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Anandtech 31 Page SSD Review Is Finally Done

tubbymac

tubbymac

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 6, 2008
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The big kahuna, the massive 31 page SSD review and analysis that Anandtech has been working on for the last few months is finally done. There's been a lot of interest in SSD drives lately. This analysis tries to make sense of all the major players and the latest developments. I was wondering why it was taking them so long. Now I know. This thing is amazingly comprehensive. I'm still chugging through it.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531
 
What a great article!

Interesting to see the huge spread of performance on the the theoretical benchmarks. Also interesting to see that in the "real world" benchmarks, they all seem to perform pretty close to the same.
 
Tubbymac!!! ahhh lol you've absolutely screwed over my chances of holding off on buying an SSD drive haha. :p:D

I'm not even half way thru the read and while I knew they were a great boost for a computer now I'm like man oh man! I gotta get me one of these lol.

Thanks for the post though, I was reading alot of users reviews and this answers alot of questions as to why to avoid certain drives and what the read advantages are in terms of how it all works. Great article.
 
After reading through the rest of this article is pretty clear why the Intel drives cost what they do. The marketing guys love to spew the 250mb read speeds, but the latency makes so much more sense and it shows on his benchmarks. The bandwidth is only half the story, the cheaper drives once they become "used" will perform worse then traditional platter HDD's. This really shows what's going on in the SSD business.

Thanks so much for the link again, not only makes things much clearer as to what drives are total crap and what drives are worth paying the premium for, it answered so many questions about what all the numbers really mean for real world use.
 
I love Anandtech. Their MacBook Pro review is the one I always link to when someone asks a question about something.

And yes, SLC SDDs are the way to go. I plan on buying one only after 2 years, when hopefully the capacity of SLC SSDs is large enough.
 
Some of his benchmarks don't add up. My Vertex is something around 6 times faster than what he has stated in the 4k Random Writes. :rolleyes:
 
I just read the end page and have a similar experience.

I switched from the Intel 80gb to the Vertex 120gb because it's larger and will work with bootcamp. Otherwise I was happy with the Intel.
 
I thought I knew quite a lot about SSD drives until I read all 31 pages. That article made me feel like an absolute noob, it was so comprehensive. I did a simplified analysis of the performance degradation of all SSD drives a while ago in the Titan SSD thread of this forum and calculated a theoretical 33.3% drop in performance. It looks like "real" usage falls close to this, with about a 20-40% drop in write performance depending on manufacturer when all flash cells have been written to at least once.

When you compare your own benchmarking numbers to Anandtech's numbers, remember that he has methodically written to every flash cell before doing the benchmarks. Your numbers will be higher with a fresh drive.
 
The vertex numbers will be revised by Anand in a couple of weeks, he used an old 0112 firmware that is now outdated by 1199 and soon to be 1275 that bought more speed without any reduction of IO. We talking about 25-40% read/write increase in seq speed in just two updates.
 
dr. shdw said:
Some of his benchmarks don't add up. My Vertex is something around 6 times faster than what he has stated in the 4k Random Writes. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Was that benchmark done in "steady state"? Meaning did you benchmark after your whole drive has been written? Clean drive will always be 10 times faster than a "worn" drive when it comes to SSD.
 
MikhailT said:
The vertex numbers will be revised by Anand in a couple of weeks, he used an old 0112 firmware that is now outdated by 1199 and soon to be 1275 that bought more speed without any reduction of IO. We talking about 25-40% read/write increase in seq speed in just two updates.
Click to expand...

The Vertex looks quite promising. It's pretty clear that there is still some significant headroom for firmware performance tweaks on that SSD. The Intel drives still don't work with bootcamp on Apple computers so the best drive at the moment that supports all of a Macbook's features is the Vertex.
 
Abstract said:
I'm surprised this thread hasn't garnered more interest.:confused:
Click to expand...

Probably because for the most part people don't want to read 31 pages...they want to be told whats the best, then they'll go buy it. Which is why there are so many 2.66 vs 2.93 or whats the best SSD threads.
 
Wow, great article. I didn't know some of the things it mentions. I would love a nice RAID array of SSDs as my primary drive on the desktop :D (like that 24-SSD monster someone built).
 
bbadalucco said:
Probably because for the most part people don't want to read 31 pages...they want to be told whats the best, then they'll go buy it. Which is why there are so many 2.66 vs 2.93 or whats the best SSD threads.
Click to expand...

So basically most people are too lazy. I think this would also help people that are deciding weather or not to get a ssd. After reading this i realize that ssds are quite a bit less reliable than i thought they were.
 
mikes70mustang said:
So basically most people are too lazy.
Click to expand...

Not lazy but impatient I think. 31 pages of pretty technical and heavy reading has most people falling asleep by about the 2nd page.

Anybody who wants just a summary should read just the first and the last page.
 
tubbymac said:
Not lazy but impatient I think. 31 pages of pretty technical and heavy reading has most people falling asleep by about the 2nd page.

Anybody who wants just a summary should read just the first and the last page.
Click to expand...

I probably shouldn't admit it.. but I actually found it interesting lol, but then again I've always been curious on how stuff works. If I had purchased one of the "cheap" models and then read this I would be kickin' my own ass for not doing enough research.

The part about latency was a real eye opener for me. Makes perfect sense that companies just go for Read/Write top speed to sell drives while not telling the real story on "real world" performance. Thankfully there are people out there doing this kind of testing and making it available to consumers. :)
 
glad the intel drive is still cream of the crop (for the most part). Extremely disappointed by the slowdown and for some reason I feel a few of my apps getting slower , and I do keep a lean OS X configuration. I guess it won't really matter until I upgrade my early '08 MBP since it only uses the 1.5 Gbps instead of the 3.0 that this drive is rated for.
 
So: Two important questions.

In the Macbook Air, is the 128gb ssd 1.8" drive of ... ? type? Is obviously doesn't perform like the Intel drives on the random writes once it's full, but is it as bad as the Jmicron drives? Anand mentions that Apple couldn't ship a drive with the Jmicron like performance, but what level of performance DID they ship out with?

What about the 128gb SSD 2.5" option on the MB Pro?

What kind of SSD do we get with those options?
 
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