SSD Showdown: 4 Top Drives Reviewed

Posted 04/18/2011 at 11:04am | by Nathan Edwards

14

Comments

Print

Breaking the 250MB/s barrier with no moving parts

If the automotive world progressed as fast as the computer industry, the old joke goes, we‘d all have $1,000 cars that get 400 miles to the gallon, never need maintenance, and crash catastrophic-ally every eight weeks for no reason. Ancient punch lines aside, comparing this year’s storage options to those of even half a decade ago would be like entering a Bugatti Type 35 in the Preakness Stakes.

Half a decade ago, we were all still chasing the fastest mechanical hard drive. Today, solid-state drives are where the action is. And the progress made in SSDs over the past three years has been staggering. During our first SSD roundup in November 2008, the cream of the crop offered sustained-read and -write speeds on par with a mechanical drive, at 20 times the cost, and most were much worse.

In 2009 and 2010, the first really excellent consumer SSDs arrived, powered by Indilinx’s Barefoot controller, SandForce’s SF-1200, as well as Intel’s and Samsung’s proprietary controllers. 2011’s crop of controllers brings 6Gb/s SATA support, enabling much faster transfer speeds. Some are also using smaller-process NAND. Marvell’s 9174 controller (the one from last year’s Crucial C300) powers three of the drives in our roundup, while the fourth is the first SF-2200 drive we’ve been able to get our hands on. Where’s the best bang for your buck? Does 6Gb/s SATA really make a difference? And who would ever buy a horseless carriage?

Pole Positions

1. OCZ Vertex 3 240GB

Will the new SandForce SF-2200 controller in the Vertex 3 dominate the field the way its predecessor did? The other SSDs here hope not.

2. Crucial m4 256GB

Virtually the same drive that Micron is selling to OEMs with the RealSSD C400 moniker, the Crucial m4 is the follow-up to the C300 6Gb/s SSD.

3. Intel 510 250GB

In a surprise move, Intel enters the 6Gb/s field with a third-party controller—the same Marvell 9174 powering all but one of the drives here—instead of one of its own.

4. Plextor M2 Series 128GB

Plextor has yet to make a name for itself in the SSD market after debuting with the unimpressive M1S. Perhaps the new Marvell 9174 controller will help it out.

How We Tested

New hardware, new software for our most comprehensive SSD tests ever

Regular readers of our drive reviews might notice a few changes in our benchmark chart at the end of the article. HDTune and HD Tach, the low-level drive benchmarks, are gone, replaced by CrystalDiskMark, AS SSD, and ATTO. Several factors played into this decision. First, the low-level benchmarks work on the raw disk level, on unformatted and unpartitioned drives. This is useful on rotary drives, but less so on solid-state ones. CrystalDisk-Mark and AS SSD are designed from the ground up to test solid-state storage at the partition level, which better mirrors real-world use. AS SSD’s 4KB low-queue-depth random benchmark gives results that match well with HDTune’s, while CrystalDiskMark’s 32QD 4KB read and write benchmarks parse well with Iometer’s, giving another level of robustness to our storage tests. ATTO shows read and write speeds for a wide array of different block sizes; we use 64KB as a good middle-of-the-road benchmark. Premiere Pro and PCMark Vantage, as real-world tests, remain in our toolbox.

AS SSD is built from the ground up to measure SSD performance.

We still ran HD Tach and HDTune on all the drives in this review, but the end results were not as useful as those from CrystalDiskMark and AS SSD.

We’ve also moved our SSD test bed to a Sandy Bridge motherboard—Asus’s P8P67 Pro with the B3 chipset. Our previous test bed was based on the X58 chipset, which used a Marvell 6Gb/s SATA controller. The P67 chipset’s native Intel 6Gb/s offers better, more stable 6Gb/s SATA performance.

OCZ Vertex 3 240GB

First of the next batch of SandForce drives

Some amount of wheeling and dealing got OCZ access to special firmware for its last-gen SandForce drives, enabling faster random-write performance than the competition. Despite OCZ’s recent acquisition of Indilinx, it seems there’s still a spark to OCZ’s relationship with SandForce, as the company was able to get us an SF-2200 drive before anyone else. Since the Vertex 3 is the first SF-2200–powered SSD we’ve tested, we don’t know how it compares to the rest of the SF-2200 field, but we do know it kicks the pants off of most every other SSD we’ve reviewed.

OCZ retains the solid-state crown with stellar overall performance.

The Vertex 3 uses 25nm-process NAND and, like all SandForce drives, no cache. That SF-2200 controller really cooks, setting records in most of our benchmarks and performing competitively in the rest. No single drive in our roundup matches the Vertex 3 on all fronts, though the Crucial m4 is close in random read/write performance and the Intel 510 comes close to its sequential reads and surpasses its sequential writes. OCZ continues its tradition of blazing-fast random-write performance, both at low- and high-queue depths, serving up more than 85,000 IOPS in our Iometer QD32 4KB random-write test. That’s nearly 80 percent faster than the Vertex 2, the previous SATA champion.

It’s too early to tell whether the rest of the SF-2200 lineup will be able to compete with OCZ’s Vertex 3. But for the few weeks until we get our hands on more next-gen SandForce drives, the Vertex 3 reigns supreme.

OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD

OMG

Blazing-fast performance on all fronts.

EEK

Sequential-write speeds slightly behind Intel 510.

$540, www.ocztechnology.com