Micron C400 Benchmarks!!!!

[Morg.]

You must be living on a different planet.

I could get a 4+ years old laptop ( Single Core Pentium M ) working MUCH smoother and faster then a modern Computer with Dual, Heck even Quad Core CPU and normal HDD.

HDD was the bottleneck of our computing performance for a decade!

And i am sorry

Quote:
Nothing is going to run faster because you have an SSD.
Literally EVERYTHING will run faster because of your SSD.

I am not even sure if it was you who replied my comment in an earlier Anandtech Article. Sighting SSD is useless apart from IT uses like VM. Which is COMPLETELY False.

Alright, so now your pentium M beats a modern config in x264 and games and trolling.
Right .. just right.

YES the SSD improves your quality of life significantly, but NO it does NOT impact your FPS or your productivity in most cases (just slower loading from disk).

The toy is a nice to have for a consumer and it will stay that way until it becomes cheap enough.

You do NOT use the 50k iops, you do NOT use the mad bandwidth except for some loading activities which are mostly sequential and *could* run as fast on an hdd raid.

 

[Morg.]

Watching H.264 video while working on a document in Word which requires work from a picture in Photoshop, a diagram in OmniGraffle, and a spec in Axure. Also keeping open several browser windows. This is something I do on a daily basis. And that's not including background tasks like Handbrake or Torrents.

The fact that my reboots and app launch times are cut by factors of 2x-4x doesn't hurt either.



It's not a zero sum game here. I have a quad core Sandy Bridge and 8GB of RAM, it's not like I have to give those up to have an SSD.



Yeah sure, keep telling yourself that. Anyone who uses one can feel the difference immediately.

LoL . the usage you just explained is not impacted by an SSD, except at load times.

Everything you described is RAM / CPU bound.

You have the cash to get an SSD, enjoy it, definitely.

Everyone can feel the difference, but is *that* difference worth it ?

And that's what I try to explain, for the people who are not going to put more than 1.5 - 2k in their box, this is NOT worth it, because below that price, you'll prefer having another 6970, more ram, a Watercooling or a bagpipe.

Don't get me wrong, SSD's are great, they are just not worth their price at the moment for most people.

Oh and, if you still have too much money, find a very expensive raid card that can handle 4 vertex 3's, go raid 10 on last gen SSD's and tell me how you like it (don't worry you have little chance of finding the raid card before the v3's are out anyway).

 

[Old Hippie]

The FW of the drive in that review is 0001 whilest the FW on the one on Micron's website is BF01.
Hrmmm.

The C400 has also been tested with an older version of ASSSD.

 

[Arcadio]

So when can we expect the Micron C400's to be available on sites like Newegg and Amazon?

 

[smyrgl]

LoL . the usage you just explained is not impacted by an SSD, except at load times.

Everything you described is RAM / CPU bound.

Wrong, it hugely impacts the response times of the applications.

You have the cash to get an SSD, enjoy it, definitely.

Everyone can feel the difference, but is *that* difference worth it ?

That's up to the user. For those of us whose time = money then yes.

And that's what I try to explain, for the people who are not going to put more than 1.5 - 2k in their box, this is NOT worth it, because below that price, you'll prefer having another 6970, more ram, a Watercooling or a bagpipe.

None of those things is going to make the things I do with my machine any faster.

Don't get me wrong, SSD's are great, they are just not worth their price at the moment for most people.

And why do you think YOU are most people? I would speculate that most people care way more about the responsiveness of their machines than you seem to think they do.

Oh and, if you still have too much money, find a very expensive raid card that can handle 4 vertex 3's, go raid 10 on last gen SSD's and tell me how you like it (don't worry you have little chance of finding the raid card before the v3's are out anyway).

Why would anyone be interested in such a wank setup? Pat yourself on the back with your one free hand for imagining such a setup.

 

[Morg.]

I'm sorry smyrgl, you sir are right and obviously your knowledge of the subject is much better than mine, please forgive me and have a nice day.

 

[Edrick]

Wrong, it hugely impacts the response times of the applications.

Sorry, but MORG is correct. The tasks you mentioned: "Watching H.264 video while working on a document in Word which requires work from a picture in Photoshop, a diagram in OmniGraffle, and a spec in Axure. Also keeping open several browser windows. This is something I do on a daily basis. And that's not including background tasks like Handbrake or Torrents." are almost all CPU/RAM bound and are fast for you because you have: "I have a quad core Sandy Bridge and 8GB of RAM". An SSD may help with loading the video, and loading the image into Photoshop, but has nothing to do with Word docs and multiple browsers being open.

