Is a Solid State Drive in your future?

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.

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There’s also some concern about the drive wearing out. You may not know it but flash memory has a limited amount of times that you can write to it. With my old Omnibook 300, I had to occasionally run wear leveling software to ensure that there weren’t premature dead cells occurring. Those dead cells would stop responding to write commands. While you could read from them forever, the cells would essentially turn into read only memory. That still occurs on flash memory today but the algorithms to minimize it and the cycles has increased so much that it really isn’t a factor. In the MTron’s case, the company claims a write endurance of greater than 140 years with you writing or erasing 50GB per day. If true, that means the notebook will long be in the scrap pile before you ever wear out any cells.
Still, at 16GB, the MTron has pretty limited applications. If you are particularly rugged on your notebook the MTron certainly is the go to drive. If you also have a special needs application that sings on low latency or drive access, the MTron is also particularly attractive. However, I’d have a hard time swapping the 5,400rpm 160GB Seagate drive in my notebook today to squeeze into 16GB. I just can’t put myself on that kind of data diet even for the incredible performance.

The Western Digital impressed me as WD is a fairly new player in notebook hard drives. For it to leap ahead of Seagate (largest drive is 160GB), Fujitsu (largest shipping drive is 200GB) and Toshiba (largest drive is 200GB) is surprising. The Scorpio does very good in the benchmarks considering its 5,400 spindle speed but that’s due to the areal density of the unit. It packs 250GB on two platters with four heads. That’s 125GB per platter. The Seagate also uses two platters but only hits 160GB or 80GB per platter. That makes the Scorpio attractive for those willing to give up performance for capacity.

That still leaves the Seagate 160GB as the reigning performance champ of notebook hard drives though (note we said hard drives not SSD’s). In the synthetic tests, the Scorpio lags by just 5 to 7 percent but in PC Mark 2005’s test, the numbers get a bit uglier. The Barracuda comes up with numbers generally 30 percent faster than the Scorpio when traces of real programs are applied to the platters. Our Photoshop CS 2 test, however found a very slight difference between the two and boot and hibernate times were similar.

If forced to choose between the 7,200rpm Barracuda or the 250GB Scorpio, I’d almost go with the Scorpio for the storage. One thing does give the new Barracuda an advantage over the Scorpio though. It features an internal G-force sensor – an accelerometer – that can sense a drop and parks the head to hopefully reduce the chance of data loss. Even there the MTron has the final word. For one test, we ran HD Tach while we repeatedly dropped the drive on the table from a height of three inches and rattled it on a hard surface from different angles. At worst, that’s a death sentence for any hard drive, and at the least, it’s a major performance lag as the internal accelerometer would halt read/writes during the impact. The Mtron, of course, just shrugged it off. I think even a paint shaker wouldn’t phase the unit.

 

Specs
Make	WD Scorpio	Seagate Barracuda	WD Raptor	Mtron MSD-P25016
Model	WD2500BEVS	ST9160823ASG	WD1500ADFD	MSD-P25016
RPM	5,400	7,200	10,000	N/A
Platters /Heads	2/4	2/4	2/4	2/4
Interface	SATA150	SATA300 w/ NCQ	SATA150	SATA150
Buffersize	8MB	8MB	16MB	8MB
Warranty	3 years OEM / 1 Year retail	5 years	5 years	5 years

 

 

HD Tach Scores
Make	WD Scorpio	Seagate Barracuda	WD Raptor	Mtron MSD-P25016
Avg. Read	45.5 MB/s	48.4 MB/s	75.4 MB/s	92.4 MB/s
Random Access	17.7 ms	14.2 ms	8.2 ms	.1 ms
Burst	112.5 MB/s	116.8 MB/s	127.4 MB/s	93.8 MB/s
CPU Utilization	2%	1%	5%	2%

HD Tune Benchmarks
Make	WD Scorpio	Seagate Barracuda	WD Raptor	Mtron MSD-P25016
Avg. Read	43.6 MB/s	49.2 MB/s	70.9 MB/s	81.1 MB/s
Maximum Read	56.3 MB/s	59.7 MB/s	82.4 MB/s	81.5 MB/s
Random	17.9 ms	14.7 ms	8.3 ms	.1 ms
CPU	2.5 %	2.7 %	4.4 %	4.9 %
Burst	82.4 MB/s	91.5 MB/s	106.9 MB/s	77.8 MB/s

 

PC Mark
Make	WD Scorpio	Seagate Barracuda	WD Raptor	Mtron MSD-P25016
Overall	3,997	4,874	7,266	15,791
XP Startup	6.3 MB/s	8.5 MB/s	11.9 MB/s	49.9 MB/s
App loading	4.8 MB/s	6.7 MB/s	11.6 MB/s	40.5 MB/s
General Usage	3.8 MB/s	5.2 MB/s	9.6 MB/s	33.7 MB/s
Virus Scans	84.6 MB/s	79.9 MB/s	88.2 MB/s	89.1 MB/s
File Write	42.9 MB/s	47.9 MB/s	71.3 MB/s	67.3 MB/s

Maximum PC Benchmarks
Make	WD Scorpio	Seagate Barracuda	WD Raptor	Mtron MSD-P25016
Photoshop CS2 script	4:43 Min:Sec	4:46 Min:Sec	WNR*	4:07 Min:Sec
Hibernate	12 sec	13 sec.	WNR*	12 sec
Wake	25 sec	25 sec.	WNR*	21 sec
Boot	57 sec	58 sec.	WNR*	48 sec

Bold denotes winner.

* We could not physically install the WD Raptor in our notebook PC so we did not run these benchmarks.