Intel Solid State Hard Disk Drives
Admittedly the title of this blog post is a misnomer as the correct term is “Solid State Drives,” but old habits die hard. Just ask the old IBMers who still call them “hard files.” These are the same folk who tell you to send your presentation “foils” from the meeting and mean that they want your deck of PowerPoint slides. But I digress…
I’ve written about my experiences with SSD drives at length on this blog. Try here, here, and here if you need to go back and refresh your memory. I am a huge fan of SSD drives, and I was excited to finally get a chance to try the new Intel SSD we’ve just started selling. As background, I’ve been using a Samsung 64GB SLC drive since June. I’ve been more than pleased with its performance, but like all things, what once was “WOW,” soon becomes normal and accepted. Intel has been touting the performance benefits of its new drives and I wanted to see if and how the new drive would compare in real world testing on my own system. My results aren’t scientific, but are definitely real as I was able to duplicate the same environment for both my current drive as well as the Intel drive on my own system with my own working preload.
I obtained an Intel 80GB X18-M drive. Right away, the drive gets bonus points for having more capacity than the 64GB I was living with on the Samsung drive. The drive itself uses a newer SATA 300 interface which proved problematic for migration purposes on my T61. While it would show up and operate fine in an Ultrabay drive adapter once Windows was booted, my migration tool of choice, Acronis Migrate Easy, did not want to talk to it when it rebooted into its migration environment.
After much fussing, it finally occurred to me that our ThinkPad W700 would make a perfect migration platform as it has support for dual internal drives plus the required CD drive for booting the software. To make the drive fit, I used a 1.8″ to 2.5″ adapter and had no problems. Also, I did defrag before and after migration to maximize the number of contiguous free blocks on the drive. (As a side note, you absolutely should defrag your SSD on a regular basis. If I need to expound on that in a future post, then let me know in the comments)
After migration, I slid my drive into my T61. It booted up without problem. My goal was to do my normal work routine and also do some basic performance testing to see what the drives were capable of. And, should it matter to some readers, my operating system is Windows XP 32 bit, and yes, I have the latest Intel Storage Matrix driver loaded onto my system. I timed cold boot to a fully loaded Windows desktop with all of my startup programs loaded, opened Lotus Notes, a large PowerPoint file, and then did some copy/paste functions with a large single file plus about 1.7 GB of small files.
The results are pretty straightforward. The Intel clearly has a performance advantage over my current Samsung drive.
Technically adept readers are probably yelling at their screens saying that this isn’t a fair test. I’m clearly pulling a spark plug wire on a 5.0L Mercedes and then taking it to a drag race. For those that have no idea of what I’m talking about, my T61 has an older SATA 150 interface. The Intel drive is capable of newer SATA 300 speeds. In my T61, I’m not giving the drive enough bandwidth to truly give it a workout.
In order to give the drive a chance to show what it was capable of, I next installed it and the Samsung in turn as a second drive on my W700 and performed some testing again. In this case, my OS on that machine is Windows Vista 64 bit.
There’s no question that my T61 was keeping the drive from operating at its optimal speed. I saw small performance gains yet again. However, in my initial testing, the Samsung drive seemed to be performing better than the Intel drive, which did not make sense at all given Intel’s marketing claims and my own experience in my T61.
Upon consultation with some technical folks from Intel, they determined that my drive was still only operating at SATA 150 speeds. I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on here, but in fairness, I am not going to post Intel vs. Samsung specs in this W700 configuration until I get this sorted out. I’m sure it’s a BIOS or driver issue somewhere.
Conclusion
For giggles, I also tried some performance testing in a ThinkStation S10 workstation. It was faster than my desktop sized 3.5″ 7200 rpm HDD! I don’t care if I make Seagate, Maxtor and all of the rest unhappy with this next statement, but the hard disk is dead. Long live the hard disk! There’s a new sheriff in town – SSD. They’re fast, and boy oh boy do they make computing a much nicer experience. If you care about performance at all, buy your next desktop or laptop with an SSD drive. Put your programs and operating system on that drive. Then buy a second spinning HDD to act as a large storage tank for your photos, videos, and music. Back up everything regularly. (You should be doing that anyway.)
As a future experiment, I’d love to try Intel’s enterprise/workstation lineup of X25-E drives in my ThinkStation. If Intel’s “standard” drive shows performance gains over my current ThinkStation drives, I can only wonder what their “enterprise” line will show with its faster write speeds. This drive plus some serious photo editing should be something to behold.
