The Intel SSD 320 Review: 25nm G3 is Finally Here
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 28, 2011 11:08 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Storage
- SSDs
- Intel
- Intel SSD 320
Performance vs. Transfer Size
All of our Iometer sequential tests happen at a queue depth of 1, which is indicative of a light desktop workload. It isn't too far fetched to see much higher queue depths on the desktop. The performance of these SSDs also greatly varies based on the size of the transfer. For this next test we turn to ATTO and run a sequential write over a 2GB span of LBAs at a queue depth of 4 and varying the size of the transfers.
I've created a second set of graphs that just looks at 3Gbps performance of a few drives to make things easier to read:
3Gbps sequential read/write performance at low queue depths is competitive with other 3Gbps drives as we've already seen. Intel's controller scales simlarly with transfer size as the Marvell controller used in the 510.
If you've got an AMD or Intel 6Gbps controller however you'll be let down by the performance of the 320:
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Chloiber - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
True.It is true, thet the REAL capacity of flash drives is 2 based. The NAND chips are.
So a 120GB drive has in reality 128GB of flash.
So its 120/128 % spare area. The 300GB version has also 300/320 % spare area (which is exactly the same).
Anand is confusing things. The user gets 300GB, as he gets 300GB when buying a HDD. Windows on the other han is showing us "GiB" not "GB". But it's not a real difference in size. 74.5GiB EQUALS 80GB. It's the same thing. Compare the BYTE numbers if you wanna be sure, not the KB/MB/GB/TB numbers.
I'm actually shocked that this still gets confused.
overzealot - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
RAM was not the only thing that was calculated using binary pseudo-metric prefixes. Perhaps you aren't old enough to remember the days before kibibytes, when all computer disks and tapes were measured as such.noblemo - Wednesday, April 6, 2011 - link
Conversion from GB to GiB:320 / 1.024^3 = 298 GiB
Subtract 6.25% spare area:
298 x (1-0.0625) = 279 GiB
MeanBruce - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
You can blather all the technostats you want 25nm, who cares, didn't change a thing! My next ssd, would never have said this a year ago, looks like Corsair Force GT! Read/Write 500/500 is all you need to say!;)zanon - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
Granted, this isn't a stunning offering. But one thing I do look forward to is that I think we will finally start to see updated filesystems start to appear in the near future. For example, ZFS appears as if it will at last appear as a full Mac OS X file system via Z-410 this summer.One of the features of modern filesystems is full filesystem level compression and encryption (which really is where such features belong). I will be looking forward to (hopefully) seeing you test how this affects the SSD scene. My principle concern with Sandforce's strategy in the back of my head has always been this: that sooner or later, OS makers or someone will finally get with it and make full compression standard in the FS. At that point, the "worst case" scenario of fully random data will become the *only* scenario. That still leaves a (huge huge) legacy market, and likely time to adapt, but I do wonder if it will shake up the SSD scene at all once again.
overzealot - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
I don't agree. If the controllers are powerful enough to do encryption and compression in real-time, then it should still be done at the disk level.You can still encrypt/compress in your OS as you please, but I like having performance.
PS, not dogging on ZFS, I use it all the time with openindiana.
marc1000 - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
vertex 3 is not already on market???http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technology-Vertex-2-5-In...
aork - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
That's for pre-order. Notice "Usually ships within 1 to 2 months."piquadrat - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
Is it sufficient, security wise, using only max. 8 characters ATA password against thieves?One program, I sometimes use, MHDD offers ATA password reset option.
If someone can bypass ATA pass so easily what all this AES128 is for?
Could someone explain this matter to me?
DesktopMan - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
The password is used to generate the encryption key, much like how software products such as TrueCrypt does it.The max length of ata paswords is 32 which should be more bits than the actual key, depending on character set. 8 is not much though, depending on how these drives deal with brute force attacks.
Old drives with ata passwords are just enabled with the password, which can be circumvented with master passwords or firmware commands in some cases.