OCZ's Vertex 2 Pro Preview: The Fastest MLC SSD We've Ever Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 31, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Enter the SandForce
OCZ actually announced its SandForce partnership in November. The companies first met over the summer, and after giggling at the controller maker’s name the two decided to work together.
Use the SandForce
Now this isn’t strictly an OCZ thing, far from it. SandForce has inked deals with some pretty big players in the enterprise SSD market. The public ones are clear: A-DATA, OCZ and Unigen have all announced that they’ll be building SandForce drives. I suspected that Seagate may be using SandForce as the basis for its Pulsar drives back when I was first briefed on the SSDs. I won’t be able to confirm for sure until early next year, but based on some of the preliminary performance and reliability data I’m guessing that SandForce is a much bigger player in the market than its small list of public partners would suggest.
SandForce isn’t an SSD manufacturer, rather it’s a controller maker. SandForce produces two controllers: the SF-1200 and SF-1500. The SF-1200 is the client controller, while the SF-1500 is designed for the enterprise market. Both support MLC flash, while the SF-1500 supports SLC. SandForce’s claim to fame is thanks to their extremely low write amplification, MLC enabled drives can be used in enterprise environments (more on this later).
Both the SF-1200 and SF-1500 use a Tensilica DC_570T CPU core. As SandForce is quick to point out, the CPU honestly doesn’t matter - it’s everything around it that determines the performance of the SSD. The same is true for Intel’s SSD. Intel licenses the CPU core for the X25-M from a third party, it’s everything else that make the drive so impressive.
SandForce also exclusively develops the firmware for the controllers. There’s a reference design that SandForce can supply, but it’s up to its partners to buy Flash, layout the PCBs and ultimately build and test the SSDs.
Page Mapping with a Twist
We talked about LBA mapping techniques in The SSD Relapse. LBAs (logical block addresses) are used by the OS to tell your HDD/SSD where data is located in a linear, easy to look up fashion. The SSD is in charge of mapping the specific LBAs to locations in Flash. Block level mapping is the easiest to do, requires very little memory to track, and delivers great sequential performance but sucks hard at random access. Page level mapping is a lot more difficult, requires more memory but delivers great sequential and random access performance.
Intel and Indilinx use page level mapping. Intel uses an external DRAM to cache page mapping tables and block history, while Indilinx uses it to do all of that plus cache user data.
SandForce’s controller implements a page level mapping scheme, but forgoes the use of an external DRAM. SandForce believes that it’s not necessary because their controllers simply write less to the flash.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Correct. Highly Random and highly compressed data will not work well with SandForce's current algorithm. Less than 25% of the writes you'll see on a typical desktop machine are random writes, even then they aren't random over 100% of the LBA space. I'm not sure how well the technology works for highly random server workloads (SF claims it's great), but for the desktop user it appears to be perfect.Take care,
Anand
shawkie - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Thinking about this further I've come to the conclusion that the files must be divided into small blocks that are compressed independently. Firstly because the disk doesn't know about files (only sectors) and secondly because its the only way you could modify a small part of a compressed file quickly. I don't think 512 bytes would be big enough to acheive respectable compression ratios so I think 4KB is more likely. This might explain why Seagate are pushing to make 4KB the smallest addressable unit for storage devices. So then they take each 4KB block, compress it, and write it to the next available space in flash. If they use 64 bit pointers to store the location of each 4KB block they could easily address the entire space with single-bit granularity. Of course, every overwrite will result in a bit of irregularly sized free space. They could then just wait for a bit of compressed data that happens to fit perfectly or implement some kind of free space consolidation or a combination. I'm starting to come around to the idea.shawkie - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Apologies to Anand, I completely missed the page titled "SandForce's Achilles' Heel". I do think there are some scenarios that still need testing though. What happens when a small modification has to be made to a large file that the drive has decided to compress? Not an easy thing to benchmark but something I can imagine might apply when editing uncompressed audio files or some video files. The other question is what happens when the disk is made dirty by overwriting several times using a random write pattern and random data. What is the sequential write speed like after that?lesherm - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
with a Seinfeld reference.LTG - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Definitely the only one with a Seinfeld and a Metallica and a StarWars reference :).Sponge Worthy
Enter the Sandforce
Use the Sandforce
GullLars - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
It seems anand has a problem with identifying the 4KB random performance of the drives.Intel x25-M has time and time again been shown to deliver 120MB/s or more 4KB random read bandwidth. x25-E delivers in the area of 150MB/s random read and 200MB/s of random write at 4KB packet sizes for queue depth of 10 and above.