Oh, and one more thing. I ran across this blog post today about how some call center employees are suing their employers for the time it takes to boot up their machines. They claim that it can take 10 – 15 minutes or more to login, load all of their programs, process their updates, etc. At night they have to do the same thing in reverse. During that time they don’t get paid for their work. 10 minutes per day x 5 days per week is an hour per week of their time that they are not getting paid for.
Believe their claims. I’ve worked in a call center before. Call center employees don’t exactly get the newest PCs. There is encryption, malware protection, VM type programs, login scripts, patching, services etc. that all decide to take their sweet time getting started. The machine I used ran OS/2 (which was supposed to be fast) without virus protection or any special configuration and it took 7 minutes to reboot while the hard disk was thrashing within an inch of its life.
Can I suggest to these employers that they buy some SSDs? They’re cheaper than a lawsuit.
November 20th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Very insightful as usual. Can’t wait to get my hands on one of these SSDs and try it out!
Regarding buying call centers SSDs, if cost of 1 SSD per workstation added up is greater than settling the lawsuits, then it’ll be a no-go. This is very likely due to the gigantic size of most call centers and the smaller chance of call center employees suing employers (compared to higher paid, more educated and more informed employees). Same reason why car manufactures don’t always recall vehicles but settle lawsuits instead. Unfortunate.
Ray Shan
November 20th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Hi Matt,
. Actually, the defragmentation is only a heavy wear for flash memory with limited write cycles …
I`am just curious what`s the reason for defraging a electronic memory? The access time is the same for every block of the SSD and block/sector sizes for standard NTFS file systems are so small, that capacity loss is marginal. I don`t really see a point for defragmentation on SSD. It doesn`t help the performance, nor the capacity
November 21st, 2008 at 1:05 am
No, spinning rust isn’t dead; yet.
As you point out, it’s still a vast amount cheaper for bulk storage.
I think the Sun Microsystems guys that gave a talk at work today had a more likely scenario: 10K RPM and 15K RPM FCAL and SCSI are dead (or soon to be). Typically these drives are used where you need high I/O per second and SSD provides that for less money and less power (and about the same drive capacities).
If you need 10TB of storage though, you’re still going to go for spinning rust just for the cost.
I too would like to know more about defragging SSD.
Defragging is (to my knowledge) mostly about getting blocks in a row so that when the head spins over a segment of the disk it can do a contiguous read quickly (and, typically, read a few extra blocks as most reads have some degree of relevance to previous reads and thus can be cached to prevent another disk access). If all areas of the disk are equal latency, defrag doesn’t seem to make much sense.
November 21st, 2008 at 7:38 am
What about battery life? It was also my understanding that SATA 150 in laptops was by design because nothing hit 150 MB/s but by doubling the speed, you double the power consumed by the link itself (though, it lets you put the link in a power save mode faster)
November 21st, 2008 at 7:46 am
Hey Matt,
i’m pleased that you liked my suggestion in comment to your first SSD-post of having an SSD for OS and Programs but a traditional HDD for data you acces less frequently;-)
Did you pass this issue to your notebook designers too? A SSD module of 20GB should still fit in every Thinkpad i suppose. This would be a rather cheap performance boost.
best
Hecke
November 21st, 2008 at 11:47 am
Hi Matt
Thanks for the great post. I’m a big fan of SSDs myself, and I use it for development machines, and it makes a huge difference (http://developerlife.com/reviews/?p=225)!
Can you please explain why SSDs should be defragged on a regular basis? Since seek time is equal for all data on the drive, why would there be a need for this?
Also, I have a T400, and after reading what you wrote about the W700 not being able to connect to the drive using SATA150, I’m concerned if my T400 might be doing the same… I have a Dell XPS which is faster with my Samsung 64G SSD than my T400, and I was always curious why this was. How do I test my Thinkpad to see which SATA interface it’s using?
Thanks
Nazmul.
November 21st, 2008 at 12:13 pm
I’ll address the defrag issue in a future post. I understand the skepticism. Until it was explained to me, I was also in the dark about why you’d need to defrag.
You’re right; I didn’t mention battery life. Jumping from a spinning 7200 rpm HDD to an SSD gave me about 30 extra minutes/charge of runtime. Jumping from the Samsung to the Intel SSD, I have yet to notice any difference between the two. There may be a theoretical advantage of SATA 150 vs SATA 300, but I have yet to notice it in real life.
Hecke — What you’re proposing makes sense, but it’s not likely to be implemented anytime soon. The reason is that you (collective, plural you as in “all customers”) won’t pay for it. All anyone seems to be interested in are cheap netbooks. I personally wish they would go away.
