Solid State of the Union: 5 Top SSDs Reviewed

Posted 06/15/2010 at 12:06pm | by Nathan Edwards

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Fiscal Conservatism

How do two budget SSDs compare to a single high-performance model?

In the midst of our SSD test-stravaganza, a letter arrived from Intel with an intriguing idea. Why buy one expensive SSD, it asked, when you can buy two 40GB X-25Vs and run them in RAID 0? You’ll get better performance, the argument went, and for a lower cost. Well, let’s consider that. One 40GB X-25V (the V is for Value) costs $125, so $250 nabs you 80GB of storage, versus about $330 for a 128GB Patriot Torqx. So is it worth it to buy two of the value drives?

Since the whole point of running two value SSDs in RAID 0 is to save money, we decided against using an add-in RAID card—instead, we built RAID 0 arrays using the Intel south-bridge on our test bed and the Gigabyte-branded Marvell-manufactured onboard RAID controller, and tested them under the same conditions as the other drives in our roundup.

Intel's X-25V value SSDs, like the rest of the X-25 line, prioritize random writes over sequential.

While a single Intel X-25V drive got 161MB/s average read speeds and 40MB/s average sustained writes—acceptable for a value drive—a two-disk RAID 0 on the Intel SATA controller did nearly twice as well. Sustained average reads were pushed to over 240MB/s, while writes approached 75MB/s. But random writes are where Intel drives have always excelled and the X-25V, despite its “value” moniker, is no exception. Both a single drive and a RAID 0 array produced 4KB random writes of more than 15,000 IOPS—three times the speed of any other drive in the roundup, as well as the Patriot. Sustained writes, especially in our Premiere Pro encoding test, were less impressive.

So is a RAID 0 array of value Intel SSDs actually a value? It depends. Read speeds and random writes are fantastic, of course, while sustained writes will likely leave you frustrated. But you won’t be doing too many sustained writes to an 80GB drive, now will you? Your SATA chipset will play an important role as well—the Intel SATA chipset on our test bed gave us the best numbers, while sustained writes on a RAID built on the Gigabyte-branded RAID controller were half as fast.

There’s another catch, too: By using a RAID array, you’re giving up OS-level TRIM support, as TRIM commands aren’t passed through the RAID controller. You can manually optimize your drives with Intel’s tools, but until TRIM commands can be passed to RAIDed SSDs, Windows 7 users should consider a single-drive solution. A 64GB Indilinx-based drive with TRIM support can be had for as little as $200. If 64GB is enough for you, we think that’s the better deal.

6Gb/s SATA: Does It Make a Difference?

Say you’re one of the increasing number of users with 6Gb/s SATA ports on your fancy new motherboard. But what you don’t have—yet—is a drive with a 6Gb/s SATA controller. Can you put those onboard ports to use anyway? Some drive vendors claim that even SATA 3Gb/s drives benefit from the improved native command queuing and greater bandwidth of 6Gb/s SATA. To put this claim to the test, we took two drives from our roundup—the SandForce-toting OCZ Vertex LE and the Marvell-controlled Plextor PX-128M1S—and retested them on a mobo with both SATA 3Gb/s and SATA 6Gb/s ports onboard.

Our tests showed that some benchmark scores for both drives were better on the 6Gb/s SATA controller, but not significantly so. The Vertex drive showed higher average and maximum sustained read speeds on a 6Gb/s port, but average sustained writes fell, as did 4KB random writes. The Plextor drive showed slight improvement in 4KB random reads and writes. Premiere Pro and PCMark Vantage HDD test scores for both drives were higher on the 6Gb/s controller. Most other scores were nearly identical on either controller.

We’ll soon start seeing SSDs with native SATA 6Gb/s controllers, and those will likely see marked improvements in SATA 6Gb/s mode compared to 3Gb/s. Until then, the only reason to run in SATA 6Gb/s mode (other than very minor gains in some areas) is if you need to use your 3Gb/s ports in IDE or RAID mode and want an AHCI-enabled SATA port for your SSD.

Best scores are bolded. All tests performed on an Asus P6X58D Premium motherboard with a Core i7-X980 CPU @3.33GHz with 6GB DDR3/1600 running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. SATA 3Gb/s tests performed on onboard Intel chipset; SATA 6Gb/s tests performed using onboard Marvell 9123 chipset.