Forget Intel's G3 SSDs

SandForce Announces Next-Gen SSDs, SF-2000 Capable of 500MB/s and 60K IOPS - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

The specs in the article are for enterprise parts, but hot damn, if the consumer parts are anywhere near that, then Intel drives will need to be priced competitively.

edit: to be clear, the title was supposed to spoof Jayayess1190's threads, I just didn't want to mimic it too closely.

 

didnt someone post a picture of the g3 using sandforce controllers?

 

I think that was a SandForce controller using new Intel NAND, not the G3 itself.

 

Sandforce uses hardware compression and they use all-zero (ideally compressible data) for their benchmarks, so take their claims with grain of salt. Their real-data performance is much less.

 

Even if the spec’s are true, you can’t take advantage of the speed if your using Sata II, as it will saturate the bus at 250-270M/bs anyway.

 

True, I assume some drives will be using SATA III though, or PCIe like RevoDrive was.

 

I am underwhelmed by the annoucement - (just finished reading the article).

What Ingvarr says about SandForce's 'real data' performance (and my own experience with them) leaves much to be desired.

The most disappointing items:

They will continue with their 'DuraClass/DuraWrite' theme which severely throttles the performance of the drive - when they feel it is working too fast. ???

I agree that right now the SandForce based drives certainly 'feel' the fastest of all the SSD's I've tried (initially), but sustained performance is where I'll put my next money on.

That probably means that an Intel G3 is what my usage patterns require - an SSD that is quicker than any mechanical (in every real world metric, and no, they're not there yet...) and, that is able to sustain that speed advantage as it is used day in and day out.

It may not be the G3 that finally gives me that, but I am still betting that Intel will be the one to deliver a 'complete' SSD first.

 

Definitely a fair point currently, though by the time these drives are in the hands of consumers there will be more SATA 3.0 systems available.

 

SF won't be releasing any consumer-based SATA 6Gb/s drives for a while. Adoption of the interface just isn't there yet. I asked them this very question in our briefing on the enterprise product you referenced.

Incidentally, OWC is the first to announce a product in development using the new SF-2000 processor family. Though I think it's fair to assume OCZ, Viking Modular, etc. are also steaming ahead.

OWC Developing Enterprise SSDs with SandForce SF-2000 Processor | StorageReview.com

 

That doesn't even make sense. Sandforce pretty much is Duraclass and on the fly compression/encryption.

I'm not sure what the obsession is with speed at the cost of everything else but all of the SF-1222 drives are comparable to Intel G2 under the worst conditions that you can subject the drive to which is writing large amounts of extremely incompressible data to the drive in a short space of time (after the NAND has been fully written to, a GC map has been created and Durawrite starts working.). If the data is 2:1 compressible then it writes half as much data to NAND or to look at it another way, appears to complete the i/o sequence twice as fast. Its all an advantage.

And to top it all off, the wear limitation mechanisms built into the controller allowed Sandforce partners to use cheap NAND (the 5k pe/c stuff and not the 10k pe/c NAND you see in the Intels). So after all of the above you can also buy the drives at retail for alot cheaper than an Intel G2 per gigabyte right now and on average it'll last as long. The marketing was hyperbole sure but what with NAND shrinking, you have to use alternative methods of increasing write endurance. More capacity, more spare area for wear leveling, compression. Whatever.

G2 is already quicker than any mechanical hard drive.

 

Not on linear writes.

 

Its fortunate then that theres more to data storage devices than sequential writing eh?

 

Maybe. If you do video editing or often transfer big data arrays, they mean a lot though.
But main point was just that G2 is not quicker than mechanical drive in every important respect, and hopefully G3 will improve on that.

 

That seems like nitpicking to me though. And either way, the tail end of gen2 ssds was dominated by Sandforce which at worst is comparable to a G2 at sequential writes or a fast hdd but if the data is compressible it can appear to be much faster. Here are the extremes from high incompressible to highly compressible using a settled in Vertex 2. Real usage will see transfer rates oscillate between the two extremes depending on compression ratio.

 

I'm more interested in the consumer-grade 25nm NAND Crucial C400, due in early 2011.

 

So Sandy Bridge will bring Sata III notebooks, and I hope someone brings a better SSD than G3 that can utilize it. Any ideas of which maker it would come from?