Nazmul — I used the Intel Matrix Storage Manager console to determine the speed that my drive was running at. There is a reporting function built in.
November 21st, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Thanks for another interesting article from you, Matt.
I personally do not think that SSD’s are the solution to the problems of slow booting/slow shut down in Call Centre PC’s. My last job was in a call centre for a well known and rather large UK Travel Insurance firm. The bulk of the problems could be traced to a combination of lack of usage of network storage drives, Windows XP slowdown (due to cumulation of patches and fixes) and really old hardware (more than 3 years old).
For them, replacing all their PC’s with ThinkCentre A/M series Ultra Small Form factor computers would be a better solution.
November 21st, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Matt,
I’m excited about the SSD drives in general, and definitely more specifically about the Intel ones. You said that Lenovo just started selling them… but for what product? I’m kinda biding my time til this drive becomes available for the W series laptops and/or the right combination of ecoupons comes along. (W700, here i come). What kind of timeframe are we talking about for wider availability of these drives? Or would it be smarter at this point to get a W700 with a spinning drive and pick up the X25 separately?
Thanks for the informative posts.
-Marc
November 22nd, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Hi Matt,
very thoughful article. But the bottleneck you “discovered” is actually a design flaw of Thinkpads. Yes, hard to believe, but Thinkpads are limited to about 110MB/s, although the chipset is capable of SATA-300. Why? I have no clue. It has been suggested that it is due to power saving. Your Intel X25-M should boast read transfer rates well in excess of 200MB/s – anywhere, but in a Thinkpad. There have been numerous threads about this issue on the lenovo forums as well as thinkpads.com forums.
I can “kind of” understand that Thinkpads up to the 61-line are limited, just because there existed no drives which could even choke up SATA-150 by the time they were designed. But seeing this limitation on current Thinkpads is kind of frustrating, to say the least.
The Samsung SSD is for Thinkpads actually the better choice, vs. the Intel. Why? Because it has faster write speeds and almost equal read speeds, thanks to Thinkpads 110MB/s limitation.
Maybe you are able to take this serious issue to a higher level, as obviously, it has not been noticed by people at Lenovo who possibly could do something about it. If there is any way to fix it, Lenovo better does.
Please keep us updated on this issue.
Thanks,
-Florian
November 22nd, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Interesting timing. I just completed to tests yesterday using some standard Hitachi 2.5″ hard drives (both SATA 150 and SATA 300) in my ThinkPad T61p and the W500.
For the record, is the W500 primary hard drive bay and connector SATA 150 or SATA 300? What about the new W500 Ultrabay hard drive adaptor?
My tests seem to indicate the primary drive bay on the W500 is SATA 150. Or as you indicate above, there is a bug in the BIOS.
Can you shed some light on this?
November 22nd, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Matt,
Just bought a lenovo at Frys and wanting feedback on your experience with this computer. What is an SSD drive? Thank you for your time and opinion.
Renee
November 23rd, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Those who know to read German and are interested in how SSDs perform read, write, delete operations, what wear-leveling is all about and why flash-chips on SSDs do still have a limited time life etc. might want to read this good explanation of how SSD operate at all.
–> http://www.heise.de/ct/08/21/122/
Maybe those who don’t understand German can use babelfish or the like to get some more or less meaningful translation…
[Start of Text Excerpt]
…
…
There are generell some difference between SSDs which use the cheaper MLC-Flash-Chips instead of the more pricy SLC-Flash-Chips, that’s the reason why SLC-SSDs are meant more for server-systems and MLC-SSDs the mass consumer-markets. MLC-Flash-Chips do store two to four bits per cell and SLC-Flash just one bit. So MLC-Flash chips allow to produce more storage density at the same silicium costs and thus they are cheaper to produce. That’s the reason why SLC-SSDs have often still three times the price of MLC-SSDs.
A usual hard disk commonly needs just two operations “read” and “write”, but a flash-chip needs another third one, a “delete/erase” operation. Before you can write to a flash-chip you need to erase first a whole block of pages (usually 128-512 KByte), during this operation all cells in this block are losing their charge and thus data information.
A fact is that single flash-cells do survive only few delete-cycles, for SLC-NAND around ~100000 cycles, for MLC-NAND even fewer. In order to compensate this problem, the flash-controller distributes writes-accesses evenly about all cells, even if the operating system would only change the same pages. It is commonly a good kept secret of the flash-controller vendors how their individual “wear-leveling-algorithms” do work in practice.
