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CSX 128GB SSD

Nathan Edwards — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:20:35 -0500

As the price of NAND flash memory drops to record lows, more and more hardware vendors are getting into the solid state drive business—and why wouldn’t they? A standard hard drive has lots of moving parts, but a solid state drive is nothing more than a few NAND flash modules, a controller chip, some PCB, and an enclosure. CSX is well known in Europe as a producer of aftermarket RAM for Apple products, and its Diablo gaming RAM has started making waves in the United States. But this 128GB multilevel cell (MLC) SSD marks the company’s first foray into the solid state market.

Single-level cell (SLC) SSDs typically have better write speeds than multilevel cell drives, but MLCs are more common because they’re much cheaper. We’ve tested a few standout MLCs, including Intel’s X-25M, but most of the multilevel cell drives we’ve benchmarked have suffered from poor write speeds.

The CSX SSD’s read performance of 114MB/s is second only to that of Intel’s X25-M, which clocked in at 206.6MB/s. However, write performance, at 25.58MB/s, is only slightly better than that of bottom-of-the-barrel drives from RiData and Super Talent (reviewed as part of our SSD roundup, http://tinyurl.com/9qvwyd). It’s no match for SLC drives like Memoright’s MR25.2-032/64S (http://tinyurl.com/9jnjqg), but, more importantly, it doesn’t come close to reaching the 100MB/s write time the company’s literature claims the drive can achieve.

The CSX garnered the worst Premiere Pro score of any SSD we’ve tested and a PCMark Vantage score that puts it firmly in the middle of the pack—it’s better than RiData’s Ultra-S Plus and Super Talent’s MasterDrive DX, worse than the other drives in our roundup, but not even close to our reigning champion: the Intel X-25. Large-file (greater than 504MB) random-access write times were similarly poor at 107.7ms, with max latency at nearly a full second and average large-file latency hitting 218.8ms. The Intel X25-M, by contrast, has an average random-access write speed of just .09ms.

A peek under the hood of this drive revealed the same JMicron JMF602 controller that’s used in other write-crippled drives, such as Super Talent’s MasterDrive DX and OCZ’s Core. Most SSD manufacturers have stopped using this controller; we hope CSX will do the same in future iterations of the drive.

OCZ's Vertex SSDs Reach 250MB/s Read and 240MB/s Write Speeds

Andy Salisbury — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:09:40 -0600

OCZ has been pretty clear that the delays on their Vertex drives was due to the state of their firmware, and now that they appear to have that part out of the way, they’re boasting some mighty impressive numbers.

The latest version of their firmware speeds up sequential read and write performance, so much that it can keep up with Intel’s X-25E Extreme series. But, the Vertex will feature lower prices and higher capacities.

The Indilinx Barefoot SSD controller that the Vertex uses was initially specified to work at 200MB/s sequential read and 160MB/s sequential write, whereas the latest version was able to blow those old numbers out of the water, now moving at 250MB/s sequential read and 240MB/s sequential write.

Image Credit: OCZ

Intel Cuts SSD Prices to Ward Off Competitors

Andy Salisbury — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:04:21 -0600

Intel has recently slashed the prices on their SLC (Single Level Cell) and MLC (Multi Level Cell) SSDs. This move comes in the wake of the failing economy, but also in the interest of helping to keep their competitors, such as OCZ, at bay.

OCZ claims that their series of SSDs have continued to see delays due to firmware reliability and performance. Reportedly many customers are anxious to buy them, but it is notable that OCZ is doing their best to avoid Seagate’s firmware issues.

Intel is planning for a 128GB SLC drive and a 320GB drive using new 34nm MLC chips in late 2009. For the time being though, their price cuts are mighty significant. Their 80GB model is down fro $585 to $390, 160GB down from $945 to $765 and their 32GB is down from $575 to $415.

Image Credit: Intel

Mtron MSD-S25032

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:54:26 -0600

An early 16GB SATA solid-state drive from Mtron wowed us, but that was just the beginning. The company’s 32GB version of the drive slays all other contenders for the speed crown.

How fast is this bad boy? We put it up against a desktop Western Digital 150GB 10,000rpm Raptor for reference, and the 32GB Mtron MSD-S25032 flat-out smoked it. In fact, the only reason the MSD-S25032 isn’t the fastest hard drive we’ve ever tested is because it’s not a hard drive—it’s a solid-state drive.

So it goes without saying that the other two drives reviewed here, the Seagate Momentus and the Western Digital Scorpio, had no chance of touching the Mtron’s benchmark scores. You can read the scores for yourself and weep for disk-based storage. Average read speeds of 138MB/s—equivalent to those of a striped RAID—and a .1-second access time put hard drives to shame.

The access time is no surprise, as this drive stores data in nonvolatile flash RAM instead of the magnetic platters of a hard drive. This greatly improves reliability since there are no moving parts to crash, no bearings to wear out, and no delay while waiting for the head to seek. To test the drive’s durability, we repeatedly pounded it on a lab bench while we ran our benchmarks. That treatment would kill most hard drives, but the Mtron shrugged it off without even a performance dip.

In HD Tach, the Mtron’s average read speeds of 138MB/s blazed past the 48MB/s achieved by the fastest notebook drive we’ve tested, Seagate’s Momentus 7200.2. Even the desktop 10,000rpm Raptor (reviewed March 2006) can achieve only 92MB/s average read speeds. The MSD-S25032 produced similar results with HD Tune, achieving read speeds of 121MB/s.

We also used PCMark05’s hard-drive suite to judge real-world workloads. PCMark05 uses trace patterns to simulate the read and write loads that a drive goes through when booting Windows XP or starting Microsoft Word, the Mozilla browser, Acrobat Reader 5, or virus scan workloads. The MSD-S25032 crushed all other hard drives in these tests. We saw a healthy boost in our Photoshop CS2 test, as well, but no major gains in hibernation time or XP boot times. Perhaps the bottleneck is the OS?

Unless our benchmarks are lying to us, the MSD-S25032 is the fastest notebook drive available, achieving near RAID 0 performance with a single drive.

Despite the amazing performance, there’s an obvious shortcoming. Let’s face it, 32GB isn’t much capacity today. And the speed comes at an exorbitant price. The MSD-S25032 costs a whopping $2,000. (We’re told by the U.S. distributor of the drive, DVNation.com, that it should be in the $1,000 range very soon.)

Still, for those who need amazing durability and speed, the MSD-S25032 is a winner. Despite the sticker shock, with this kind of performance, we have no choice but to award Mtron’s MSD-S25032 high honors.