 

AFAIK the G3 is SATA II since no intel chipsets support SATA III yet.

 

Yeah, unless if AMD steps it up, really hard and fast, it ain't happening. Intel has a rather insurmountable lead (right now) in the laptop market, so whatever they do is what others have to follow. Heck, even nVidia was forced out of the chipset business...

 

Hayte,

First, when DuraWrite kicks in the CDM numbers you posted go out the window. Why? Because SandForce wants us to prolong the pain of ownership. I didn't buy a fast drive to have it throttle down to 'safe' cruising speeds. I bought it to speed up my work (which it doesn't).

Second, with 27% filled capacity, I can't do any work with your test install. My daily data output is bigger after less than an hour of letting the system 'do its thing'.

Third, I've had worse CDM scores and much better CDM scores than what you have posted - at 70 and 80% filled - depending what combination of stamatisx and JJB's tweaks I have used. That unfortunately did not translate into one iota of real world benefit for me.

So, for me, SandForce was tried, tested and (when I get rid of this Inferno) forgotten.

Intel is holding back because it knows all this as a fact. When it has some real (or imagined) competition, it will finally give the world the SSD we deserve.

They have stated several times that what they offer is consistent performance under all workstation loads. That is much more than what SandForce based drives seem to promise, but fail to deliver.

I hope the G3 is the model that will appreciably surpass a mechanical HD in the test that matters most to me: the small matter of getting today's shoot out of the way, in the fastest time possible.

 

While it's true that Sandforce controllers only reach their peak speeds with compressable data it turns out to work quite well in real life. Look at all the real world benchmarks where Sandforce beats Intel G2.

Judging by the specifications of SF-2000 chances are it will beat Crucial C300 and Intel G3 in real life.

 

So are you saying the Sandy Bridge notebooks won't support Sata III, or that the current chips don't? Since G3 isn't being released until Feb., there should be SB notebook around by then or just around the corner to support Sata III.

 

I think most of the problem is that tilleroftheearth's "real life" isn't like the "real lives" of the rest of us. He does photography for a living, which means he's transferring and editing huge photographic files all day long, back and forth, which will hammer his drive with huge amounts of IO... which would seem to pretty much be worst case for a Sandforce drive, forcing it into Durawrite much faster. And, of course, since this is how he makes his living, he can't really take the time to "let the drive recover", if he did, he'd be out of work. So, specifically for tilleroftheearth, a Sandforce drive is almost certainly not the best choice.

 

Yeah and probably every other MLC consumer drive.

 

There is absolutely no reason why you cannot use RAIDed hdds/hybrid drives or, if you have the money, enterprise class ssds for bulk file copy. One of the things hdds are very good at is large sequential read/write.

Phil is right. If you are going to sequentially and continuously hammer your storage device with massive, incompressible files then you got better and cheaper options available to you than client class ssds. If you RAID a few WD Caviar Blacks together you'll get huge sequential read/write speeds - faster than any single ssd on the market at the moment, it'll cost alot less money and it will give you vastly more capacity.

 

Fair enough, I can see it from your perspective (sort of ).

But consider this:

I'm not using enterprise (SAS) drives currently either in my notebooks nor my desktops.

Maybe I'm just not getting the 'next gen' storage subsystems available are not meant to be used to store/copy/move/delete stuff on them - like yesterday's consumer products can do daily for years (and years and years...).

And yet they still command a (too) high price tag?


I'm sure someone can find another point that 'shows' why I 'just don't get it' about SSD's, but a storage subsystem's goal is simple:

Store and retrieve the data I want as fast as possible each and every time.

To become the 'next gen' storage subsystem that actually replaces the above, you can't put in arbitrary restrictions like (limited) amount of writes, throttling (to 'supposedly' prolong the nand's lifespan) and at the same time ask for ridiculously more money all at the same time.

So yeah, we agree 100% no more SandForce toys for me.

INTEL! Wake up! I need yoooouuuu!!!

 

Assuming of course, that the system offers at least two drive bays, right?

 

... and you can RAID SSDs too, don't forget

 

You don't need two drive bays. eSATA and expresscard (for another eSATA) will do just fine with an enclosure. Even then its debateable whether you even need to RAID. Single hdds are fast at sequential writes.