However, there are two known different approaches, during the dynamic wear-leveling the controller distributes write-accesses of changed data evenly over free or to be get free blocks. Here the areas, where data changes often, do wear out heavily until they will fail, in contrast to areas with unchanged data, which would be still able to handle many write cycles. In order to adjust this, static wear-leveling moves unsused or seldom changed data from time to time into strong worn-out cells. This way fresh cells are available in a pool for write-accesses and the lifetime for cells are enhanced before write-fails are encountered. Static wear-leveling enhances the lifetime of the media but for the cost of some performance.
…
…
…
[End of Text Excerpt]
NOTE:
Even SSDs might be very hype, beside the price factor, they actually still have some technical limitations which have to be solved and thus by far not all SSDs perform fast especially when writing data to the flash ships. The flash-chips on SSDs still have their lifetime limitations due to the fact how SSDs perform and handle delete-/erase-write cycle accesses and thus they need some stronger wear-leveling-algorithms in order to compensate some of the technical existing problems.
Another point is, that many SSDs are also not as energy saving as SSD marketing vendor people often tend to advert, which in turn means that you won’t save much battery time at all with some SSDs on notebooks. Here only few vendor models are really proved to be a little more energy saving as modern hard disks.
All in all, only the latest generation of SSDs do offer some better read/write performance and some energy savings in contrast to actual high speed hard disks. – The new Intel SSDs are promising, but the competition doesn’t sleep either, the new soon to be expected Toshiba and Samsung 256 GB SSDs might rise the bar even a little bit higher here and of course the price factor too.
November 23rd, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Renee – see the sites below for an explanation of SSD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-an-ssd.htm
November 24th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Some interesting stuff about ssd’s (second page onwards), and the Intel ssd in general,
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuch.....spx?i=3403
Which Thinkpads, if any, support SATA 300 at full speed ?
November 24th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Hi Matt,
Thank you so much for the wonderful article!
Could you please be so kind in explaining in the future why we absolutely should defrag SSD on a regular basis?
Cheers,
Antonio De Castro.
November 26th, 2008 at 6:53 am
Hi Matt,
as you already stated in former posts, most thinkpads are not bought by individuals but by companies to equip their staff. I can’t imagine that these customers of Lenovo will switch to cheap netbooks. At least in my environment we surely need quite some computation power and not just a browser (i would go for a W400 with a quad core!). In such contexts there should be some extra money for a system SSD device. And 20GB, which is definitely enough, is not that expensive, at least if you compare it to the overall price of your mobile workstations.
best
Hecke
December 1st, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Hi Matt – Like you, I’m thinking about migrating drives in my T61, though in my case it would be from a 7200-RPM disk to a SSD. Unlike you, though, I don’t have a W700 lying around to help with the task. Is there a way around the migration problems you mentioned? Is there a tool other than Acronis that might help?
Thanks,
–Ben
December 5th, 2008 at 8:28 am
I am no defrag expert, but I don’t think the SSD defrag is meant to be the same as a defrag for a conventional magnetic HDD. For magnetic HDDs, file fragmentation seems to be the major problem for reads, and this is less of a problem for SSDs due to their low read latency.
However, where the SSDs stumble seems to be for writes in the scenario where the free space is heavily fragmented, just like for normal HDDs. So SSD defragmentation mainly involves free space consolidation I think.
Is this due to wasted/split I/Os? Don’t know for sure, but you could ask the guys at Diskeeper, they have a blog article on this
http://www.diskeeperblog.com/a.....l#comments
December 18th, 2008 at 3:17 am
Wow what a bunch of jeberish! …. I personally know that the performance on any Intel SSD out performs almoust any other. As far as defrag. …. as many know ….. defrag helps performance by consolidating complete program strings by placing them in complete rows or neer by cells for better performance. Why else whould we defrag? Duh!!!
December 25th, 2008 at 10:54 pm
Hi Matt,
I am looking forward to this forward post regarding defragging SSDs, as, how I understood it, given the near-instantaneous access time of solid state drives, defragging the SSD is not necessary, and just provides an expedited means to its eventual end when it runs out of read/write cycles.
I recently bought an X25-M 80GB for my T60 Widescreen, and have not been able to have much luck with it. I have no idea why, as I have installed Vista, followed by the Matrix Storage Manager (which automatically installs the appropriate AHCI drivers), etc. What happens is that it will tend to freeze at random. I have called Intel and gotten a replacement, but to no avail. My Dell XPS M1530 exhibits the same issue. For now I do not know what to do. Dont get me wrong, when the X25 works, my god it is so fast. But the random freeze on occassion prevents me from keeping this SSD as my primary drive in my laptop. Do you (or anyone) know of this issue and/or a possible solution?
