Original Link: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614










"I think Intel just Conroe’d the HDD market."



Let's get to it.

How SSDs Work







SLC (left) vs. MLC (right)


  SLC NAND flash MLC NAND flash
Random Read 25 µs 50 µs
Erase 2ms per block 2ms per block
Programming 250 µs 900 µs




The Flash Hierarchy & Data Loss












How Long Will Intel's SSDs Last?







Other Wear and Tear



What Happens When Your SSD Fails?

When your hard drive dies we all know what happens. You go to turn on your machine one day and your OS doesn't boot, or your drive stops getting detected. But with SSDs their lifespan is far more predictable, so what does happen as they near the end of their life? A well designed SSD will have a good enough wear leveling algorithm to make sure that all blocks in the device get equal usage, so that when they fail, they do so at the same time.

Intel's SSDs are designed so that when they fail, they attempt to fail on the next erase - so you don't lose data. If the drive can't fail on the next erase, it'll fail on the next program - again, so you don't lose existing data. You'll try and save a file and you'll get an error from the OS saying that the write couldn't be completed.

The beauty here is that the SSD knows exactly when it can't erase/program a block, and if the drive knows, then you can use software to ask the drive what it knows. In the near future Intel will be releasing its own SSD tool that will let you query two SMART attributes on the drive: one telling you how close you are to the rated cycling limit, and one telling you when you've run out of reallocating blocks. The latter is the most important because Intel fully expects these drives to outlast their rated limits. As bad blocks develop, the SSD will mark them as such and write to new ones - by telling you when it has run out of bad blocks (or nearly run out of bad blocks), you'll know exactly when you need a new hard drive.

This is hugely important. While Intel's SSDs aren't exactly cheap, the beauty of flash is that it follows the same Moore's Law that CPUs do. In the next ~18 months you'll be able to get a 160GB drive for the price of the 80GB, in another couple of years we'll be at 320GB for the same price (most likely lower as SSD demands increase). Within the next five years we'll be in a situation where the fans in your system are more likely to fail than your hard drive, and if your drive does happen to fail it'll tell you well in advance. How nice of it.

The Generic SSD

Intel isn't the first manufacturer to get into the SSD market, in fact quite a few of the companies we regularly deal with have SSDs. OCZ Technology, SuperTalent, Patriot, G.Skill, Mtron, and Silicon Power are just the names that contributed hardware for this review, but many more actually make SSDs.

Silicon Power drives provided by DV Nation

You'll notice that most of these companies are memory companies, not chip companies. Cracking open any of their SSDs reveals the true nature of their SSD manufacturing business: most of them simply rebrand someone else's SSD.

Let's take the MLC drives for example, here we have MLC drives from OCZ (the infamous Core), SuperTalent and Silicon Power:

Every last one of the drives has the exact same layout, same flash devices and same Jmicron controller (the JMF602).

The same is true for SLC designs, here we have SLC SSDs from G.Skill and OCZ:

They are the same, you could give them ice crea...nevermind

Note that these are the same drive, in this case purchased from Samsung and placed in new housing.

Only Mtron offers a slight amount of innovation by using its own FPGA as a controller:

But we know very little about any of these controllers so it's tough to say if Mtron's FPGA is done well.

For the most part however, all existing MLC drives on the market are built out of the same parts, as are all existing SLC drives. The MLC drives all use the JMF602 and the SLC drives use the Samsung S3C49RBX01 host controller with 32MB of on-board DRAM. The SLC drives are all priced above $640 for 64GB while the MLC drives are all under $300 for 64GB, Intel's 80GB MLC is priced in between the two (but closer to the SLC drives) at $595.

We'll soon see that Intel's price is justified in the market, but before doing that it's important to address an issue with these very tempting MLC drives...

Enter the Poorly Designed MLC





Advertised Specs OCZ Core (MLC) OCZ (SLC)
Read Up to 143MB/s Up to 100MB/s
Write Up to 93MB/s Up to 80MB/s
Seek < 0.35ms unlisted
Price < $300 > $600


However the real world performance didn't match up.


