*****Kingston SSDNow V Series Solid State Drives*****
- Thread starter Slackworth
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Looks like they scale pretty well to me (although this is with a hardware RAID controller)
Soldato
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they basically saying RAID is a waste of time for any SSD? no noticable increase in anything over 1 drive.
unless the drive has low read/write speeds?
unless the drive has low read/write speeds?
I'll admit I only read the 1st page of that link, but to me the glaring factor was the fact he was copying/installing the files from a 16Gb SSD from USB. Surely USB2.0 cant handle the speed required to transfer files to a SATAII SSD drive, which is why there isn't much difference between the two test.....
I know I may be talking rubbish, but I am sure I am about to learn
I know I may be talking rubbish, but I am sure I am about to learn
I've not had a chance to type a proper reply - I also feel I was a little bit harsh in my first post in this thread.
Anyway...
The issue is that the rated sequential speeds for an SSD do not give any accurate picture of how the drive will perform in real use.
Whether we are using a database, playing games, or simply just running an operating system sequential transfers are almost irrelevant.
What matters is a combination of factors, but a lot of it boils down to their IOPS capability.
The "king" is the Intel X25-M. It's actually better for desktop use than the E. It has the best IOPS performance of all consumer/prosumer devices. The Vertex isn't too far behind, and it also performs better in other areas. The end result is the Intel is a shade better, but realistically there's no way to tell other than benchmarks... and you can show the Vertex being better or the Intel being better depending on which benchmark you are using.
The dual JMicron internal RAID0 drives (Apex for example) have roughly the same sequential speed performance as the Vertex. From that you would expect the performance to be roughly similar. It's not the case. The Vertex handles IOPS miles better, so in real use it far outperforms the Apex.
xx05 RAID cards from Adaptec are not any improvement over ICH10R motherboard raid. This is apparently due to them being SAS cards that can also do SATA. They're not designed for high SATA performance, and in fact drives drop from the arrays frequently if there's more than 2 connected. Conversely the ICH10R seems to perform for most people very well for 2 drives.
I know very little about this Kingston drive. The price however is fantastic. It's a huge price drop for that amount of storage. However we don't know at this stage whether it performs well or not. Putting them in RAID would help, but it wouldn't help much, and if the IOPS performance is poor then it's not going to help.
There's a huge big issue with SSDs and "dirty" cells. Any time a cell is written to, it needs to be erased before it can be written to again. Windows 7 comes with TRIM, which will solve this problem. As far as I'm aware no drive currently supports the way W7 RC1 has implmented TRIM. All that currently exists is proprietry TRIM on Indilinx drives (SuperTalent, OCZ). They have a very simple program which creates a file the size of all the free space, and then issues TRIM commands for all of that space. The end result is that all the free space is "clean". Without the ability to TRIM drive performance will over time drop to roughly 50%. It seems to affect reads to a lesser extent as well. As soon as the drive is TRIMmed, then performance is restored. Some people have reported success with CCleaner, as it sends secure erase commands which if they make it through device drivers can be intepreteted by some drives as the same as TRIM. The JMicron drives for example in some circumstances have had performance restored by it.
TRIM does not work under RAID at all. It's going to be a while before RAID controllers support it, and not all will implement it. Adaptec have confirmed they are going to do it though, but it's unclear if it'll just be the 2405, 5x05 series, or if they 3x05 series will also have it.
In short though, regardless of what controller this Kingston drive has it's a fantastic price. Just don't expect to be able to exceed the performance of X-25 or Vertex/Summit drives by simply adding more drives, it doesn't work like that.
The benchmark that needs to be done on these Kingston drives to show how they really do perform is Crystalmark.
Anyway...
The issue is that the rated sequential speeds for an SSD do not give any accurate picture of how the drive will perform in real use.
Whether we are using a database, playing games, or simply just running an operating system sequential transfers are almost irrelevant.
What matters is a combination of factors, but a lot of it boils down to their IOPS capability.
The "king" is the Intel X25-M. It's actually better for desktop use than the E. It has the best IOPS performance of all consumer/prosumer devices. The Vertex isn't too far behind, and it also performs better in other areas. The end result is the Intel is a shade better, but realistically there's no way to tell other than benchmarks... and you can show the Vertex being better or the Intel being better depending on which benchmark you are using.
The dual JMicron internal RAID0 drives (Apex for example) have roughly the same sequential speed performance as the Vertex. From that you would expect the performance to be roughly similar. It's not the case. The Vertex handles IOPS miles better, so in real use it far outperforms the Apex.
xx05 RAID cards from Adaptec are not any improvement over ICH10R motherboard raid. This is apparently due to them being SAS cards that can also do SATA. They're not designed for high SATA performance, and in fact drives drop from the arrays frequently if there's more than 2 connected. Conversely the ICH10R seems to perform for most people very well for 2 drives.
I know very little about this Kingston drive. The price however is fantastic. It's a huge price drop for that amount of storage. However we don't know at this stage whether it performs well or not. Putting them in RAID would help, but it wouldn't help much, and if the IOPS performance is poor then it's not going to help.