January 4th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
I have been reading up on SSD and one issue I have seen that you all don’t meniton is that there is a definite perfromance issue with SSD drives and Ouutlook 2007 aned the way Outlook coniuntually indexes.
Has anyone heard of this. This si a deal breaker for me as I live by Outlook all day long!
January 10th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Sooooo, which Thinkpad now hows Intel SSD?!?!?!
January 15th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
Bob, it’s not Outlook that is indexing, it’s Windows Search 4.0, if you have that installed you might just get rid of it.
January 17th, 2009 at 6:10 am
Hello,
i am not happy about thinkpads and ssd’s …
I have an 128GB ssd from photoFast (its a little faster the the new intel) and with my x61 i have transferspeeds about 130mb …
With the thinkpad t400 i have about 220mb … it is ok.
Now the w700 comes and i think when i use Raid0 and 2 ssds i have more then 200mb … but NO, i have the same …
Sorry for my bad english. I think when the w700 use Raid0, then are only Sata150 in work. WHY NOT SATA300 Speed ????
Why Lenovo limited the Speed in the X61 or W700 ?
Cheers
February 6th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
So there is no way to use full SATA-300 speeds on my thinkpad X61tablet? What a shame. I just purchased a x25-m 80GB.
February 9th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Any resolution on this yet? Sounds like this might be something that can be fixed with a BIOS update. I need to make some decisions on laptop purchases and this is going to be a deal-breaker. Need to see one of the following:
1) A fix or
2) An official statement from Lenovo with a timeline on when this will be fixed or hardware replaced/repaired under warranty (since they advertise SATA300 speeds).
3) I would have to sell an unofficial statement to get approval but I doubt that will fly.
Reasons are primarily for SSD but aso cache access speeds for hard drives. This is becoming more important with larger drives that use larger cache sizes. Many desktop drives have cache sizes of 32MB and it probably wont be long before we see that on notebook drives as well.
February 13th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Matt, is there any new developments with the SATA 2 speeds in the T60p? I asked because I purchased a intel x25 drive before I discovered the SATA 2 speed was crippled. Lenovo needs to address this problem. I have a T60p, and I am annoyingly disappointed with Lenovo for not informing its custormers that the sata speeds had been lowered. The speed at which the x25 transfers data is a life extender for my T60p. Are there any other standards that my T60p does not fully comply with?
February 13th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Hi Matt,
about the defraging – you were actually right, but not intentionally and somehowe completely wrong at the same time.
Read this http://www.pcper.com/article.p.....ype=expert
Recommending the defragmentation of the drive by standard software tools is completely wrong and at the same time, some kind of fragmentation occurs on the base level and is hard to fight.
You should definitely correct your articles.
February 18th, 2009 at 12:42 am
So, how abou thaving an ssd AND a large normal HD?
The thing I do not get is this – you really want SSD for a system hard drive, and for regularly used (small) data amounts. To put all thos freakily growing GB’s from your digital SLR camera or large scale work data that is accessed infrequently, you want a 400 GB mechanical HD. I’d be happy for years with 64GB SSD plus 300 GB HD in my Thinkpad X series.
The thing is: The (physical) space is there!
Most Thinkpad notebooks have one 2.5″ slot and several (2-3) PCIe slots. Usually, at least one of the latter is not used (unless you have WWAN or Turbocache, or both if you have 3 slots). This is the case in mine, there is an empty slot sitting right there. So, why do the Thinkpads not work with the PCIe hard drives? The newest ones made for the Eee-Pc’s are, while not blazing fast, at least fast enough for this (up to 100MB/s read). From their performance in those machines – I’d take them for my windows drive (fragmented write is not great, but good enough). The thing is, they do not work in the Lenovos. Nor do any other types of PCIe drives. Why is that not done? They do seem to use standard PCI to PATA and SATA implementations, so there should be no protocol issues.
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:27 am
Hi Matt,
I think you’re mistaken about your T61 using a SATA 150 interface.
Lenovo’s published specs list the T61’s transfer rate as 3.0Gb/s, same as the W700. ( ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/.....tabook.pdf )
So why do both thinkpads operate in 150 mode, when they should both operate in 300 mode?
February 26th, 2009 at 6:19 am
An update about this situation. Lenovo has issued an official statement.
Certain Thinkpads advertised as SATA300 are actually limited to SATA150. Lenovo does not plan to fix the issue. Inexplicably, they continue to advertise SATA300 support for the affected models.
http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/b.....amp;page=6
March 10th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Wow, there’s still someone with OS/2 out there. I want the PM, HPFS, Rexx and my T-Shell back!