Orange Planet

What is that you ask?

Well, it’s a photo of an SSD.

Ok, fine, it’s photo of a small corner of an SSD.

A rather expensive, Samsung SLC SSD, I might add.

You see, early Wednesday afternoon, after I took my last final, I was perusing the NBR Marketplace, and I came across a post that nearly made me wet myself. I initially feared that I might have been getting scammed, but I hopped on it nonetheless and hoped for the best. ultimately, the crux of the matter here is that I bought this rather expensive, Samsung SLC SSD for a mere one hundred and ten dollars - shipped

And yes, that implies I did not get scammed; in fact the unit arrived on Saturday and I took some time to put it through its paces. I plugged it into my E6400, installed my fancy-pants Dell OEM XP Pro with SP3 (in fifteen minutes no less!), and ran two benchmarks: the standard HDTune and something new I found called CrystalDiskMark.

The graph for the Toshiba MK8052GSX (default drive in my E6400) was taken some time ago while I was playing music, hence the intermittent spikes in HDD speed. The graph for the Samsung was taken with a clean install, so it’s not a totally fair comparison, but it should get the point across. An HDD obviously slows down as it fills up, and an SSD rapes everything else in access times. Ok great, moving on.

Sequential Read : 51.705 MB/s
Sequential Write : 51.001 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 22.201 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 25.963 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.297 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 0.948 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB

Sequential Read : 94.794 MB/s
Sequential Write : 86.774 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 92.378 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 68.579 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 15.583 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 5.387 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB

CrystalDiskMark really gives us some more interesting numbers to look at, as it tests sequential reads, sequential writes, random reads, and random writes. As HDTune already made clear, an SSD (even the cheapo MLC ones) really flies when it comes to random reads; for blocks of 4KB, the Samsung is something like fifty times faster than the Toshiba. It does not tell us that most SSDs (especially the cheapo MLC ones) are NOT that good at random writes; for blocks of 4KB, the gain in speed is ten times less.

Conclusion? There are theoretical gains all across the board for the Samsung. Furthermore, it makes less noise, draws less power, and has a far greater (theoretical) lifespan than a standard spinner. And did I mention durability? Supposedly you can drop this off a three story building… Of course, for a piece of hardware typically worth more than many laptop computers, I wouldn’t expect any less!

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