There's a huge big issue with SSDs and "dirty" cells. Any time a cell is written to, it needs to be erased before it can be written to again. Windows 7 comes with TRIM, which will solve this problem. As far as I'm aware no drive currently supports the way W7 RC1 has implmented TRIM. All that currently exists is proprietry TRIM on Indilinx drives (SuperTalent, OCZ). They have a very simple program which creates a file the size of all the free space, and then issues TRIM commands for all of that space. The end result is that all the free space is "clean". Without the ability to TRIM drive performance will over time drop to roughly 50%. It seems to affect reads to a lesser extent as well. As soon as the drive is TRIMmed, then performance is restored. Some people have reported success with CCleaner, as it sends secure erase commands which if they make it through device drivers can be intepreteted by some drives as the same as TRIM. The JMicron drives for example in some circumstances have had performance restored by it.
TRIM does not work under RAID at all. It's going to be a while before RAID controllers support it, and not all will implement it. Adaptec have confirmed they are going to do it though, but it's unclear if it'll just be the 2405, 5x05 series, or if they 3x05 series will also have it.
In short though, regardless of what controller this Kingston drive has it's a fantastic price. Just don't expect to be able to exceed the performance of X-25 or Vertex/Summit drives by simply adding more drives, it doesn't work like that.
The benchmark that needs to be done on these Kingston drives to show how they really do perform is Crystalmark.
I think that was Greebo's original point - that read/write throughput is irrelevant for OS use once it reaches a certain speed (slower than the throughput of these drives), but that those who wanted the read/write speed for whatever reason could get that through RAID. Not to say that RAID 0 would double the performance, but it would double the sequential read/write speeds.
What makes you say TRIM improves read performance? AFAIK, the reason performance degrades is due to cells having to be erased before being written to, which means that unless there's a different mechanism behind a read slowdown, there's no reason reads should be affected at all.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Sure, you'd spend the extra £20 to get double read/write performance if the drives were the same capacity but they're not, and a 60GB Vertex will set you back £105 more than the 64gb Kingston, which is double the price. Not such a nobrainer now.
Again with the RAID, your argument is invalid because you get a third the space on the Vertex array, although you at least acknowledge this. But space is important, otherwise you could say why get a 2tb HDD? Far better performance from a 30GB Vertex, and it's half the price too, so makes no sense to get the slower 2TB drive
What makes you say TRIM improves read performance? AFAIK, the reason performance degrades is due to cells having to be erased before being written to, which means that unless there's a different mechanism behind a read slowdown, there's no reason reads should be affected at all.
£105 Kingston SSDNow V Series 64GB
- Read: Up to 100MB/sec
- Write: Up to 80MB/sec
£125 Vertex Series 30GB
- Read: Up to 200MB/sec
- Write: Up to 160MB/sec
Agree with you, i wouldnt pay double the price for a 0.2ghz cpu, but then again i wouldnt not pay £20 for potentially double read/write speed.
Why not compare it to OCZ Vertex in raid too?
2 30gb drives at 400mb/sec read 320mb/sec write for less £ then the cost of those 3 64gb drives. (192GB vs 60GB, so storage space diffrance is hugely in favor of the kingston). £315 vs £250.
I stand by my statment, these are good drives for storage space, but not if your just after read/write speeds. I wouldnt personly go SSD for storage so i would chose the quicker read/write option, not that both dont have a use.
I cant comment on the access time's of either drive as it doesnt say that on the ocuk spec's
Or am i totally missing something here? please correct me if im wrong as i dont know much about SSD drives, yet.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Sure, you'd spend the extra £20 to get double read/write performance if the drives were the same capacity but they're not, and a 60GB Vertex will set you back £105 more than the 64gb Kingston, which is double the price. Not such a nobrainer now.
Again with the RAID, your argument is invalid because you get a third the space on the Vertex array, although you at least acknowledge this. But space is important, otherwise you could say why get a 2tb HDD? Far better performance from a 30GB Vertex, and it's half the price too, so makes no sense to get the slower 2TB drive
Thanks for the interesting links.
All I will say is that either raid on ssd does not work as well as expected or it proves my point that out and out read/write speeds is fairly irrelevant in real life speed once you get past a certain point.
And yes miniyazz, you are right. I was just pointing out that if sequential read write speeds bother you then you could raid the Kingston drives to match it. I didn't suggest it was a good idea, I had pointed out the extra read/write speed wasn't needed already and you would see little real life gain.
My point about a 100mb/sec ssd drive loading windows only 1 sec slower than a vertex in the recent review still stands. Isn't the speed of loading things and zippiness of windows the reason people buy ssd drives in the first place? Once you have seen a major boost over a sata drive, then the small gain will not be noticable.
Hence, are the vertex worth the extra money for the real life performance gains? No IMO.
For the manufacturer backup, firmware updates, TRIM utilites, potential long term speed sustaining then it starts and becomes a little more justifiable.
As an affordable way for normal people to have a major boost to their computer then I think the Kingston are a great buy.
But as said, it will be interesting to wait and see which controller these use and some reviews first before parting with your cash.
