Micron C400 mSATA (128GB) SSD Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 10, 2012 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2011
Two years ago we introduced our AnandTech Storage Bench, a suite of benchmarks that took traces of real OS/application usage and played them back in a repeatable manner. I assembled the traces myself out of frustration with the majority of what we have today in terms of SSD benchmarks.
Although the AnandTech Storage Bench tests did a good job of characterizing SSD performance, they weren't stressful enough. All of the tests performed less than 10GB of reads/writes and typically involved only 4GB of writes specifically. That's not even enough exceed the spare area on most SSDs. Most canned SSD benchmarks don't even come close to writing a single gigabyte of data, but that doesn't mean that simply writing 4GB is acceptable.
Originally I kept the benchmarks short enough that they wouldn't be a burden to run (~30 minutes) but long enough that they were representative of what a power user might do with their system.
Not too long ago I tweeted that I had created what I referred to as the Mother of All SSD Benchmarks (MOASB). Rather than only writing 4GB of data to the drive, this benchmark writes 106.32GB. It's the load you'd put on a drive after nearly two weeks of constant usage. And it takes a *long* time to run.
1) The MOASB, officially called AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload, mainly focuses on the times when your I/O activity is the highest. There is a lot of downloading and application installing that happens during the course of this test. My thinking was that it's during application installs, file copies, downloading and multitasking with all of this that you can really notice performance differences between drives.
2) I tried to cover as many bases as possible with the software I incorporated into this test. There's a lot of photo editing in Photoshop, HTML editing in Dreamweaver, web browsing, game playing/level loading (Starcraft II & WoW are both a part of the test) as well as general use stuff (application installing, virus scanning). I included a large amount of email downloading, document creation and editing as well. To top it all off I even use Visual Studio 2008 to build Chromium during the test.
The test has 2,168,893 read operations and 1,783,447 write operations. The IO breakdown is as follows:
AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload IO Breakdown | ||||
IO Size | % of Total | |||
4KB | 28% | |||
16KB | 10% | |||
32KB | 10% | |||
64KB | 4% |
Only 42% of all operations are sequential, the rest range from pseudo to fully random (with most falling in the pseudo-random category). Average queue depth is 4.625 IOs, with 59% of operations taking place in an IO queue of 1.
Many of you have asked for a better way to really characterize performance. Simply looking at IOPS doesn't really say much. As a result I'm going to be presenting Storage Bench 2011 data in a slightly different way. We'll have performance represented as Average MB/s, with higher numbers being better. At the same time I'll be reporting how long the SSD was busy while running this test. These disk busy graphs will show you exactly how much time was shaved off by using a faster drive vs. a slower one during the course of this test. Finally, I will also break out performance into reads, writes and combined. The reason I do this is to help balance out the fact that this test is unusually write intensive, which can often hide the benefits of a drive with good read performance.
There's also a new light workload for 2011. This is a far more reasonable, typical every day use case benchmark. Lots of web browsing, photo editing (but with a greater focus on photo consumption), video playback as well as some application installs and gaming. This test isn't nearly as write intensive as the MOASB but it's still multiple times more write intensive than what we were running in 2010.
As always I don't believe that these two benchmarks alone are enough to characterize the performance of a drive, but hopefully along with the rest of our tests they will help provide a better idea.
The testbed for Storage Bench 2011 has changed as well. We're now using a Sandy Bridge platform with full 6Gbps support for these tests.
AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload
We'll start out by looking at average data rate throughout our heavy workload test:
The next three charts just represent the same data, but in a different manner. Instead of looking at average data rate, we're looking at how long the disk was busy for during this entire test. Note that disk busy time excludes any and all idles, this is just how long the SSD was busy doing something:
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Chaitanya - Tuesday, April 10, 2012 - link
Is conclusion page missing? or it is not present intentionally.bobsmith1492 - Tuesday, April 10, 2012 - link
Same as the last article... this one is just a refresher so all the conclusions are on the first page and the rest are just backup data.ImSpartacus - Tuesday, April 10, 2012 - link
That's a neat way of doing it.I hope Anandtech can still do in-depth looks at important products, but this format is a happy medium for less important products that still deserve a review.
icrf - Tuesday, April 10, 2012 - link
I agree. I like the format. They could probably tell from access logs that a lot of readers do what I do: read the first page (introduction), then read the last page (conclusion), skipping everything in between. It makes life easier, even if costs you a page of ad impressions.LancerVI - Tuesday, April 10, 2012 - link
....and that's the truth of it. I agree!johan851 - Tuesday, April 10, 2012 - link
I like the layout also. Though you'll get less ad revenue when I skip the rest of the pages. ;)AssBall - Tuesday, April 10, 2012 - link
I agree and hope to see some of the mobo reviews follow suit, after the nice and complete initial chipset analysis reviews you don't really need a full blown review, just the basics.CaioRearte - Tuesday, April 10, 2012 - link
I don't think so. When you're reading something that's interesting, I think you tend to check out the ads more than when you're just scrolling down pages of benchmarks.leexgx - Thursday, April 12, 2012 - link
i only use the Print page button (do not print it) as it makes all the pages onto one page (wish other sites would do it) so its only 1 page changei prefer to have one full page that's just me
jaydee - Tuesday, April 10, 2012 - link
Price, availability?