When you said: "The fact that my reboots and app launch times are cut by factors of 2x-4x doesn't hurt either.", that is where you see a SSD shine. You say it like it the the secondary reason, but in fact it is the primary.

But on the other hand, MORG should not speculate that most users do not need a SSD just because he does not. SSDs are the best single upgrade you can do to your computer.

 

[smyrgl]

Sorry, but MORG is correct. The tasks you mentioned: "Watching H.264 video while working on a document in Word which requires work from a picture in Photoshop, a diagram in OmniGraffle, and a spec in Axure. Also keeping open several browser windows. This is something I do on a daily basis. And that's not including background tasks like Handbrake or Torrents." are almost all CPU/RAM bound and are fast for you because you have: "I have a quad core Sandy Bridge and 8GB of RAM". An SSD may help with loading the video, and loading the image into Photoshop, but has nothing to do with Word docs and multiple browsers being open.

Actually it does matter. When I'm merging large images and SVGs into a Word doc from OmniGraffle or Photoshop with a standard hard drive it can end up hiccuping the machine for several seconds. This doesn't happen with an SSD.

When you said: "The fact that my reboots and app launch times are cut by factors of 2x-4x doesn't hurt either.", that is where you see a SSD shine. You say it like it the the secondary reason, but in fact it is the primary.

No it's really not. The thing I got the SSD for was stupid beachball/hourglasses that crop up during my workflow. The SSD has cut these down to nothing whereas my other quad core machine with similar RAM but a conventional hard drive has these all the damn time.

 

[iRage]

I was also going to purchase the Crucial M4, until I realized it was delayed. Vertex 3 has also been delayed till April and the only thing available right now is the first generation C300 and Intel's 510. I decided to just get all my parts, build my computer and run it on a F3 Spinpoint until Crucial and OCZ are both released with reliable benchmarks from people like Anand.

Then I'll order my SSD, reformat and install my OS on it. I figure this would be the better route, allowing me to work out the kinks/overclock of my new system and truly appreciate the speed boost a SSD will give over an HDD, when I upgrade.

As of now, if I purchased it all in one go, I doubt I'd fully appreciate or understand the true significance of an SSD as it would be muffled by having a ridiculously fast system with SLI, i7-2600K, and 16 GB of Ram, especially since this will be my first experience with Dual Core Processors and more than 2 GB of Ram. This'll also be the first time I use Windows 7, seeing as how I never had a reason to upgrade from Vista.

 

[nusyo]

Morg try to use your pc while you run the antivirus ....... and those faster response time add up and at the end of the day you'll end up with minutes? (when you upgrade from Pentium M to Dual Core you end up with extra minutes as well, don't you?)

its funny 'cause the biggest increase in speed you'll notice is when you drop a ssd in an old pc/laptop

 

[Bauss]

May be everyone was expecting a new Intel Controller, may be we have too high of a expectation. Intel is getting all the bad press with 510 when it is clearly the 2nd BEST Consumer SSD you could get beside Vertex 3 or aka Sandforce 2000 series.

And it is not far off either, in Real World traces, Intel is only 10 - 20% behind is worst case and sometimes when data are not compressible it actually comes out ahead.

Not saying i am very happy with 510, but i just dont understand why everyone hate it.

Me neither. In most test reflecting Desktop user use patterns (Copying large Files/Data, Load times, boot times) the 510 runs circles around everything short of the V3. I'm not sure how that became a disappointment, but I'd wager it has to do with peoples' strange obsession with synthetic benchmarks.

As for the C400, it looks very promising. That said, so did the C300 in the beginning. However, it took many revisions of firmware (some of the destructive) to get to a stable point. I'd suggest giving it a bit of time before taking the plunge on that one...

 

[taltamir]

Me neither. In most test reflecting Desktop user use patterns (Copying large Files/Data, Load times, boot times) the 510 runs circles around everything short of the V3. I'm not sure how that became a disappointment, but I'd wager it has to do with peoples' strange obsession with synthetic benchmarks.