All I will say is that either raid on ssd does not work as well as expected or it proves my point that out and out read/write speeds is fairly irrelevant in real life speed once you get past a certain point.
And yes miniyazz, you are right. I was just pointing out that if sequential read write speeds bother you then you could raid the Kingston drives to match it. I didn't suggest it was a good idea, I had pointed out the extra read/write speed wasn't needed already and you would see little real life gain.
My point about a 100mb/sec ssd drive loading windows only 1 sec slower than a vertex in the recent review still stands. Isn't the speed of loading things and zippiness of windows the reason people buy ssd drives in the first place? Once you have seen a major boost over a sata drive, then the small gain will not be noticable.
Hence, are the vertex worth the extra money for the real life performance gains? No IMO.
For the manufacturer backup, firmware updates, TRIM utilites, potential long term speed sustaining then it starts and becomes a little more justifiable.
As an affordable way for normal people to have a major boost to their computer then I think the Kingston are a great buy.
But as said, it will be interesting to wait and see which controller these use and some reviews first before parting with your cash.
If you had any sense, then you'd wait until the end of the year to buy your SSD. Once the next gen NAND rolls of the fab's running at faster speeds, with double the capacity, current drives like these will drop like a stone.
Personally I'm waiting for Win7 to ship, bung a nice new shiny OS on a nice shiny new SSD, with all my old data left on the current HDD's.
But SSD's are almost there now, the little 16GB Samsung SSD in my netbook fly's and that's only a 90MB/s read, 45MB/s write drive. By Xmas we will have 128GB 200MB/s drives for £100.
Personally I'm waiting for Win7 to ship, bung a nice new shiny OS on a nice shiny new SSD, with all my old data left on the current HDD's.
But SSD's are almost there now, the little 16GB Samsung SSD in my netbook fly's and that's only a 90MB/s read, 45MB/s write drive. By Xmas we will have 128GB 200MB/s drives for £100.
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Unfortunately you're potentially forgetting about the wonderful world of NAND flash pricing which has gone up by almost 90% in recent months and around Christmas is when it tends to be bad due to higher demand.
As for details on the Kingston, I've asked for more details on the controller and cache today so will hopefully get something back soon. We are waiting for a sample to arrive so we can do some benchmarks of our own but already sold quite a few of these today so no doubt some will appear here soon.
Very interested to hear what's "in the box". Regardless though the price is incredibly low!
Read speeds on SSDs run at the same speed when access read be it Trim or not, Trim is for Write part of the SSD can keep the Write speed up so the erase command does not need to be used when an file is been saved
@others
Data rate is not that important with SSDs as it completes most requests in under 1ms, SSDs data rate tends to be far higher then an HDD when under the same load
the thing is you need to use Iometer to get the results from an SSD but in the end Iometer is putting a lot of load that an norm user does not do and most other benchmarks allso do as well, day to day you not see any difference between any of these SSDs ,samsung (first and second gen) vertex, corsair (S128 P256) falcon,
only time you see difference with faster data rate SSDs if your moving 1-5gb a lot or Messing with video files , you have to use SSD to SSD as norm HDD cant keep up with an 200MB/s SSD or gigabit network for moveing files around
if you look at the Benchmark of an Slow SSD like mine put next to an HDD the read speeds do not look that much good but due to access times every thing on my PC just opens Right away where as on HDD there can be an delay or program can take bit longer to open
page 7 shows how poor JMicron SSDs can be on writes (this kingston looks like one of them)
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/06/05/corsair-p256-256gb-ssd-review/6
as this ssd is not reporting any cache on the specs that have been given you should ingore this SSD and get an corsair S128 or pay more £££ for bit more read speed if you need it, as it not have any Writing issues
unless it is samsung First gen then it likey be very bad on Writes , for £42 more you can get Samsung second gen 64GB SSD (to bad the samsung drives are not in stock only preorder) that does not suffer from Small write issues, and has higher Read and Write speeds, or corsair S128 for £171 has norm data rate read speeds but random read speeds are fast
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Soldato
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Yes but it looks like they all need wiper programs, i would rather keep my drive at top speed when its something like 60% full.. rather than lose 20-30% on the write or read or whatever.
there is no what ever its only Write speed that is affected and your Unlikely to notice it unless its an JMicron drive as they go slow once the erase has to be performed before the Writes (no cache)
as long as it has cache on it your not going to notice the speed drop, you only seeing it due to Benchmark test, on the drives with cache on them they are far faster then an HDD any way even when they take an 20-30% hit on Write data rate speeds
once windows 7 comes and SSD makers bring out the Trim command for Sata ATA windows 7 will be able to keep the SSD mostly erase free before writes (as it do the Erase after the Write)
as long as it has cache on it your not going to notice the speed drop, you only seeing it due to Benchmark test, on the drives with cache on them they are far faster then an HDD any way even when they take an 20-30% hit on Write data rate speeds
once windows 7 comes and SSD makers bring out the Trim command for Sata ATA windows 7 will be able to keep the SSD mostly erase free before writes (as it do the Erase after the Write)