 

One thing I would find interesting would be a log of how much tilleroftheearth actually writes to his drive in the average day, kind of like the Host Writes listing that the Intel SSD toolbox has. I just think it'd be interesting to see exactly how much data he writes per day, or week, or whatever and see how it might stack up against what might be considered to be a more "normal" usage scenario. I'm not sure if that Host Writes SMART attribute is for Intel SSDs only, however.

 

Judicator,

I have posted screen shots (I think?) of what the usage was reported to be with SSDLife on a couple of different threads.

Basically, I wrote around 100GB/day - average - around 3TB in about 30 days (if I am remembering the numbers right). More accurate though was 3TB in 14 days and then basically not using the computer for much else except browsing the internet...

I know, I know, while Intel has stated that their drives will still be alive (5 years later) and usable after that kind of daily use (for MLC drives: the SLC drives can do even more), I incorrectly thought that SandForce based products were at the same level and also that they would keep the initial blush of speed over the Intel (as witnessed in the same system when I tested them side by side). Oh well, live and be burned/learn.

Right now, SSDLife reports almost 10 years of life left in the SSD, with almost 5TB data read and over 3.1TB data written.

While that may sound great superficially - keep in mind that for the last couple of weeks I have been using this system mostly as an iPad (ie: for non-productive 'work')

Not as a very portable workstation as I intended it to be.

 

Reads aren't really important, what really wears is writes, but still... 3 TB over 14 days? That's like... 5 times what Intel calculated that they would warranty their drives for (100 GB a day). Granted, you didn't keep that up, but still. I think you've definitely gone beyond "normal" usage levels.

 

Are you saying I'm a heavy user?

Must I go on a 'data diet' to get to use the new toys?

Doesn't any SSD maker have a 'real' SSD that allows me to be who I am?

 

Holy Crap! Your creating downright sick amounts of data there. We better warn Intel not to sell you any SSD's

Who you are is not normal man, they haven't built a SSD for you yet.

 

the most irritating thing of all these SSD softwares is that they can't read Crucial C300 drives but i'm waiting to see how the G3's do...

 

Ha! I've been told that my whole life...

And I keep finding out about the 'haven't built one for me yet' each time I try a new one.

 

I suppose maybe an enterprise-class SLC drive might be what you're looking for, although those will be quite expensive. Or maybe an Intel, although I think G2s had somewhat slow write speeds, and thus might not be quite as fast as what you were looking for. And with your data rate, even a G2 would wear pretty quickly. Maybe you need to buy a "big" drive, like a 160 GB G2 and only use half of it? That would theoretically make it last twice as long... maybe.

 

In theory an Intel G2 would wear quicker than a Vertex 2. It uses the same memory while it lacks write protection mechanisms like DuraWrite.

 

Well, yes. This was more of a "would last twice as long as an Intel of half the size" sort of argument, as it would have twice the space to perform wear leveling on, and thus individual NAND cells should receive approximately half as many writes. A Vertex 2 would probably last longer thanks to Durawrite, but would (apparently) suffer in terms of the performance that tilleroftheearth needs.

 

Need? Really, how many months has it been since we were all using hard drives? Sometimes I think this 'need' for performance is blown out of all proportion. You didn't need it last year or the year before and you were doing what you were doing just fine back then.

SSDlife doesn't report correctly and has been noted before. 100gb of writes per day is highly unlikely and it would put him in the top 0.1% of users in enterprise space according to the studies cited by Intel in their own JEDEC presentation. You might want to use a program like Procmon to track write patterns to your drive and then post a screenshot of the results but until then its more likely that human error is involved here somewhere. It is incredibly hard to believe that a non enterprise user is writing that much data every day and if you are there is something staggeringly inefficient going on. Now if the data has alot of redundancy then its compressible and if its compressible then Sandforce isn't writing as much as you think to the drive anyway. If its not, you really have to question why you have bought a client class ssd that gets around cheap NAND by using on the fly compression.

eSATA hdd RAID array is out of the question? A single external hdd + boot ssd is out of the question? It isn't possible at all for you to reduce the amount of writes to your ssd by moving some of them onto an external hdd or by changing your workflow? Compressing/zipping files before file copy? It isn't possible for you to buy one of the SF-1500 type SLC enterprise drives? None of these things are possible? If not then why not?

