Judging by the Numbers
There’s a huge difference between cheap and pricey SSD drives, but the
fastest may not be right for everyone!
You might not realize what you’re get-
ting when you purchase an SSD. As we’ve
learned from this roundup, the nuances of
an SSD’s construction can make a huge dif-
ference in its performance.
We found that MLC-based drives just
aren’t worth their low prices. While their
read speeds are certainly impressive com-
pared to those of the fastest hard drives
we’ve tested, poor write performance holds
them back. We wouldn’t use an MLC-based
device as the primary volume for our op-
erating system, especially since we can get
hard drives that offer faster reads and writes
at four times the capacity for the same price.
SLC-based drives are a different breed
entirely. While their prices can vary from
reasonable to outrageous, SLC-based SSDs
can deliver a massive performance improve-
ment in general operations thanks to theirlower random access read and write rates.
We would definitely recommend a less-
expensive SSD, such as those from Samsung
or OCZ, for a notebook environment. The
combination of price and performance is
great, and the added reliability—SSDs are
less likely to fail than hard disk drives if you
drop your laptop—sweetens the deal.
You don’t need this kind of protection in
a desktop environment. It’s for this reason,
and the capacity-to-cost ratio of even the
least expensive SLC SSDs, that we cannot
recommend this technology for desktops at
this time. Or even for a while—we’d toler-
ate a 128GB SSD in our rig and would be
happy with a 256GB product, but it will take
a number of successive capacity improve-
ments before such drives reach an accept-
able price point.
All of the SLC SSDs we tested blew pasta Velociraptor drive in simulated operat-
ing system patterns, as evidenced by the
PCMark Vantage scores. But this speedy per-
formance is of little value if Windows plus a
game or two completely fills the drive. We’d
rather stick with two $300 Velociraptors in
RAID 0 right now: Based on our experience,
an array of these drives is only 10 percent
slower than the real-world performance of
Samsung’s $800 SSD but offers nine times
the capacity.
There will come a day when solid-state
drive technology is a more compelling
desktop option. Maybe NAND flash will
get cheaper to produce or larger capacity
SSDs will start bumping down prices on the
lower-capacity end of the SSD spectrum. We
can promise you one thing: Don’t expect this
turnaround to occur for years. This is only
the beginning of the storage war.Best scores are bolded. Premiere Pro and h2benchw scores were taken using Windows XP SP3; PCMark Vantage scores were taken using Vista SP1. All programs were run on our standard test
bed, which uses an EVGA 680i motherboard running an Intel Q6700 CPU, an EVGA 8800 GTX videocard, 2GB of RAM, and a 7,200rpm Western Digital 500GB Caviar Drive. Thanks to DVNation.com for
supplying some of the drives in this feature.Average Sustained Transfer Read Rate (MB/s) 91.52 91.57 112.47 87.20 85.60 98.21 96.79 98.31 91.30
Average Sustained Transfer Write Rate (MB/s) 22.69 22.90 106.60 83.56 82.69 83.80 84.24 98.22 89.80
Random Access Read (ms) 0.39 0.39 0.09 0.12 0.13 0.10 0.10 7.24 14.06
Random Access Write (ms) 248.04 246.10 1.46 7.19 7.42 7.85 7.61 3.42 6.41
Premiere Pro (sec) 634 632 411 523 540 514 497 383 WNR
PCMark Vantage Overall Score 9,541 9,577 13,527 13,006 13,691 12,386 12,684 6,082 5,178BENCHMARKS
RiData Super Memoright Samsung OCZ Imation Mtron WD Samsung
Talent Velociraptor HD 103UJflashflood
50 | MAXIMUMPC | NOV 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com