None of those 3 things you described are typical desktop user use patterns. Copying files is something we do... but if you measure the amount of time a user spends copying files it will be much less than 1% of their computer usage time.
The typical use pattern is lots and lots and lots of background programs running at once. This causes the system to be sluggish, like molasses. The so called "synthetic benchmark" of random access speeds are very accurate representations of the drive's performance in such a situation.

No review site uses a "typical system" to create accurate real world tests, their "open a single doc file on a recently reformatted drive with just the OS" test is as far from realistic as humanly possible.

Besides which the biggest issue is price. The 510 is actually made to look bad by its cheaper G2 cousin.

 

[beginner99]

Maybe already been said but huge sequential performance isn't very useful too. Anyone actually coping around large files will probably have them on spindle anyway because they are large. Same for games. Steam folder on ssd? IMHO a ultimate luxury.

SSDs no IMHO is mainly as OS drive to prevent annoying stuttering and anything from G2 to C400 will do fine.

 

[Bauss]

May be everyone was expecting a new Intel Controller, may be we have too high of a expectation. Intel is getting all the bad press with 510 when it is clearly the 2nd BEST Consumer SSD you could get beside Vertex 3 or aka Sandforce 2000 series.

And it is not far off either, in Real World traces, Intel is only 10 - 20% behind is worst case and sometimes when data are not compressible it actually comes out ahead.

Not saying i am very happy with 510, but i just dont understand why everyone hate it.

None of those 3 things you described are typical desktop user use patterns. Copying files is something we do... but if you measure the amount of time a user spends copying files it will be much less than 1% of their computer usage time.
The typical use pattern is lots and lots and lots of background programs running at once. This causes the system to be sluggish, like molasses. The so called "synthetic benchmark" of random access speeds are very accurate representations of the drive's performance in such a situation.

No review site uses a "typical system" to create accurate real world tests, their "open a single doc file on a recently reformatted drive with just the OS" test is as far from realistic as humanly possible.

Besides which the biggest issue is price. The 510 is actually made to look bad by its cheaper G2 cousin.

Firstly, when I said Desktop user use patterns, I meant that with respect to enthusiasts, not just typical users (email, browsing).

Secondly, you're right. Random access is important. But you need to understand that even last-gen SSDs can do over 20000 random 4k writes every second. Nobody in a Desktop environment can claim that they require such a high level of access to permanent storage in a modern computer. Computers these days come with so much RAM that a hard drive has to deal with relatively little while an app is running. Nobody who understands SSDs gets one because it'll help RUN MS Word faster. But, it will help it load, save, import assets, and close faster.

That said, nobody should be buying an SSD based SOLELY on the fact that it does 60k random 4k IO/s, and it's competition only does 45k. That would honestly be like getting a GPU JUST because is has 4GBs of VRAM when the competition only has 2GB VRAM. Utterly useless at this point.

Now that sufficient amounts of 4k write performance has been achieved for desktops, SSD makers like Intel and Crucial are changing their thinking and beginning to focus on sequential speeds. Why? Because it's the last real place that they can make an SSD appear noticeably faster to a user. All SSDs will boot Windows in 10 seconds. Now, they want to make sure you can copy a 5GB HD video in that time too.

It's a good strategy, but if you can't wrap your head around it, prepare to be immensly disappointed in 2011.

Also, 510 looks bad compared to the G2? Are we looking at the same benchmarks here? Even when the numbers are taken in w.r.t. price. It can literally move twice as much data 9 times out of 10. Worth it if you ask me...

http://techreport.com/articles.x/20594/5

 

[Arcadio]

Another review

Wow... now the C400 doesn't look as appealing as before.... in some of the tests it gets demolished by the C300..

 

[ksec]

Alright, so now your pentium M beats a modern config in x264 and games and trolling.
Right .. just right.

YES the SSD improves your quality of life significantly, but NO it does NOT impact your FPS or your productivity in most cases (just slower loading from disk).

The toy is a nice to have for a consumer and it will stay that way until it becomes cheap enough.

You do NOT use the 50k iops, you do NOT use the mad bandwidth except for some loading activities which are mostly sequential and *could* run as fast on an hdd raid.

LOL, How many IT users out there? And How many PC Gamers out there?

Add them all up, and i am sorry, your numbers dont even come close to 20% of the average Joe PC users in the world. And 20% is a larger number i am giving you so you dont lose so bad.

The Total amount of task done on PC, Games? x264 .... LOL, Yeah,
Right . just right.

