Is a Solid State Drive in your future?

Posted 07/25/2007 at 4:21pm | by Gordon Mah Ung

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SSD’s have been hyped up lately, but it’s not exactly a new concept. My first experience with flash-based storage was the then revolutionary Hewlett-Packard Ominbook 300. The Omnibook used a combination of ROM cards and an optional 10MB PCMCIA flash card for storage almost 14 years ago. That 10MB optional flash drive set you back $1,200 and performance wasn’t exactly stunning.

In fact, recent web reviews of early SSD’s haven’t blown us away. At best, the drives are posting barely acceptable read speeds of 25MB/s. So we weren’t sure what to expect when MTron’s MSD-S2516 arrived but the U.S. distributor of the drive, Dvnation.com, challenged us to put it against any other portable drive available.
We did. Picking up Western Digital’s new 250GB 5,400rpm beast and Seagate’s 160GB 7,200rpm drive, we expected to see a close race as SSD’s sole promise up to now has been low latency, durability and power savings. The low latency occurs because there’s no head to seek around a rotating platter since it is based on flash memory and the time it takes for the drive to cough up data from one cell anywhere in the drive doesn’t matter. This lack of moving parts greatly increases durability as there’s no head to crash, no motor or bearins to wear out and nothing moves at all. Since there’s no platter to spin up and keep moving, power savings are also very good.

To test the three drives, we used Asus’ new C90s platform. This unique notebook features two things we’ve not seen before. A Core 2 Duo desktop processor and an eSATA port. We tested the drives by installing them in the notebook with a clean copy of Windows XP Professional. We then threw an 80GB Seagate drive into the C90s and tested the drives using the notebook’s eSATA port an external power supply. The notebook runs the slightly older Intel 945P chipset with the ICH7 southbridge.

How does the MTron do? Besides durability, low latency and low power, SSD’s can now finally add another notch in its holster: performance. In fact, it’s spectacularly fast. We saw throughput speeds that nearly doubled that of the speed king: Seagate’s Barracuda. After our tests, we can easily pronounce the MSD-S2516 the fastest notebook in the world. But maybe that’s not going far enough. With constant read speeds of 92MB/s across the “platter” it actually outpaces even the 10,000rpm 150GB Western Digital Raptor in the synthetic hard drive benchmarks HD Tach and HD Tune.

How about real world applications? To test the MTron in a real-world environment, we loaded Windows XP onto the MTron and measured boot times and hibernation times. Surprisingly, we saw no improvement in hibernation. Windows boot times did decrease by a healthy 18 percent though. We surmise that to be the result of the huge decrease in latency with the MTron not just pure read or write speeds. Why? Our tests used the hard drives with a fresh install of Windows XP. While the average read speeds of the drives seems to be a paltry 45MB/s or 48MB/s when compared to the 92MB of the MTron, in reality both the WD and Seagate’s read speeds are likely in the 55MB/s and 60MB/s range with their platters nearly empty. That still gives the MTron a 30 percent advantage and speeds, even with the 32GB version, should be maintained the entire time.

For another test, I ran Adobe Photoshop CS2 using our standard MPC action script. Although CPU speed, RAM and chipset speed can factor into the test, CS2 also hits the hard drive like a wino takes to Thunderbird. We’ve seen fair performance gaps between RAID 0 systems and non RAID 0 boxes with this particular test and there was no difference here as we saw the MTron about 13 percent faster.

Our final test used PC Mark 2005. The hard drive benchmark sequence reads and writes to the hard drive using pattern traces that are generated from real-world applications. Among those pattern traces is a Windows XP boot, a virus scan, application load times for such things as Microsoft Word, Mozilla and Acrobat Reader 5. Again, the MTron crushed the competition with an overall score more than 220 percent faster.

Before you get too lathered up, there is one thing to remember with the MTron: the capacity. Our model featured 16GB of unformatted space. That’s enough to get Windows XP onboard and a few applications but in the age of the digital pack rat, that clearly not enough storage. A 32GB version is on the way out but that increases the already painfully expensive drive’s price from $1,000 to $2,000.