again, Toshiba operates at an amazing 0.5 W, followed by the SandForce-driven SSDs. Western Digital’s Silicon Edge Blue and Crucial's RealSSD C300 require the most power here. The Crucial drive delivers bone-crushing throughput, while WD is just one many drives in the 200 MB/s realm.
Enthusiasts need to know how much power an SSD requires when delivering a 1080p video stream, as this is a popular workload. Once again, Intel and Toshiba are unbeaten, requiring half the power of Indilinx drives or the WD SSD.
The workstation test involves heavy I/O activity and stresses SSDs in a much different way. Toshiba's drive, which is the lowest power consumer at idle or when delivering massive amounts of sequential data, is a real loser at high I/O activity. The Indilinx drives are lowest on power consumption under intensive I/O, but they also don’t deliver the same level of performance as the SandForce SSDs. Let’s look at how this translates into power efficiency.
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Good, before I saw this my decision on getting an Intel would have been fine.
Have (2) 30GB OCZ Vertex in RAID 0. They are pretty darn quick.
You can get the Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB for $240. Only problem is the sketchy firmware (read about at anandtech) and poor performance in RAID.
SSD's I have (I always look for deals and buy when I think it's the lowest):
1. (2) Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB ($240) - Fast, great price, used for video editing and programming.
2. Intel x-25m 160GB ($380) - Fast, expensive, used on my server.
3. (2) Corsair P128 ($260, $290)- Decently fast, very low power consumption, decent price but now expensive, used for my HTPC and laptop.
4. Kingston SSDNow V-series 64GB ($110) - Fast enough, somewhat cheap, used for my gf's computer.
Luckily none have gone bad on me, and would buy them again. Glad to see other SSD's in the mix, though. More reviews and benchmarks never hurt, and THG's always used when I need more information to make a decision.
Nice piece very informative.
G-Skill Phoenix 100GB looks like a good all rounder.
OWC a good 2nd choice for me.
Western digital would have been my 1st choice but seems to lack a lot.
The rest is too all over the place with it's performances for me.
I just used 2 120 GB Phoenix Pros in RAID 0 for a friend's build. It's freakin FAST! I got one for my parents as their HDD just crashed. They love it.
"reads and whites" is that supposed to be some sort of play on words? Just kidding. Good article, much appreciated.
I got 2 intel 80 G2s in RAID0 and they haul. sure under heavy 4K scenarios they do fall behind, but for most use its no problem. you can also purchase 2 intel 160G drives for slightly more than a C300 and you'll get far better results per dollar per GB in a RAID0 setup.
I get 525MB reads and 175MB writes. For an OS drive that doesn't do a whole lot of writing I'm ok with the performance.
For my dollar I'll do a smaller OCZ Vertex 2 for a boot drive...they have great performance and come in under $150.
I'm still rocking a Intel X25-M G1, no probs at all. I see no point to change.
I just picked up the kingston SSDNow-now SNV-425, Im happy with it but am thinking about picking up another for raid 0. Does anybody have this setup?Im curious to know your read/write numbers as I cant find anybody with this setup on the net. Please Post.
Two corrections to the graph titles (other SSD articles have the same problems):
- it says "[t in ms]" (should be "t in us")
- it says "including rotational latency"; which parts of the SSD are rotating and have latency? ;-)
I like how you did the price/performance index. People don't usually buy SSD's for storage but for performance so it makes much more sense to show the performance vs dollar metric than gigabyte vs dollar. This way, people can pick what capacity will suffice for them then decide which drive will give them the most performance for the money. Kudos!
Interesting.
Guess I'm still waiting for the Gen3 Intel drives.
I have been saying that for a while now...
Though I will avoid RAID for a boot drive, and RAID 1/5 only for storage.
I've had enough headaches from RAID.
I just ordered an OCZ vertex 2 60GB for ~155 USD, excluding shipping and other costs, if the performance is close to the 120GB version then I'm in good shape, but I highly doubt that. Any one got a good comparison between the 2 drives?
Great stuff ... thanks guys.
Sorry I came across so rude in your other article P & A.
I have a soft spot for core2.
Maybe I missed this in the tables, but was the Crucial drive tested on a 6 Gb/s interface only? For those of us with only 3Gb/s boards, it'd be interesting to see how the performance compares. I seem to recall from Anand's review that throughput was somewhat less than saturated.
Patrick and Achim, great to see you included price in your performance ratios! The previous articles focused on power consumption, which is less relevant for SSD (a 1W difference when your laptop CPU consumes anywhere between 13 and 35W, and your GPU anywhere between 7 and 50W?)
128GB C300 SSD's are already barely above $2 per GB. I can't wait for the next generation of intel SSD and the widely predicted price drops at the end of the year.
Raid does NOTHING to improve SSD speed....
Western Digital should hang their head in shame. Pathetic SSD offering and I cant see anyone actually buying one.
I'm kind of surprised seeing the aggregate performance chart with the intel V series outperforming the indilinx drives. Seems fishy to me.
Not surprised with WD as I've noticed the same thing myself. If you look at the lower capacity WD drives though you'll find the price competes with the intel (and Kingston) V series but performance is closer to the indilinx and M series (I can only assume as I'm not sure I've ever seen the smaller cap versions benched). A much better buy in my opinion.
That said, I really want a Vertex2 (or larger cap C300) but I'm waiting for a reasonable capacity under $200. I think that threshold is shared by many and the first mfg to make it there is going to make a killing.