And Yeah, I dont need as much as 50K IOPS, I dont need Mad ( actually they are far from mad ) bandwidth. I never sad i need those. But they are of coz part of the speed i need. I need fast response time. And that is the fundamental part of SSD experience.]

Honestly i suggest you read up all Anand's SSD article, pcper, and Bitech. Then go and buy an SSD and enjoy.

nough said.

 

[Dadofamunky]

Well, I'd just like to point how pointless this all is.
SSD's are almost useless for consumers.
Yes, your OS and games load faster, and then ?
Nothing is going to run faster because you have an SSD.

Massive FAIL. That is all.

 

[Emulex]

c300 had alot of growing pains. hopefully they've ironed out all the bugs that plagued it

 

[Morg.]

Honestly ... so many people convinced SSD's are SO good and who actually bought one.

You people should really consider THIS:

most if not all of your io activity IS sequential
most if not all of your io activity IS "big" -> as in not fetching just one 4k block

Because of that, the decreased latency is not going to help you as your file loads are like this :

1 random seek + sequential read (a lot of blocks)

Where the random seek is completely dwarfed by the sequential read time (yes this is also true for a 20 meg file)

So let's summarize :

The low latency represents less than 1% of your speed increase.
The sequential read speed represents 99% of your disk IO
The random read speeds are irrelevant because you DO NOT DO a relevant amount of RANDOM READS unless your hdd is fragmented to hell / some r*tarded developper thought it was cooler to split up a file in 5000 instead of using one big archive-type file.
The random write speeds I won't even talk about it's irrelevant here.

So in effect, the speed upgrade you enjoy is only better sequential read and writes, which you can easily surpass with any hdd raid0.

Here's a little review to explain this:
some review

Now for the price of any decent SSD you can raid0 two of these and beat said SSD on sequential write/reads for files of any size relevant to you (no i do not believe you write single 4k blocks if you do not use a database).

And that's still GREEN drives.
Heck for the price of a single SSD you could raid10 these, get 4(minus a little)x the base seqread performance over 4 goddamn terabytes ! (and yes, that means 600mb/sec seqreads and 200+ mb/sec seqwrites - ooh I see that's not enough for you ? raid10 on 8 disks there you go 1.2gb/sec seqread and 400+ mb/sec seqwrites .and we're still around 600 bucks with 4tb of space).
(yes i'm talking about 320 euros here)


Now quit the flaming, ask some people who actually know something about this and learn instead of saying "I BOUGHT AN SSD ITS GOT TO BE GOOD RIGHT".

And you know what ? Ask anand what he thinks of YOUR usage pattern (which is little more than 5% of the user population, even less than gamers) on either a 300 bucks ssd or a 300 bucks raid10 of green (or not green) 2tb drives.

SSD's ARE AWESOME, for me, for my databases, for virtualization, for coffee making and stuff. but right now, they're not worth the money for you, so please try understanding your own usage pattern, understand the reviews you read and the actual impact on your perception of said improvements.

 

[Echo147]

...some r*tarded developper thought it was cooler to split up a file in 5000 instead of using one big archive-type file...

Sadly this is often the case with games.

NFS - Hot Pursuit and Left 4 Dead 2 to name just two, have over 20,000 files

 

[Bauss]

I only partially agree with what Morg said. Saying that an SSD is not worth it for users in relation to RAID arrays is only only true when when looking at sequential performance. However:

1) 90% of the reason ANY MODERN SSD is awesome is because of their relatively instant random access speeds. The reason that apps and files load up so quickly is because SSDs can get to data VERY quickly.

2) Performance and Mobility. I can't get a RAID array into a notebook. Also, SSDs are not vulnerable to shock.

But he is right that many users overvalue random performance. The notion that at any point during loading up an app, file, or even a VM that you'll ever need to access over 4KB in 20000 random places in a given second is laughable. So buying based solely on that is silly. Especially when the are so many other reasons and factors to consider.

 

[Bauss]

Sadly this is often the case with games.

NFS - Hot Pursuit and Left 4 Dead 2 to name just two, have over 20,000 files

True, but:

1) Those files are ALL the assets for all the tracks, car models, etc. One would never access all that at once.

2) due to drives being slow, they would load any needed items into ram at before the game runs.

 

[bigi]

Well, I'd just like to point how pointless this all is.
SSD's are almost useless for consumers.
Yes, your OS and games load faster, and then ?
Nothing is going to run faster because you have an SSD.
Now if you can spend the same amount on any other component, the speed increase will be huge in comparison.

