SSD - is there any way around the low performance for small file sizes?

[VirtualRain]

Those are impressive numbers. It would be nice to be able to confirm that it gets similar results on a mac.



I understand the difference, it's just hard to know whether a particular kind of real world use is more like sequential reads or random reads (if it's more like random, then the SSD should have even more of an advantage, but it doesn't). Either way, I'm seeing performance that is about the same as HD or worse in this particular case. When I'm reading data at a rate lower than the 4k benchmark for this drive, I have to wonder if the problem is that the software is the bottleneck (which would mean that a faster drive might not make any difference, same with a raid).

Almost all real-world OS/Apps related activity is Random Reads of relatively small files. Activities such as saving data files and/or reading media files are more sequential.

Hence benchmarks to pay attention to are your Random Reads of 4K blocks and your Secquential Reads/Writes of 256K Blocks. The others are irrelevant. In fact, Xbench's reporting of Sequential Reads of 4K blocks has no home in the real world as it implies your small files are neatly arranged one after the other on the drive which is never going to happen.

Your benchmark performance is as expected.

 

[Ace134blue]

Sorry to tell you, but the Crucial C300 is a Sandforce based SSD and is one of the fastest on the market.

Uh duh, as are many others. It Sucks compared to other sandforce drives like phoenix pros and vertex 2s.

What benchmarking software are you using to get this?

Sorry, i used HDTach. I had two drives that i tested, the boot drive and a plain drive with nothing on it. Sustained read was about 283~MB/s on the clean drive, but the boot drive was a bit lower.

 

[nanofrog]

Sorry, i used HDTach. I had two drives that i tested, the boot drive and a plain drive with nothing on it. Sustained read was about 283~MB/s on the clean drive, but the boot drive was a bit lower.

OK, so you tested under Windows (no problem). Is it the Trial or Registered version?

The Trial version tests random access, burst, and CPU utilization. You need the Registered version to get the sequential throughput. Assuming you do have a Registered version, I'd recommend doing multiple runs on disks with actual data on them (i.e. boot disk), not just a bare disk. Then average those results, as there usually are some differences between tests results (some can be quite notable).

This is one of the reasons for using multiple benchmark applications (though IOPS data is necessary for some rather than a simple throughput result), as they tend to show different results between them. But there's still sufficient information to make good decisions on (can see if one benchmark is way off of the others, ...).

 

[Ace134blue]

OK, so you tested under Windows (no problem). Is it the Trial or Registered version?

The Trial version tests random access, burst, and CPU utilization. You need the Registered version to get the sequential throughput. Assuming you do have a Registered version, I'd recommend doing multiple runs on disks with actual data on them (i.e. boot disk), not just a bare disk. Then average those results, as there usually are some differences between tests results (some can be quite notable).

This is one of the reasons for using multiple benchmark applications (though IOPS data is necessary for some rather than a simple throughput result), as they tend to show different results between them. But there's still sufficient information to make good decisions on (can see if one benchmark is way off of the others, ...).

The trial version Does show sustained reads, only thing it does not show is writes, which i dont care about. The boot drive gets 250~ or so. IOPS on this drive is 50000 on 4k writes i believe.

 

[Inconsequential]

Sequential speeds SSD SATA II: Up to 270MB/s
Sequential speeds SSD SATA III: Up to 355MB/s now, 500MB/s (proposed) in Q1 '11

Sequential speeds HDD: Up to 145MB/s

I wouldn't exactly say give or or take the same.

Anyway, the OCZ drives you proposed are actually not really expensive any more. The RevoDrive editions are about the same price as a similar sized Vertex 2.
Unfortunately, there are no OS X drivers available as of yet. OCZ promised to work on them, though.

I said the benchmarks, or to be more precise the XBench Benchmarks.

Uncached Read 256kb for my Velociraptor, 1Tb WD Black and Intel G2 SSD are all roughly the same.

I think

Can't remember what I was actually point out then.

But yes, I am well aware SSDs are faster than HDDs. I was talking about the XBench Scores.

 

[nanofrog]

The trial version Does show sustained reads, only thing it does not show is writes, which i dont care about. The boot drive gets 250~ or so. IOPS on this drive is 50000 on 4k writes i believe.

For some strange reason I had recalled that it was missing both read and write sequential information (Trial version). Oops.

 

[milo]

Sorry, i used HDTach.

It's too bad there seems to be no mac benchmark, it would be good to verify that it is getting the same speeds running under OSX.

 

[Ace134blue]

For some strange reason I had recalled that it was missing both read and write sequential information (Trial version). Oops.

Its missing write only. lol

 

[Ace134blue]

It's too bad there seems to be no mac benchmark, it would be good to verify that it is getting the same speeds running under OSX.

Sorry, but im not using bootcamp or anything, using my gaming pc with these ssds