  PCMark Vantage HDD Test
OCZ Core (JMicron JMF602, MLC) 8117
OCZ (Samsung, SLC) 12143
Western Digital VelociRaptor (10,000 RPM SATA) 6325






  SYSMark 2007 Overall E-Learning Video Creation Productivity 3D
OCZ (Samsung, SLC) 177 161 200 178 172


Delving Deeper





OCZ (Samsung, SLC) 109 0.43MB/s 9.17ms 83.2ms
Seagate Momentus 7200.2 106.9 0.42MB/s 9.4ms 76.5ms





OCZ Core (JMicron, MLC) 244ms 243ms 241ms 243ms 247ms
OCZ (Samsung, SLC) 9.17ms 14.5ms 21.2ms 28ms 28.5ms
Seagate Momentus 7200.2 9.4ms 8.95ms 9.14ms 9.82ms 12.1ms




OCZ Core (JMicron, MLC) 0.36ms 25.8ms 130ms 244ms
OCZ (Samsung, SLC) 0.16ms 1.97ms 5.19ms 9.17ms
Seagate Momentus 7200.2 0.16ms 0.94ms 4.35ms 9.4ms






The Generic MLC SSD Problem in the Real World


The Samsung SLC controller











  Creating 200MB Archive Extracting 5GB Archive Number of Pauses
SuperTalent (JMicron, MLC) 83 seconds 573 seconds lots
Silicon Power (JMicron, MLC) 128 seconds 632 seconds tons
OCZ Core (JMicron, MLC) 60 seconds 222.7 seconds 20
OCZ (Samsung, SLC) 42 seconds 94.7 seconds 0
Seagate Momentus 7200.2 72 seconds 260.6 seconds 0
Western Digital VelociRaptor 46 seconds 90.9 seconds 0




Poor hungry CPU, it just wants to eat. Comic by Laura of www.laurascomics.com



  Launching PowerPoint 2007 While Extracting 5GB Launching Photoshop CS3 While Extracting 5GB
OCZ Core (JMicron, MLC) 8.5 seconds 24.3 seconds
OCZ (Samsung, SLC) 2.8 seconds 9.3 seconds
Seagate Momentus 7200.2 21.3 seconds 46.5 seconds
Western Digital VelociRaptor 8 seconds 23.5 seconds



A Lack of DRAM or a Lack of Cache?


Intel's controller (left) + DRAM (right)







The Test

CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 (2.66GHz)
Motherboard: Intel DG45ID
Chipset: Intel G45
Chipset Drivers: Intel (Intel)
Memory: Corsair XMS2-8500 1066
Video Card: VisionTek Radeon HD 4850
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit


Overall System Performance with SYSMark 2007


SYSMark 2007 Preview Rating


Video Creation







Real World Performance with PCMark Vantage






TV and Movies









The Productivity test is awesome, let me explain:




Application Loading Performance



  Launch: Photoshop, Vantage, Chrome & NAV
Intel X25-M (Intel, MLC) 7 seconds
Western Digital Green 1TB 15.6 seconds
Western Digital VelociRaptor 12 seconds



Now let's look at individual application performance:

Google Chrome Launch Time 


PowerPoint 2007 Launch Time



Photoshop CS3 Launch Time



Game Load Performance

I looked at three games for load time performance and I picked these titles because they run the whole spectrum of how well an SSD will work in a gaming machine. First up is Spore.

Here I'm timing how long it took to load the next stage of evolution in the game, my character just grew legs and is about to walk on land for the first time:

Spore Level Load Time 

You'll see that the results are pretty much the same on all of these drives, we're reading from the disk but we're bound elsewhere in the system - an SSD won't do anything for you here and there are many games where you won't see improvements in load times.

Next up, Oblivion - I'm simply loading a savegame:

Oblivion Level Load Time

Compared to notebook drives, the SSDs do extremely well. Against the 3.5" competitors, the margins are smaller but there - you shave a couple of seconds off of the VelociRaptor's time, more off of the 1TB WD drive (or any other 5400RPM drive). For some reason these sorts of performance gains are far less noticeable in real world usage than the improved application launch times. Perhaps it's because when you're playing a game it's all you've got going on and you're more patient, whereas when launching a web browser or an application you're trying to complete a task where time is more valuable. I'll refrain from any more psychological analysis and stick to the drives though.

Finally we get to Crysis, and this is the other end of the spectrum because Crysis is a game that is very demanding on the I/O subsystem. We've got three results here: 1) How long it took to launch the game and load the benchmark level, 2) Minimum FPS, 3) Average FPS. I'm only reporting the minimum and average frame rate of the first run, because in that run of the benchmark the textures and level data are still being streamed off the disk and it actually impacts both minimum and average frame rate.

Crysis Game/Level Load Time

The Intel X25-M manages to load the game and benchmark level in around 80% of the time of the VelociRaptor and about 90% of the time of the Samsung SLC SSDs. Compared to notebook drives the performance advantage is staggering. Game load and level load performance can be improved and Crysis is a good example of that.

The minimum frame rate graph is very interesting because it shows the impact loading textures from a slow disk can have on minimum frame rates in a game. The Crysis test is a bit exaggerated since it's streaming data as fast as possible, which you don't always do in a game, but if you've ever felt your game grind to a halt and hear your disk thrash this is a good test of that.