Where SSD's make sense is in enterprise environments, where old HDD's don't have the right capacity / IOPS ratio / latency for virtualization and databases (anyone who's done a little of virtualization knows how bad it can be to have a dozen VM's using the same physical 7200rpm HDD / and for databases, well you know what difference those random seek speeds make )

Because of that, I don't think SSD's should be benchmarked on anything else than the above two, as they are not worth their price in other cases.

Intel did not choose their performance profile, they were locked between non-SF options and picked the most decent one.

Last but not least, people speak about the limits in reliability of 25nm MLC, well guess what, there's no way you're going to get anywhere within even 10% of their maximum rated rewrites doing "consumer" stuff, even if you use your MLC drive as a buffer for downloads (which would make no sense at all but hey, you can do it) due to wear leveling and all that stuff.

Wow, just pure wow!!!

 

[Edrick]

The random read speeds are irrelevant because you DO NOT DO a relevant amount of RANDOM READS unless your hdd is fragmented to hell / some r*tarded developper thought it was cooler to split up a file in 5000 instead of using one big archive-type file.
The random write speeds I won't even talk about it's irrelevant here.

SSDs are supposed to be fragmented. My last one was 29% fragmented only after a few months. SSDs actually run faster when fragmented. So yes, random reads play a key role here. And I have been told many times never to defrag a SSD.

Now if a HDD was 29% fragmented, it would run like crap.

There are a lot of cases where small random reads play a bigger role. Anytime a program has to make a read to a system file (C++ runtimes for example), these are generally small files. Or a lot of .NET development and web apps use small random reads.

Again, Morg, just because large seq speeds are important to YOU, do not assume that is the case with everyone.

 

[groberts101]

I think it's funny when people start saying things like.."fast HDD raids beat a SSD".. or.. "The random read speeds are irrelevant because you DO NOT DO a relevant amount of RANDOM READS unless your hdd is fragmented to hell".

IMO, anyone talking about an OS doing that consistently is not really understanding an OS's data flow in the first place. Windows is an operating system and the very nature of an operating system requires it to do much in the background at the same time as a user requests a file. To say that opening a application alone would be a sequential request shows no understanding of file structure or the associated I/O necessary to access them, much less all else that must be done simultaneously in the background just to simply navigate the GUI.

And saying that ram handles everything without much need for the disk? LOL It's only cached after the file is first read into said cache. Hardware/caching accelerators can only do so much and the system disk is still in great demand in many typical desktop situations.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc938619.aspx

And as for saying that SSD isn't worth it for "most" people? That's just silly, and no one should make blanket statements like that since it's in the eye of the beholder. My extended families systems have all been upgraded to SSD and everyone using them from the little preschoolers all the way to the college kids doing papers and multitasking heavily really appreciate them at every boot and throughout the entire logged on session. Heck,.. even my kids love me more for putting one on their hand-me-down P4 computer. And I had to use an IDE to SATA converter to get it shoehorned in! And despite the fact it's restricted to 28MB/s, EVERYTHING runs faster and they can actually open several browser tabs and play a game without bogging it one little bit. With SSD random reads are key and IOPS are king. Most don't seem to understand that.

With my current 6 drive Vertex2 R0 setup, I hear the typical "SSD raids like that aren't going to help speeds for a typical user"... all the time. Well.. I guess seeing is believing then, because everyone who currently owns SSD and has sat in my chair immediately see's otherwise. And one buddy even has an 1880ix with 12 drive SAS R0 which smokes me on the sequentials. SSD raid is so much above and beyond what most people expect, it's really a matter of testing it out firsthand to see if the cost is worth it to you. Even if the time saved doesn't directly correlate to money earned, it's still nice to spend less time and accomplish more when you use a PC. This is what SSD brings to the table with huge multitasking ability. Raided SSD just ups the ante even more.

Then after all that irrelevant stuff(I thought most already knew the benefits of SSD already? LOL), I have a question that actually pertains to the title of this thread.

Does/has anyone here ever owned both the C300 and the Vertex 2 to compare directly in real world usage?

Reason I ask is because we have a hardcore beta-tester over at the OCZ forum and he says the V2(on sata2) is better than the C300(on sata3) as an OS volume. Seems unlikely and was just wondering if anyone has firsthand knowledge of this or thinks the C400 will change this aspect very much.