Lastly, saying Sandforce drives will 'likely' last longer than Intel drives is a really shaky statement because hardly anyone but Sandforce knows how its Duraclass technologies work let alone the fact that usage patterns are also an important determinant. Duraclass can't help you if you batter the NAND with totally incompressible data all day, every day.

 

Hayte, for my less than 20 month old notebook (VAIO) I have replaced the shipped HD 3 times.

From some kind of 320GB 5400 RPM offering to the Scorpio Blue 500GB, then the Hitachi 7K500 500GB to the Seagate XT hybrid 500GB drives.

Each upgrade gave me increased performance relative to the cost of the upgrade ($70 to $140 each time).

I saved valuable time transferring/dumping 200-300GB of data to my desktops for backup each one or two days, I saved time by being able to produce/store more data without worrying that I was running out of space and therefore not being able to finish that 'step' - and I also saved time by the fact that with the nice bump in size (320GB to 500GB) I was able to effectively partition the HD's to keep that sustained performance with minimal manual maintenance on my part.

So, yeah, when you're measuring actual productivity (and not 'snappiness' - not the same thing by a long shot), I do 'need' real performance increases even now.

The difference is having the luxury of (at least) supper each night with your family (shooting schedule permitting) instead of using your home as a place where you simply sleep and brush your teeth at.

 

Are you saying that current that ssds (client or enterprise class) aren't fast enough for you? It still sounds like you are better off just rigging up a big raid-5 array with Caviar Blacks or Velociraptors at home so you can plug into and blitz your file copy. Vastly bigger capacity, huge sequential read/write speeds right there, redundancy in the event of drive failure, write endurance is a non issue and it'll cost less than RAIDing ssds anyway.

 

As I recall, tilleroftheearth does have a RAID array of Velociraptors at home. His issue is trying to get some work done while on-site at a shoot. Remember, he's a photographer, who has to shoot at various locations. His point is that he's trying to get some work done while he's on location, before he goes home. I'm not entirely clear on how long or how far some of his shoots may take him from home, but if one of them lasts, say, a week or so and happens to be somewhere where he can't go home everyday, he's going to have a bit of an issue trying to access that home array.

 

From here on on topic please: Next generation Sandforce and Intel drives.

 

So, on topic... as far as we know right now the Gen3 SSDs from Intel will NOT be Sata III? That really makes no sense seeing as how intel is supposedly bringing out Series 6 chipsets soon and I'm assuming those will be Sata III (6GB/sec). The currently offered Crucial C300 is Sata III capable.

There's no way I'll buy a Gen3 if they can't do Sata III because my next notebook will definitely have Sata III in it.

 

I don't think it'll be that big a deal, unless you do lots of sequential writes and reads. For most people, the things they do on their notebook fall much more heavily into the 4K instead of the sequential, and 4K read/writes are even now _just_ saturating the SATA I (1.5 Gb/s) barrier. Also, although this may just be a quirk of the C300, note this portion of Anandtech's C300 review that notes that a C300 on a SATA III (6 Gb/s) controller is actually slower than on a SATA II (3 Gb/s). A G3, unless Intel has come up with a radically different new controller (and initial specs seem to be more of an upgraded version of the G2), may well have the same sort of problem.

 

I'm wondering if, as he says, this may be a driver optimization issue. With a SATA III controller and an updated, SSD optimized IRST driver perhaps that particular bottleneck might just go away. Or perhaps a firmware update (or a C400) will do the trick.

 

Either way, in real life situations, the difference isn't going to be significant since the random R/W aren't bottlenecked.

 

I had an 80GB Intel G2 but sold it and want to try either:
OCZ Vertex 2 or
Crucial C300.
I'd like to hear any arguments pro or con either one.

Looking at Newegg reviews for the Vertex kind of scares me -- a lot of dead drives RMA'd.

 

You're not going to notice a difference in performance between any of those models. Why exactly did you sell your Intel and what do you expect out of another SSD?

 

The Intel was sold due to noticeable performance degradation over a period of only 3 or 4 weeks with "normal" or "average" usage. The drive was used with Windows 7 as the OS, so TRIM and alignment were not issues. Also, I was using the 9.6 (or later) IRST driver.

I'm hoping to find a drive available now that can keep its performance up to a reasonable level during its operating life. But, I can wait for early 2011 if necessary. There are some here who extol certain brands and disparage others. I'm just looking for long-term usage reports (long-term being a very relative term here) that show little or no performance degradation.