The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Sequential Read/Write Speed
Finally, to the roundup. We’ll start with the traditional tests. Using the latest build of Iometer I ran a 3 minute long 2MB sequential write test over the entire span of the drive. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire test length:
Sequential write speed was what all SSD makers focused on in the early days of consumer drives. The JMicron lesson taught us that there's much more to system performance than sequential write performance, and most have learned. Regardless, sequential write speed is still very important and as we can see here the majority of drives do very, very well. The high end Indilinx drives approach 190MB/s, while Intel's SLC X25-E actually breaks 200MB/s.
The same can't be said for Intel's mainstream MLC drives, both of which are limited to 80MB/s. While it doesn't make the drives feel slow in real world usage, it is a significant blemish on an otherwise (as you'll soon see) flawless track record.
The standings don't really change with the drive in a used state. The Indilinx drives all fall around 15%, while the Intel drives stay the same.
Ha! Read speed is ridiculous on these drives. See the wall at around 260MB/s? We're hitting the limit of what's possible over 3Gbps SATA. Expect read speeds to go up once we start seeing SATA 6Gbps drives and controllers to support them.
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Bonesdad - Sunday, October 10, 2010 - link
Been over a year since this article was published...still very relevant. Any plans to update it with the latest products/drivers/firmware? There have been some significant updates, and it would be good to at least have updated comparisons.Well done, more more more!
hescominsoon - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Excellent article but you left out sandforce. I'm curious if this was an oversight or a purposeful moission.PHT - Friday, September 28, 2012 - link
This article is fantastic, the best I ever read about SSD.Any follow up with new SATA III drives and new controllers like SandForce, new Indilinx etc.?
I will be glad to see it.
My Best
Zygmunt
lucasgonz - Wednesday, October 16, 2013 - link
Hello everyone.This post is quite old but I hope someone can answer.
I am concerned about the life of my ssd (sandisk extreme 240). I performed partitions ignoring the issue of the level of wear and partitions. I have it for one year ago with a 30gb partition and one with 200GB. I wanted to use large drive for data but I did not have time for that and just use the first 30gb partition . My question is if the ssd may be damaged by using only a little segment. DiskInfo shows 10tb reading 18 tb and writing.
sorry my poor English.
Thanks for any help.
Ojaswin Singh - Monday, January 13, 2014 - link
Hey,This is the most informative article i have ever read.Can You Please clear Out Some Of my Doubts:-1.Does Playing Video Games or Running Programs add to Writing on the SSD
2.Is 1 Write Cycle=Filling 120GB of SSD once
3.I really write on my HDD a lot(Seriusly a Lot) So how much life cycle can i expect from Samsung 840 SSD(Neither Pro nor EVO) I mean for how much time can i expect it to be writable
Please Help me cause i want the speeds of SSD but i want it to last for me too
Thanks,
Ojaswin