Linux Solid-State Drive Benchmarks

[d2kx]

The OCZ Vertex SSD also has a better controller and cache which makes her the second usable MLC SSD together with the Intel one. A lot more will follow this year form Samsung and other big companies.

[mycroes]

Clearly the speed bottleneck is the cpu in the compilation tests, would be nice to see what happens when using something like a 3.0 GHz Core 2 Duo or equivalent.

Features we get with SSD's are nice, but most people won't buy them because of the high price. I for one would consider a small SSD (32GB) for my root partition to speed up my compiles, but first I need phoronix to test it

[deanjo]

Clearly the speed bottleneck is the cpu in the compilation tests, would be nice to see what happens when using something like a 3.0 GHz Core 2 Duo or equivalent.

Features we get with SSD's are nice, but most people won't buy them because of the high price. I for one would consider a small SSD (32GB) for my root partition to speed up my compiles, but first I need phoronix to test it

You could have a quadcore running 6 Ghz and still have the CPU be the bottleneck on compilation times. You will be hard pressed to find hd i/o being the limiting factor in compilation.

[linuxhansl]

I have a laptop with a Samsung 128 GB MLC SSD. While the OCZ drives are known to be a little on the slower (and cheaper) side, the Samsung is quite fast.

In fact it feels like a different class altogether.
Firefox f.e. starts in about the same time cold and warm. Linux boots in around 12secs. (So this shows good read performance)

My database tests (Postgres and MySQL) indicate that DB write performance is also vastly superior to my (admittedly older) spinning disk drive.

I realize that these tests are entirely unscientific.

[skeetre]

Thank goodness! I'm glad to see someone finally doing some benchmark reviews of the ssd vs sata on the netbooks. I found a few things, but nothing definititive. I spent about 4 hours going around and around deciding between the asus 1000 40G and a wind with 160gb sata. I went with the Wind to get the 6-cell battery and overclocking features. I still think the price-performance-size comparison greatly favors a normal sata drive over ssd. Maybe in 6 months to a year, it'll be time to switch, but I don't think so yet.

I was also very interested in the Acer benchmark review showing the performance of ext4. I might have to try that out...

I'll have my own benchmarks up soon comparing the wind at difference speeds and file systems, and my asus m51.

I really wonder if different block sizes would make a difference on the ssd drives.

[Svartalf]

Heh... Encrypted filesystems will be close to on a par for SSD's versus magnetic media- the bottleneck is in the encryption process through the CPU unless you've got a coprocessor involved. Next pass, I'd skip that part, Michael.

Moreover, you're testing the known to be one of the slower of the bunch (in spite of the OCZ name on it...). I'd be more interested in what Transcend, Samsung, and Intel are doing in some of your testing, sans the encrypted fs...

[smitty3268]

Anandtech looked a little deeper into the seemingly slow performance of some SSD's and found the culprit. In some cases, the average write latency for random 4K writes was 250ms! It really affects the cheaper drives, the intel SSD is nearly 3000 times faster.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=3403&p=8

[edgar_wibeau]

Hi,

I'm using the Mtron MSD-SATA3525 32GB SLC in my home server (Asus EeeBox B202, for a bigger IMAP/mbox storage and VPN mostly) and am very happy with it. The Mtron is an SLC drive which is cheaper than all others I know and has decent access times aswell as read and write speeds (100/100 MB/s linear). It costs around €170 here including 19% VAT, so it should sell at around $200 in the US if it's available there. The OCZ Core V2 30GB sells at €87 here.

I tried a 1st-generation MLC drive before, same size, same price 10 months ago - it was slow but read access was fast enough and what matters most in a note- or netbook to me is that it's absolutely 100% quiet. Problem with that drive was that debian updates were terribly slow due to write random access times when there was a lot of work to do (bigger update of 500 packages took a whole night!). This (the Mtron) drive is A LOT faster here, also compared to the original Seagate Momentus 5400.5 shipped with the EeeBox. So it is indeed a win. What is also noticeable though is that the Atom CPU makes this system noticeably slower compared to eg. an Athlon X2 2GHz even on hard disk heavy tasks like debian updates and IMAP access.

So I think the Mtron SLC is a very interesting alternative to the Core V2 without the MLC drawbacks - might be interesting to compare?

The OCZ Vertex seems to be very interesting, too, its 30GB incarnation is listed at €130 but still not available - and I have seen no benchmarks yet. Also these drives have the potential to become (close) as cheep as current generation MLC drives, so 1 €/$ per GB shouldn't be too far off! (currently best ratio is 1.45 €/GB)
When you compare to smaller (<80GB) 2.5" drives, they are not that much cheaper: about 0.6 €/GB currently. The biggest (best ratio) 2.5" drives are at 0.16 €/GB of course, so that IS a difference (of about 10).

Finally a question: is the USB port on the OCZ drives really usable for normal drive operations? I'm reading it's intended for firmware upgrades only (which is weird as this could be done through ATA commands).

[Svartalf]

Anandtech looked a little deeper into the seemingly slow performance of some SSD's and found the culprit. In some cases, the average write latency for random 4K writes was 250ms! It really affects the cheaper drives, the intel SSD is nearly 3000 times faster.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=3403&p=8

My understanding of things is that some wear-levelling algorithms in some of the silicon on the controllers on these drives doesn't cope well with random writes because they didn't think about that being one of the mainline use cases on these drives- they worried about sustained reads and writes to files in the filesystem (which, you have to admit, is actually the mainline use case for the average user, not the massive numbers of random reads/writes that a DB or similar would do...).

[[Knuckles]]

My understanding of things is that some wear-levelling algorithms in some of the silicon on the controllers on these drives doesn't cope well with random writes because they didn't think about that being one of the mainline use cases on these drives- they worried about sustained reads and writes to files in the filesystem (which, you have to admit, is actually the mainline use case for the average user, not the massive numbers of random reads/writes that a DB or similar would do...).

Like the db firefox uses ? Or your IM client? Or those config files that are read by the thousand when you computer starts? Or all those icons? Or the small files in the latest update to your favorite package? Or those small blocks bittorrent clients save and retrieve at a time? Or those swap files when you don't have that much ram? Or all those thumbnails when you're previewing your photos?

I think manufacturers shot for "very pretty benchmark values" and forgot to do their homework. I think small reads and writes is one of the main workloads of most computers, but they have been forgotten.