There has been a huge amount of hype and misinformation in the solid-state drive debate as of late and whether it’s a technology that’s ready for primetime; I recently purchased one with my newest computer and want to offer some real-world tests. The drive in question is a Samsung 64GB SATA SSD (1.8″, Model No. MCCOE64G8MPP) which came along with my ThinkPad X200, surplus from the thin-and-light X300 I’m sure. It’s a SLC (single-level cell) drive which offers faster transfers and a longer lifespan than the cheaper MLC drives that are coming onto the market, but I’ll delve into those differences a bit more later on. First, let’s see how the drive performs…
In some basic testing with the HDTune benchmarking utility, the Samsung drive performed admirably. With an average read speed of 67MB/s and a peak speed of 88MB/s, the drive offers about twice the performance of a standard 5400RPM SATA laptop hard disk. Where the drive really shines is the almost non-existent access times on your data. In this test, the average seek time was 0.3ms where a traditional notebook is comes in at 15-20ms (or about 50-60x slower). Read/write performance also does not suffer from the pitfall that platter-based drives do, which is that information reads at the same speed regardless of where the data is physically on the drive.
The file read/write benchmarks told the same story as the standard read test. When using the 64MB file size, the drive offered consistent performance peaking at about 100MB/s reading data and 90MB/s writing. Comparing this to the tests of the reference Seagate hard-disk drive, it was consistently more than twice as fast as the traditional drive peaked at 40MB/s (HDD benchmark charts are provided at the end of the article). Boot times are not a terribly relevant or accurate way to gauge a computer’s performance, but since gamers/nerds are always clamoring for them, I’ll include them anyways. With the SSD, a the laptop booted to the Windows login screen in 34 seconds and at the desktop with all startup items loaded in a total of 39 seconds. With the HDD, those same tasks were completed in 46 seconds and 58 seconds respectively. Both of these tests were with the same drive image running Windows Vista on an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz notebook computer.
As for the SLC vs. MLC debate referenced earlier, it’s all a matter of cost. The best performing SSDs on the market are SLC drives. SLC drives offer better performance, lower power consumption and a longer-lifespan (100,000 write/erase cycles per sector as compared to 10,000 cycles on an MLC drive). MLC (multi-level cell) drives are cheaper to manufacture and are quickly becoming popular because of the lower price point. The lifespan argument loses its utility when one takes into account that 10,000 write/erase cycles is averaged/leveled out through the drive’s own firmware so the same cells aren’t constantly being rewritten (and since SSDs have a near-instant access time, there is no ill-effect on performance). Also, the useful life of a consumer notebook computer is surely less than that of the drive. In either case, a solid-state disk can greatly enhance the performance and battery life of a notebook, but it does come at a hefty cost.
Seagate HDD Benchmarks