I do not know if the problem is due to testing not being done in AHCI/RAID mode, or if it is because of a queue depth lower than number of internal flash channels, but these numbers are purely WRONG and misrepresentative. I probably shouldn't post while drunk :P but this upsets me enough to disregard that.
Anandtech is IMO a site too good to post nonsensical data like this, pleese fix it ASAP. If you choose to sensor my post after fixing it, pleese mail me notifying me of it in case i don't remmeber posting.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
My 4KB read/write tests are run with a queue depth of 3 to represent a desktop usage scenario. I can get much higher numbers out of the X25-M at higher queue depths but then these tests stop being useful for desktop/notebook users. I may add server-like iometer workloads in the future though.All of our testing is done in non-member RAID mode.
Take care,
Anand
GullLars - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Thank you for the response, but i still feel the need to point out that posting 4KB random numbers for queue depth 3 should be explicitly pointed out, as this only utilizes less than 1/3 of the flash channels in the x25-M. Here is a graph i made of the 4KB random read IOPS numbers of an x25-M by queue depth: http://www.diskusjon.no/index.php?act=attach&t...">http://www.diskusjon.no/index.php?act=attach&t...As shown in this graph, the performance scales well up to a queue depth of about 12, where the 10 internal channels get saturated with requests.
A queue depth of 3 may be representative for average light load running windows, but during operations like launching programs, booting windows, or certain operations whitin programs that read database listings, the momentary queue depths often spike to 16-64, and it is in theese circumstances you really feel the IOPS performance of a drive. This is one of the reasons why x25-M beats the competition in the application launch test in PCmark vantage despite having the same IOPS performance at queue depths 1-4 and about the same sequential performance.
The sandforce SF-1500 controller is rated for 30.000 4KB random IOPS, 120MB/s. In order to reach these read performance numbers with MLC flash, you need at least 6 channels, with corresponding outstanding IO's to make use of them. Then you also need to take into account controller overhead. The SF-1500 controller has 16 channels, and the SF-1200 controller has 8 channels.
To test IOPS performance of a drive (not enterpreted for usage but raw numbers), outstanding IOs should be at least equal to number of channels.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
I'm not sure I agree with you here:"A queue depth of 3 may be representative for average light load running windows, but during operations like launching programs, booting windows, or certain operations whitin programs that read database listings, the momentary queue depths often spike to 16-64,"
I did a lot of tests before arriving at the queue depth of 3 and found that even in the most ridiculous desktop usage scenarios we never saw anything in the double digits. It didn't matter whether you were launching programs in parallel or doing a lot of file copies while you were interacting with apps. Even our heavy storage bench test had an average queue depth below 4.
Take care,
Anand
GullLars - Saturday, January 2, 2010 - link
I'm not out to be difficult here, so i will let it be after this, but what i and a few others who have been doing SSD benchmarking for about a year now have found using the windows performance monitor indicates Queue Depth spikes in the area of 16-64 outstanding IO's when launching apps, and certain other interactions with apps that cause reading of many database entries.Copying files will only create 1 outstanding sequential IO-queue, and does not contribute significantly to the momentary queue depth during short high loads.
Scanning for viruses may contribute more to the queue depth, but i have not tested it this far.
At a queue depth of 1-4 for purely reads, there is little difference between JMicron, Indilinx, Samsung, Mtron, and Intel based SSDs, and the difference seen in PCmark Vantage applauch test and real world tests of "launch scripts" (a script launching all programs installed on the computer simultaneously) also indicate there is a notable difference. Some of this may be caused by different random write performance and sequential read, but queue depths above 4 in bursts help explain why x25-M with the 10-channel design beats the competing 4-channel controllers in this type of workload even when sequential read is about the same.
I also like to think Intel didn't make a complex 10-channel "M" drive optimized for 4KB random IOPS targeted at consumers only to win in benchmarks. If the queue depth truly never went above 3-5, even when counting bursts, there would have been wasted a ridiculus amount of effort and resources in making the x25-M, as a 4-channel drive would be a lot cheaper to develop and produce.
Thanks for taking the time to reply to my posts, and i hope you know i value the SSD articles posted on this site. My only concern has been the queue depths used for performance rating, and a concern for the future is that the current setup does not forward TRIM to drives supporting it.