While all those benchmark charts displaying 200+mb/s read and 150+mb/s write are impressive to see, it´s also good to actually have some idea of what that extra performance brings you in real life. We prepared two identical laptops with Windows 7 and Windows XP, one had a conventional HDD, the other a brand new OCZ Vertex SSD. The result is worth checking out.
Introduction, Test Setup and Testing Windows 7
Introduction
I’ve been following the SSD scene for quite some time now, waiting for a good moment to step in and buy one for my own setup. When Intel launched their X25-M SSD and all review sites out there reported excellent performance, no matter what you threw at it, I came close to ordering one, but was put off by the high price per gigabyte.
OCZ has been on the frontline of more affordable SSD products from the get go with their Core series (v1/v2) which gave the masses SSD storage at an acceptable price; to get the best performance though you had to do a whole lot of system tweaking, reformatting, more tweaking and in the end you had a fast system, which might still act up from time to time.
Anybody considering buying an SSD should have read this excellent article by Anandtech by now, where they outline the strengths and weaknesses of current lower cost SSDs, the main culprit: the controller. The cheaper controller used in the entry level SSDs can cause severe performance dips when smaller file blocks are written and random I/O is performed; over time performance also degrades noticeable once the drive is completely full. Anandtech put different SSD through their paces, and while the Intel X25 reigns supreme, for the first time there is a new contender, the OCZ Vertex, which uses a new controller.
The OCZ Vertex still benefits from the multiple tweaks you can do to increase your system’s performance with SSDs, but it doesn’t rely on it to perform properly; it works just as well “plug & play” and this is a must for most users out there.
I bought a retail OCZ Vertex 30Gb drive for ~€164 (shipped) from MemoryC.com, not the cheapest out there storage device out there, the most expensive 2.5” drives are below that number; but it’s brand new tech and if you want to be the first, you pay the premium. It came shipped with firmware 1199, I flashed the drive to the latest release at this time 1275.
The Test
Last week I prepared two system images for a Dell Latitude D630, one with Windows 7 Beta and one with Windows XP, I also added Office 2007 and some other random applications, put them all in the startup menu; so I could just push the start button and see which system would finish the bootup cycle and loading up the complete Office 2007 suite (including a prepared Outlook 2007 with 1.2gb PST) first. AVG 8.5 was running in background in Windows 7, McAfee VSE 8.5 on XP.
Some of general SSD tweaks from OCZ forum posted here from XP and here for Vista were implemented, but not beyond the regedit tweaks and enabling “write cache” on the disk. Pagefile, hibernation file were left untouched, no ram drive configured. No SteadyState, no MFT. Those last two give major performance boost, but are far from plug & play; we’re looking at user-friendliness; regedit tweaks and an advanced control panel tab fall into that category.
The laptop system specs are not extraordinary, an Intel 2.2Ghz Dual Core CPU, 2GB RAM, one system had a stock Hitachi 7200rpm 80Gb HDD (which costs ~€40 in webshops), the other system features the OCZ Vertex SSD.
Windows 7 Startup
Here’s the outcome with Windows 7, note: the embed movie from youtube already has HD mode enabled, if you click the fullscreen button you can view the original 1280x720 HD source.
While all those benchmark charts displaying 200+mb/s read and 150+mb/s write are nice to see, it’s good to actually have some idea of what that performance brings you in real life, the SSD powered system is more than three times faster. On two identical systems you can do no other upgrade which will give you such a boost, even a 6.6Ghz CPU won’t overcome the HDD bottleneck. SSDs are the upgrade to consider in 2009, the performance boost is unbelievable.
Do note that we are using a laptop HDD, a very affordable one too, with a desktop 10.000rpm HDD the difference will be smaller, but raw access times and random write/read performance remains unmatched, multi-tasking is SSD territory and even the fastest convential HDDs lag behind here.
Onto Windows XP load times ->
Windows XP and Random I/O Test
Windows XP Startup & Application Loading
Windows XP is the old dinosaur of operating systems still used on desktops today, it was released in October 2001, that’s closing in on 8 years and it’s still going strong (64% of PCs in the world still run XP according to a study done in February 2009).
While SSD is a brand new technology, created long after the Windows XP OS, it’s important that this new hardware works correctly with this major Windows release. This OS does a bit less of pre-fetching and caching than Vista/7 but there are still a few tweaks you can do to make it work better with SSD devices.
So how does the OCZ Vertex cope with Windows XP? Let’s watch and find out.
The embed movie from youtube already has HD mode enabled, if you click the fullscreen button you can view the original 1280x720 HD source.
Startup of Windows XP goes pretty fast on the SSD, the Windows logon prompt shoots by but then it seems to pause for a while, the HDD powered D630 seems to catch up at about 30 seconds into the movie… but then the SSD continues with a blistering fast loadup sequence of all the Office applications (and even 3D pinball), Outlook 2007 takes a bit longer than on Vista, but still fluent, after approximate 1:17 the system with the OCZ Vertex has stopped loading.. the other D630 takes another minute before it catches up.
On these portables Office 2007 runs so-so, Outlook especially is very I/O intensive, especially with larger PST/OST files; while not shown in the movie, I did some tests with help of a colleague to navigate and use Outlook side by side on both machines, searching through 1.2+gb PST file, just listing ALL emails took about 3-5 seconds on the SSD powered system, the D630 with 7200rpm HDD took 20-30 seconds to list them all. Opening a large email with some Excel, PDF and Word documents goes about equally fast on both machines, but opening those attachments is again a world of difference, I’m not exaggerating if I said the SSD did it 5x faster.
So while the SSD offers some blistering fast read and write speeds, these speeds can be matched by some high end conventional HDDs in a RAID array; sequential read/write is not very hard for a hard drive, SSD has it easy there too; where the two differ the most is random read/write speeds; and it’s this difference which make the Laptop with the OCZ SSD so fast; sure its maximum read/write speeds are higher, but it can read data stored randomly on the drive with latencies below 0.1 millisecond. A hard drive on the other hand has to move its mechanical read/write head over the platters to do the same thing, at best you get 7 millisecond access times, but the SSD keeps it below 0.1ms with random I/O, the HDD has 7ms only with sequential, throw a bunch of random I/O at it and performance will suffer tremendously.
To demonstrate this I used the Windows XP setup, loaded up a full disk virus scan with McAfee and ran the HD Tune HDD benchmark at the same time; this is READ only test; McAfee is accessing all the files on the hard disk, checking them for viruses, these files are stored on different locations on the disk, the HD Tune benchmark does a simple sequential read test over the whole disk.
The embed movie from youtube already has HD mode enabled, if you click the fullscreen button you can view the original 1280x720 HD source.
You’ll want to look at the minimum read speeds achieved on both systems, as well as the progress made by the virus-scan, it’s a bit longer than the other movies this one; no need to sit it out, unless you want to.. cutting to the chase:
The SSD lowest value is still 3 times faster than the HDD average. The HDD min speed is 24 times lower than that of the SSD! Access time on the SSD remain at 0.1ms, the HDD is all over the place, averaging at 21ms, while double that value can also be observed.
I summed up what I think of the OCZ Vertex SSD on the last page, but it’s worth repeating: This drive (or the Intel X25 if you can spare the money) is the single most important system upgrade you can do in 2009.
Hope you found this article interesting. For the more high-end enthusiasts out there, we have an article lined up comparing SSDs in RAID, versus multiple Gigabyte I-Ram and a 5.25” device which can hold DDR2 sticks; 350Mb/s+ transfer speeds ahead!
