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RiData Ultra-S Plus 64GB

David Murphy — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 11:00:00 -0600

RiData’s 64GB SSD uses an MLC design to pack more data onto its flash memory chips. We like how that makes the drive cheaper than the majority of SSDs on the market. What we don’t like is how the Ultra-S Plus illustrates the performance losses wrought by using this technology instead of a speedier SLC design.

The Ultra-S Plus was able to overtake the fastest hard drive we’ve tested—Western Digital’s Velociraptor—in two of our benchmarks: a random access read measurement and the overall PCMark Vantage score. Neither win came as a surprise. Because hard disk drives suffer lag while the drive arm moves to the proper location on the disk, flash memory consistently outperforms magnetic storage in random access read speeds. This helped in PCMark Vantage because the app’s eight individual benchmark traces favor read performance and random access reads.

The device’s horrible write performance—including an average random access write speed of 248 painful milliseconds—was enough to drag its PCMark Vantage score below that of all the other SSDs in this feature. And the Ultra-S Plus took more than 1.5 times longer to complete our real-world Premiere test than the fastest SSD we tested, Memoright’s GT-Series 64GB.

RiData’s SSD operates over a SATA 3Gb/s interface, although our initial round of interface speed benchmarks made this drive appear to operate over a bridged PATA connection. We believe that the drive’s MLC flash chips threw off our speed tests at first. But the fact that this SSD gave us such poor read speeds over a SATA 3Gb/s interface doesn’t paint a pretty picture for this device. Indeed, you get what you pay for with RiData’s SSD—we’d much rather have a $300 hard disk drive instead of this solid state drive.

Other SSD reviews in our roundup:

OCZ Sata II

David Murphy — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:00:00 -0600

OCZ uses rebadged Samsung SSD drives for its SSD storage offerings. While we’re confident that OCZ hasn’t done any internal tweaking to the drives, it’s nevertheless interesting to see that a slight performance difference exists between the twins.

In our tests, the Samsung and OCZ drives ran neck and neck in our sustained transfer read and write benchmarks, but the Samsung edged out the OCZ by 1MB/s to 2MB/s in both scenarios. The two drives posted similar results in random access tests, with the Samsung again taking the upper hand in random access write tests.

We saw a larger difference emerge when we ran our Premiere Pro test. It took 17 additional seconds to write the uncompressed AVI file to the OCZ drive than to the Samsung—a difference of 3 percent. Our PCMark Vantage measurement revealed a larger performance gap. The OCZ drive outpaced the Samsung by 5 percent while handily beating the rest of the field.

The showdown between these drives is really more a battle of price than performance, as the street price for each flip-flops among retailers. While the Samsung SSD offers marginally better overall speeds, we wouldn’t pay more for it. We’re satisfied with either SSD.

Other SSD reviews in our roundup:

Super Talent Masterdrive DX

David Murphy — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 11:00:00 -0600

Super Talent’s 64GB SSD must be using the exact same hardware as RiData’s Ultra-S Plus 64GB. If not, then the similarities between these drives are an amazing coincidence. We recorded identical random access read times for both, an underwhelming .39 milliseconds. Both drives’ PCMark Vantage scores were within one-third of one percent of each other, and they varied by just two seconds in our uncompressed AVI file-creation test.

If these two MLC-based drives are indeed brothers in arms, then they’re the two drunken soldiers stumbling around at the rear of the SSD brigade. Like the RiData, the Super Talent’s performance is unacceptable, even given its low price. While the Super Talent drive overtakes our Western Digital Velociraptor in the real-world PCMark Vantage test, we’d be terrified to use this drive as the primary storage for our operating system. Its random access read scores are swift, but this drive’s random access write performance is atrocious: It was more than 7,000 percent slower than a Velociraptor in our tests!

This drive would rock if we only needed to read information from it, but the SSD’s write speeds are simply too slow. There’s an inexplicably large gap between the Super Talent’s slowest and fastest sustained read speeds: 14.7MB/s, as recorded by h2benchw. This doesn’t make much of a difference in real-world performance, but it’s certainly greater than the 2MB/s to 3MB/s difference, at most, that we’re used to seeing from SSDs.

Like the Ultra-S Plus, the Super Talent DX’s sustained read speeds outpace the theoretical interface speed measurement. But this is clearly indicative of a benchmark snafu, as the Super Talent was unable to fill the pipe of its SATA 3Gb/s connection in our real-world tests.

Other SSD reviews in our roundup:

Mtron SSD Pro 7500

David Murphy — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:00:00 -0600

Mtron’s SSD Pro 7500 is the first 3.5-inch SSD we’ve tested, and it’s a welcome addition to our rig if for no other reason than its size. We don’t have to fuss with adapters to attach this SSD to our PC. It’s a small thing, but it’s a feature we wish more SSD manufacturers would adopt.

Mtron’s Pro 7500 exceeded our performance expectations on sustained transfer read rates, putting up a respectable showing that was mere megabytes-per-second behind the second-place SSD, Imation’s Pro 7000, and 14 percent behind our speed leader, Memoright’s 64GB SSD. The drive delivered write speeds comparable to the other SLC SSDs, capping out at 84.2MB/s. This synthetic performance was reflected in our real-world tests, with the Mtron Pro 7500 plowing through our Premiere Pro test in 8:17—a minute and change behind the Memoright SSD, but second place nonetheless.

The Mtron Pro 7500 didn’t perform quite as well as we expected in PCMark Vantage, but it still ran just 2 to 4 percent slower than a majority of the SSDs here. We’re confident that the Mtron Pro 7500 would be able to hold its own if you were to use it as a primary drive for your OS.

We were surprised to find Mtron’s SSD using a SATA bridge to connect to an internal ATA-133 interface. While it might add slightly to the cost of the drive, we’d be curious to see whether a true SATA 3Gb/s connection could pull even faster speeds out of this above-average SSD.

Its speeds are good, but the biggest problem with Mtron’s SSD is that its performance doesn’t reflect the $500 price premium separating this SSD from Samsung’s. The Mtron’s read rates are just 8 percent faster than those posted by Samsung’s SSD, and the difference between the two in our Premiere Pro benchmark is a mere 26 seconds. We love performance, but these meager improvements don’t warrant the added cost.

Other SSD reviews in our roundup: