Just how fast is SSD?
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 15th 2008 | Discuss
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Samsung has been annoying us with PR emails about their solid-state drives for almost a year now. Finally, we had enough and said put up or shut up. They put up and sent us a 15.4-inch Lenovo T60p ThinkPad laptop ($2,438.) What the hell are we going to do with this, Robert asked? Kathleen also was puzzled. The cats got on to test for warmth and softness and abandoned it.
How do you test for disk or flash drive speed? Surely, there must be some special benchmarks or test programs we could get.
We did find some software from PassMark and bought their Performance test ($25). It tests everything in your PC and is handy tool to have around. We used the disk test for this evaluation, and got the results shown in Tables 1-4.
| ThinkPad T60p | Dv9700 | Mini Note | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disk Mark | 418.6 | 226 | 79.8 |
| Random R/W | 24.6 | 2.24 | 2.14 |
| Table 1: Disk benchmark test results. (Source: Jon Peddie Research) | |||
| ThinkPad T60p | Dv9700 | Mini Note | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disc | 120GB, 5400 RPM | 240GB, 7200 RPM | 60GB, Flash |
| RAM | 2GB, 997 MHz | 2GB DDR2 | 1.75 GB DDR |
| CPU | T700 @2 GHz | T7250 @ 2 GHz | C7 @ 1.2 GHz |
| OS | XP Pro | Vista 64 | XP Pro |
| Table 2: Test systems’ configuration. (Source: Jon Peddie Research) | |||
| ThinkPad T60p | Dv9700 | Mini Note | |
|---|---|---|---|
| IE7 | 3 | 8 | 7 |
| Chrome | 2 | 3 | 5 |
| FireFox | 2 | 5 | 4 |
| OO Writer | 2 | 4 | 5 |
| OO Calc | 1 | 4 | 3 |
| OO Impress | 1 | 4 | 3 |
| Acrobat 9 | 2 |
4 |
2 |
| Table 3: Application loading times for three systems. (Source: Jon Peddie Research) | |||
| ThinkPad T60p | Dv9700 | Mini Note | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boot up | 88 | 135 | 80 |
| Table 4: Boot up times for three systems.. (Source: Jon Peddie Research) | |||
While we were waiting for the disktesting software to arrive, we did our own testing, user experience testing, very scientific, you can repeat this in any lab or office.
We set up three machines as identically as possible. We installed three browsers, OpenOffice, Acrobat9, and a digital clock that showed seconds.
We then ran disc clean up, and rebooted all three machines. We used HP Mini Note (discussed elsewhere in this issue), the Samsung ThinkPad loaner, and my personal machine, an HP dv9700.
The important specs of the three machines are shown in Table 2.
We then clicked on various applications and watched the clock to see when they had fully loaded—what a user would experience.
We did discover that OpenOffice, when first opened, regardless of the application, took 15 to 17 seconds on the Mini Note, and 10 to 11 seconds on the Dv9700, and was unaffected on the ThinkPad.
Assuming we might have been getting an advantage from some clever cache management, we rebooted and started with each app (a lot of reboots). Still worried about having a giant thumb drive preloaded, we loaded every application we could find other than our test apps, and then ran a system test (PC5) assuming that all of that would shift stuff out of the SSD’s first load position. It had no effect.
Then, using an external (to the PCs) timer, we booted them and timed that.
Now to be fair, the ThinkPad and Mini Note were virgin systems without all the crap that gets loaded on a computer over time through normal usage. The only programs loaded were the browsers, OpenOffice, Adobe, the digital clock, and WinZip, whereas the Dv9700 has a zillion apps and indexers to contend with. And, whereas a two-and-half minute boot up seems respectable, it took another minute or so before the machine was stable enough to actually use. (Boot up was determined by when the tool bar and all screen applets and icons were fully loaded.) The T60p was clearly the best machine, we were sorry to have to pack it up and send it home.
What do we think?
Nodoubtaboutit—SSDs are fast. They’re light, quiet, cool running, and oh yeah, did I mention F A S T! Prices for SSDs are dropping and capacities are going up. It won’t be long before all mid- to high-end machines are equipped with them. Rotating disk technology behaved like Moore’s law and continued to amaze us with its increase in capacity, reduction in size and dropping prices. But its glory days may be past as SSDs send HDDs into their twilight years.
