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The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ

 by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST
250 Comments | Add A Comment
250 Comments

Game Loading Performance

I chose two games to show both ends of the load time spectrum. The first test is World of Warcraft, I'm simply timing how long it takes from the character selection screen to a fully loaded scene in the realm I've chosen. Fully loaded means no more popping textures or waiting for anything else to load:

The Intel X25-M does the best here, even slightly outperforming the X25-E thanks to a more consumer-optimized firmware. The two OCZ drives occupy the third and fourth places, followed by the rest of the pack. No hard drive can keep up here thanks to the superior random read speed of a SSD.

The Far Cry 2 test is simply running the default benchmark and timing how long it takes to get from clicking launch to the loaded level:

While the SSDs take the cake here, the VelociRaptor isn't far behind. Once again the two Intel drives take the lead, followed by the two OCZ drives. The Vertex and the Summit tie in performance.

Application Launch Times Final Words
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  • Franco1 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link

    I've been waiting a long time for this review. It was certainly worth the wait! I would love to see some benchmarks with 2+ drives in RAID configurations via onboard and add-on controller cards. Maybe another follow up?

  • Howard - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link

    Looks like the Vertex is the drive to get, especially once the user base expands a bit.

  • MagicalMule - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link

    Thanks for the article. Everyone is critiquing grammar and all this nonsense it seems, but I really enjoyed the article.

    It was very thorough and very informative.

    Keep up the good work. =).

  • futrtrubl - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link

    You missed out a VERY significant step that causes the greater part of the slowdown associated with your scenario. After the block is read out to cache the block has to be erased before it can be written to again and as you pointed out earlier an erase cycle, and thus the entire read/modify+erase/write cycle, takes a relatively LONG time, much longer than a simple read/modify/write.

    Edward

  • DrKlahn - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link

    I've worked in IT for 15 years and have played with very fast arrays and know a fair amount about storage. 2 months ago I replaced my Raptor boot/gaming drive with a GSkill Titan. In day to day use I have no stuttering. The only stutter I have seen was while installing a large patch, surfing with multiple windows/tabs open and using Outlook. It wasn't even a second. I did align the partition, turned off drive indexing and defragmentation, and turned on caching. In day to day use it simply kills the Raptor. Games and applications load in a fraction of the time. Vista boot time has decreased dramatically.

    This isn't a case of purchase justification. If the drive was a dud I would have moved it to a secondary machine, reinstalled the Raptor, and chalked it up as a bad decision. I simply have not run into any scenario in daily use that it performs worse than the drive it replaced and I have not seen any real stuttering in daily use.

  • Gary Key - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link

    I have a GSkill Titan drive also and really like it. However, my experiences while positive overall, do not compare with yours when it comes to stuttering (yes, all optimizations have been done to the drive and OS). I still have significant stuttering problems when using multiple IM programs and having multiple windows/tabs open at the same time. I literally have to wait a few seconds when texting colleagues if more than two conversations are occurring at the same time as the system pauses, hitches, and stutters in this scenario. It is especially aggravating when on Skype and trying to text, speak, and transfer files at the same time. This does not occur on the Intel drive in my testing. Apparently, it is no longer a problem on the OCZ Vertex or Summit drives. Except for my example above, I would certainly use the Titan drive over my Raptor any day of the week.

  • druc0017 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link

    great article, keep up the good work, cant wait to see more updates, thx

  • mikeblas - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link

    Is the Velociraptor really "World's fastest hard drive", as this article states? Faster than the Hitachi SAS drives?

  • Gary Key - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link

    We have changed those statements to "...fastest consumer desktop hard drive...", that was the original intent of the statement, just clarified now. :)

  • 7Enigma - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link

    I think the majority of us understood that. People just like to nit-pick.
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