I had been wanting a SSD (solid state drive, read flash memory based hard drive) ever since I read about how Intel’s SSDs were capable of performing. Sadly, the price of Intel’s SSDs kept me from purchasing one for myself. In general, the price of all SSDs has been quite high. There have been a few “value” versions of SSDs from various manufacturers that were pretty reasonable in price. But those hard drives lacked the immense performance found in higher-priced SSDs. The problem with a lot of the cheaper SSDs was the controller chipset made by JMicron. The JMicron JMF602 causes stuttering and slowness issues with many SSDs that use it. Part of its problem is the low amount of cache memory at 16KB. But OCZ changed all that with a new controller made by a company called Indilinx and 64MB of cache memory. Go on to see what OCZ has done.
I was not really considering buying an SSD because of the high cost of entry. But then came along this deal on Newegg.com’s Shell Shocker deal page. For $119 ($99 after mail-in rebate) I could finally jump into the SSD game. 30GB is not a lot of storage space these days given that there are traditional hard drives out there with 2TB of capacity. But 30GB is plenty enough space for an OS and quite a few frequently used applications (professional apps like Photoshop and games might be pushing it). I currently am using 12.9GB of 29.5GB of the GPT partition on my drive (an older style MBR partition would have 29.8GB available for use). It is actually a 32GB drive, but 2GB are used to reduce the slowdown that SSDs experience after having been used for awhile. Intel employs a similar technique in their SSDs. Being that this is a MLC flash-based drive instead of the more expensive SLC flash, the cells can only be written to 10,000 times vs the SLC’s 100,000 times. But OCZ has built in algorithms to help manage those limits as well as it can. You still may want to follow some general techniques that others have employed, like disabling indexing. For example, I do not use Folding@Home on this drive since it writes about 100MB every 9 hours. In the long run, that is really not that much, but every little bit helps in prolonging its life. Though I will probably have replaced it within 5 years, let alone the 10,000 writes.
Now for the important part of an SSD: performance. The first thing I did was install Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6 onto it. Surprisingly, the SSD took more time to finish installing than my conventional hard drive did (which was a Seagate 7200.10). The 7200.10 could install OS X in about 10 minutes. The OCZ took about 15 minutes. That was a very disappointing result. But once the OS booted I could see the light. It got to the desktop way faster. The best way to see the improved speed is to launch multiple apps at once. I launched Safari, Firefox, Thunderbird, Adium, VLC, and Picasa as fast as I could click on their individual icons. They all popped up and were almost instantly ready to go.
As far as actual numbers go, the 7200.10 was able to get 74.89MB/sec on sequential uncached write (4K blocks) in Xbench and 31.83MB/sec on sequential uncached read (4K blocks). The OCZ SSD was able to get 267.33MB/sec and 44.94MB/sec respectively. What is even more amazing is the SSD’s performance on random uncached write and read. It got 9.01MB/sec and 24.19MB/sec whereas the 7200.10 got much lower results.