Crysis GPU Bench (Min FPS)

The X25-M has a 33% advantage here over the VelociRaptor, and I won't even mention the utter destruction of conventional 2.5" HDDs. Compared to other SSDs, the Samsung SLCs come the closest but Intel still manages a 25% advantage. The JMicron based MLC drives suffer terribly here, Intel's MLC drive is 63% faster. I will also point out that for a couple of runs the JMicron MLC drives managed a minimum frame rate of 3 fps, several of those lovely pauses happened in the middle of the benchmark which really changed things. The phenomenon was random enough that I reported the more common frame rate but it's worth pointing out that the pausing issue can happen while gaming, which would be bad if you're playing any sort of multiplayer game.

Average frame rate is obviously affected, but you can see that the numbers are much closer indicating that the minimum frame rates are at least not sustained for long periods of time.

Crysis GPU Bench (Avg FPS)

What can we conclude here? SSDs can be good for gaming, but they aren't guaranteed to offer more performance than a good HDD. And where SSDs do offer an impact on gaming performance, Intel's X25-M continues to dominate the charts.

The Killer App: Multitasking Performance

Here's where things get interesting. I ran two tests, in one I extracted a 5GB archive and tried to run Photoshop after 30 seconds of extraction and in the second test, I extracted a 5GB archive and tried to scan my system for viruses using NAV 2008. Simple enough, right? I'm reporting the times of each task individually.

The extraction task took the longest to complete but the standings speak for themselves:

Multitasking Scenario 1: Extract Archive + Run Photoshop)

Here's one area where the Samsung SLC based devices actually come out ahead, by a good margin. The Samsung SLC SSD finished the extraction in 102 seconds, compared to 161 seconds for the X25-M. Even the VelociRaptor did better here at 116 seconds, but remember you need to look at both tasks for a complete picture:

Multitasking Scenario 1: Extract Archive + Run Photoshop)

Launching Photoshop took 5.2 seconds for the Samsung SLC SSD, it was like we weren't even running another test in the background. The X25-M did fine at 12.2 seconds and the VelociRaptor was much slower at 27.3 seconds. The JMicron based MLC drives didn't do too bad here either, although they were a little slower than Intel's MLC offering.

The real stress test was this next multitasking scenario. Quite possibly one of the most annoying thing about viruses is having to run real time scanning and protection software all the time, especially with a traditional HDD in your system. The extraction task is the same as before, but the other task is a full system scan in Norton Anti-Virus 2008. I timed both:

Multitasking Scenario 2: Extract Archive + Run Norton Virus Scan 

The WD 1TB drive would always complete the extraction task quicker than all of the other drives, but paid the penalty in the scan test (which is why you have to look at both charts for a full analysis). The Samsung SLC drive is still the overall winner here, followed closely by Intel's X25-M. The JMicron based MLC drives do horribly here, taking over twice as long to complete as Intel's MLC.

The mechanical disks however do a lot worse. While the Intel X25-M took 3.5 minutes to extract the 5GB archive, the VelociRaptor took over 17 minutes. The Seagate Momentus 7200.2 took over 23 minutes!

Let's look at the NAV results:

Multitasking Scenario 2: Extract Archive + Run Norton Virus Scan

The X25-M took around 5.3 minutes, the Raptor needed more than 23 minutes and Seagate Momentus made me wait over 40 minutes. It's these sorts of usage scenarios that really make SSDs worthwhile, and they are the most realworld you can get. When we started looking at real world performance the PCMark Vantage numbers may have looked a bit ridiculous, but by now you should see that they are more of the middle ground when looking at performance of these drives.

Power Consumption & Battery Life

Intel lists the idle power consumption of the X25-M at 0.06W and the "typical workload" power consumption as 150mW. This is far lower than any conventional hard drive and relatively comparable to other SSDs.

In a desktop system using the Intel X25-M will shave off around 3 - 5W of total system power at the outlet under idle or load conditions. The savings are less compared to a 2.5" drive, but the real question there is how much more battery life do you get if you switch to the X25-M?

We didn't have enough time to run through a full suite of battery life tests but using MobileMark 2007's Productivity test I looked at the Intel X25-M, the OCZ Core (JMicron based MLC), the OCZ SLC SSD (Samsung based SLC) and the Seagate Momentus 7200.2.

MobileMark 2007 - Productivity Test

Overall performance was highest on the OCZ SLC SSD, but only marginally compared to the Intel X25-M. The OCZ Core managed to come in third place, still faster than the mechanical disk.

MobileMark 2007 - Productivity Test

The battery life of the system was actually lower with the OCZ Core, presumably thanks to the strange write performance issues. But generally the SLC, MLC and HDD all last around the same amount of time. Intel's X25-M boosted battery life by a bit over 6% or 27 minutes, not an insignificant increase in battery life.

Final Words










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