Conclusion
Although the advent of affordable SSD drives is a good thing, they are far from perfect. More than the wear on MLC chips and other problems they suffer whether in terms of life expectancy or write speeds, it is the controllers that are most in need of improvements so that the advantages of flash memory can be made the most of.
Of course wear on flash cells still needs to be taken into account but the different mechanisms integrated within SSD drives seem to be equal to the situation, at least on paper, over a fairly long period. It is however difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to SSDs, especially as manufacturers are not particularly revealing when it comes to the methods used inside their SSDs: Intel can moreover be congratulated on the detail it gives. In all cases, and this is also true for classic hard drive users, don’t forget to back up!
Otherwise, SSDs are completely silent, in contrast to hard disk drives and are therefore an obvious choice for anyone who’s looking for discretion in their PC. This makes them ideal for, for example, a living room PC which is used to read videos stored in a NAS. They aren’t however particularly more economical in terms of energy than a notebook hard drive and there would be no point investing in one purely for power economy.
For anyone who is looking purely for performance, these drives give great performance levels as system disks using the most common applications, as is shown by the scores obtained on PC Mark Vantage (unequalled read speeds and seek times). They improve the reactivity of any system, particularly when launching an application. Compare for example 6s for launching Photoshop CS3 on a VelocRaptor with 2 or 3 seconds on an SSD!
SSDs do however have some weaknesses on other tasks. SuperTalent SSDs give very low write speeds, while OCZ Core and Silicon Power SSDs are as cheap as they are unreliable on random writing, so much so that latency can be felt during use. If you add to this the false claims on capacity (64 GB against a real 60 GB for Silicon Power and Core V1 SSDs) and overinflated speeds given on spec sheets, these SSDs are the runt of this particular SSD litter.
And what is there to say about the Intel solution? A real treat on paper, the Intel X25-M literally knocked us for six during the first tests! However, the dip in performances recorded when the SSD is submitted to varying workloads is quite worrying, even though Intel says this phenomenon is to be “expected”. It is one thing for performance to dip and it may be acceptable as long as their starting point is so far ahead of the SSDs of its competitors. The problem is that in certain cases, which are, it’s true, very specific, performance is recorded as being lower than that of a 5400 rpm disc, particularly during file copying. It would be great news if Intel could find a solution allowing it to retain high performances whatever the workload of the SSD, even if this means losing something from maximum performance.
For now only Samsung is really managing this. Whether on PC Mark Vantage, file copying or IOMeter, performances do not disappoint, without, it is true, attaining the levels of the Intel X25-M when at its best. There is a price for all this unfortunately, with the Samsung SLC (or its exact OCZ copy) coming in at €800 for 64 GB. The icing on the cake is that it is the most economical of all the SSDs tested.
There is then, no perfect solution and given current prices, SSDs will as yet only be used in fairly limited circumstances and by a limited number of users. Recent evolutions show that the price of SSDs will fall quickly but there is still some way to go in terms of performance exploitation, as Intel has shown with its incredible X25-M. The classic hard drive is not yet dead but it is on its way out!
