Worth Reading?
+20 [22 votes]
Loading ...Earlier this month Samsung sent over their new 64GB solid-state drive for us to play with, and Vincent promptly slapped it into his MacBook Pro to see whether it made much of a difference in access speed. Well, we’ve finally dragged it away from him, extracted the SSD and put it through some benchmark testing.
As a test machine we used Alienware’s m9750 laptop running Windows Vista 32-bit (as we reviewed here), comparing the Samsung 64GB SSD with Sandisk’s 32GB SSD in both single and dual-drive RAID-0 configurations. After each hardware change we reinstalled the laptop’s OS using Alienware’s supplied restore disk, then ran HD-Tach and HD-Tune to test burst and transfer rates.
HD Tach - set to test the drives with Long Bench 32MB zones - looked first at burst rate; each of the three configurations ran through the tests three times, and we’ve used the median of those three here.
As you can see, Samsung’s 64GB SSD was edged out by over 10MB/s by the single Sandisk 32GB drive, and as expected the RAID-0 array of two 32GB drives stormed ahead with almost 127MB/s burst speeds. We then ran HD-Tune to bench transfer rate, again running the tests three times per hardware setup and taking the median result.
Surprisingly, the Samsung drive showed much more consistent speeds than its rivals in terms of range, but it was nonetheless produced the slowest transfer rate compared to the single 32GB SSD and the RAID array. As Samsung claim, though, the access time is certainly sub-1 second, and the 47.3MB/sec average rate compares favourably to the quoted read and write speeds (of 57 and 32MB/s respectively).
Is it worth choosing SSD over a traditional platter-based drive in your next laptop, then? Looking solely at performance, the answer has to be yes; however price is still a significant factor and the number of machines that even offer solid-state storage remains limited. As for choosing between the 32GB and 64GB options, that comes down to your need for space versus how quickly you must access that space; yes, a twin-drive RAID array might give the best of both worlds, but few laptops offer that setup. Considering it’s not unusual to see platter-based drives of 100GB+ sizes in even entry-level portables, we’d lean toward the larger Samsung SSD. Yes, its performance isn’t quite on a par with the Sandisk drive, but the extra capacity makes it eminently more practical.
In my benchmarks this disk is at least 3 times SLOWER than the regular hard disk when writing small files to the disk, which is the case if you compile programs - it slows the compiler speed at least 2-3 times compared to the regular disk. I guess Samsung got greedy and did not install any cache memory into the $1000 drive! The flash itself is known to be very bad with writing a lot of small files to the disk.
ha, this article threw me off at first. I thought it said that Samsung had created a 64 GB SD memory card :-) That’ll be the day.
Art, that is one of the flaws in ssd. It has poor large random write performance which is likely causing your slow down. What I would recommend you do is get a seperate platter based drive to write files to when compiling.
Laptops that offer SSD’s also have the option for a 2nd “storage” drive, why not make it a platter to get rid of this issue?
Another solution would be to have a large USB drive that’s platter based.
I just bought the XPS M1730 with 64GB ssd and I certainly don’t regret it. Prices are coming down on the SSD’s, the samsung 64GB is already at the $800 mark. I expect this value to half in the next 6 months if you have the patience. I personally couldn’t wait to get my hands on this new technology.
I just read a long article about ssd drives, here is the link http://www.nextlevelhardware.c.....attleship/
And it is true, write time is slower, but there is some work going on to improve that.
Here is a copy and paste of a part concerning write speed
credits to Author: Dominick Strippoli
“Write performance is not yet a perfect and refined process using NAND flash and you will not have a drive that is going to write file operations as well as a high end U320 15K SCSI or SATA 10K setup. There is a company that I have been talking with directly about this NAND flash write issue called EasyCo in PA, USA. They are working on a process called MFT technology and they offer a simple MFT driver that is claiming to increase random write IOP’s on a single drive up to 15,000 IOP’s. Doug Dumitru had explained to me this technology will take your standard Mtron 16GB Professional drive and turn it into an enterprise behemoth. Anyway, short IOMeter sum-up: The single drives perform up to 33X faster than SCSI/SAS mechanical drives in a webserver 8k random read configuration. Raid scaling increases IOP’s exponentially”.
check the link. he made a good job and published interesting results as well for gamers :o)