Louwrentius

The price of Solid-state drives (SSDs) has dropped significantly over the last few years. It's now possible to buy a 1TB solid-state drive for less than €60. However, at such low price points, there is a catch.

Although cheap SSDs do perform fine regarding reads, sustained write performance can be really atrocious. To demonstrate this concept, I bought a bunch of the cheapest SATA SSDs I could find - as listed below - and benchmarked them with Fio.

I didn't have the budget to buy a bunch of 1TB of 2TB SSD, so these ultra-cheap, low capacity SSDs are a bit of a stand-in. I've also added a Crucial MX500 1TB (CT1000MX500SSD1) SATA¹ SSD - which I already owned - to the benchmarks to see how well those small-capacity SSDs stack up to a cheap SSD with a much larger capacity.

Understanding SSD write performance

To understand the benchmark results a bit better, we discuss some SSD concepts in this section. Feel free to skip to the actual benchmarks if you're already familiar with them.

SLC Cache

SSDs originally used single-level cell (SLC) flash memory, which can hold a single bit and is the fastest and most reliable flash memory available. Unfortunately, it's also the most expensive. To reduce cost, multi-level cell (MLC) flash was invented, which can hold two bits instead of one, at the cost of speed and longevity². This is even more so for triple-level cell (TLC) and quad-level cell (QLC) flash memory. All 'cheap' SSDs I benchmark use 3D v-nand³ TLC flash memory.

One technique to temporarily boost SSD performance is to use a (small) portion of (in our case) TLC flash memory as if it was SLC memory. This SLC memory then acts as a fast write cache⁴. When the SSD is idle, data is moved from the SLC cache to the TLC flash memory in the background. However, this process is limited by the speed of the 'slower' TLC flash memory and can take a while to complete.

While this trick with SLC memory works well for brief, intermittent write loads, sustained write loads will fill up the SLC cache and cause a significant drop in performance as the SSD is forced to write data into slower TLC memory.

DRAM cache

As flash memory has a limited lifespan and can only take a limited number of writes, a wear-leveling mechanism is used to distribute writes over all cells evenly, regardless of where data is written logically. Keeping track of this mapping between logical and physical 'locations' can be sped up with a DRAM cache (chip) as DRAM tend to be faster than flash memory. In addition, the DRAM can also be used to cache writes, improving performance. Cheap SSDs don't use DRAM cache chips to reduce cost, thus they have to update their data mapping tables in flash memory, which is slower. This can also impact (sustained) write performance. To be frank, I'm not sure how much a lack of DRAM impacts our benchmarks.

Benchmark method

Before I started benchmarking I submitted a trim command to clear each drive. Next, I performed a sequential write benchmark of the entire SSD with a block size of 1 megabyte and a queue depth of 32. The benchmark is performed on the 'raw' device, no filesystem is used. I used Fio for these benchmarks.

Benchmark results

The chart below shows write bandwith over time for all tested SSDs. Each drive has been benchmarked in full, but the data is truncated to the first 400 seconds for readability (performance didn't change). The raw Fio benchmark data can be found here (.tgz).

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It's funny to me that some cheap SSDs initially perform way better than the more expensive Crucial 1TB SSD⁵. As soon as their SLC cache runs out, the Crucial 1TB has the last laugh as it shows best sustained throughput, beating all cheaper drives, but the Kingston A400 comes close.

Of all the cheap SSDs only the Kingston shows the best sustained write speed at around 100 MB/s and there are no intermittent drops in performance. The ADATA, PNY and Verbatim SSDs show flakey behaviour and basically terrible sustained write performance. But make no mistake, I would not call the performance of the Kingston SSD, nor the Crucial SSD - added as a reference - 'good' by any definition of that word. Even the Kingston can't saturate gigabit Ethernet.

The bandwidth alone doesn't tell the whole story. The latency or responsiveness of the SSDs is also significantly impacted:

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The Crucial 1TB SSD shows best latency overall, followed by the Kingston SSD. The rest of the cheap SSDs show quite high latency spikes and very high latency overall, even when some of the spikes settle, like for the ADATA SSD. When latency is measured in seconds, things are bad.

To put things a bit in perspective, let's compare these results to a Toshiba 8 TB 7200 RPM hard drive I had lying around.

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The hard drive shows better write throughput and latency⁶ as compared to most of the tested SSDs. Yes, except for the initial few minutes where the cheap SSDs tend to be faster (except for the Kingston & Crucial SSDs) but how much does that matter?

As we've shown the performance of a hard drive to contrast the terrible write performance of the cheap SSDs, it's time to also compare them to a more expensive, higher-tier SSD.

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I've bought this Samsung SSD in 2019 for €137 euro, so that's quite a different price point. I think the graph speaks for itself, especially if you consider that this graph is not truncated, this is the full drive write.

Evaluation & conclusion

One of the funnier conclusions to draw is that it's beter to use a hard drive than to use cheap SSDs if you need to ingest a lot of data. Even the Crucial 1TB SSD could not keep up with the HDD.

A more interesting conclusion is that the 1TB SSD didn't perform that much better than the small cheaper SSDs. Or to put it differently: although the performance of the small, cheap SSDs is not representative of the larger SSD, it is still quite in the same ball park. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Kingston SSD came very close to the performance of the Crucial SSD, as it's the most 'expensive' of the cheap drives.

In the end, my intend was to demonstrate with actual benchmarks how cheap SSDs show bad sustained write performance and I think I succeeded. I hope it helps people to understand that good SSD write performance is not a given, especially for cheaper drives.

The Hacker News discussion of this blog post can be found here

Disclaimer

I'm not sponsored in any way. All mentioned products have been bought with my own money.

The graphs are created with fio-plot, a tool I've made and maintain. The benchmarks have been performed with bench-fio, a tool included with fio-plot, to automate benchmarking with Fio.

Introduction

Back in 2004, I visited a now bankrupt Dutch computer store called MyCom¹, located at the Kinkerstraat in Amsterdam. I was there to buy a Western Digital Raptor model WD740, with 74 GB of capacity, running at 10,000 RPM.

When I bought this drive, we were still in the middle of the transition from the PATA interface to SATA². My raptor hard drive still had a molex connector because older computer power supplies didn't have SATA power connectors.

You may notice that I eventually managed to break off the plastic tab of the SATA power connector. Fortunately, I could still power the drive through the Molex connector.

A later version of the same drive came with the Molex connector disabled, as you can see below.

Why did the Raptor matter so much?

I was very eager to get this drive as it was quite a bit faster than any consumer drive on the market at that time.

This drive not only made your computer start up faster, but it made it much more responsive. At least, it really felt like that to me at the time.

The faster spinning drive wasn't so much about more throughput in MB/s - although that improved too - it was all about reduced latency.

A drive that spins faster³ can complete more I/O operations per second or IOPs⁴. It can do more work in the same amount of time, because each operation takes less time, compared to slower turning drives.

The Raptor - mostly focussed on desktop applications⁵ - brought a lot of relief for professionals and consumer enthusiasts alike. Hard disk performance, notably latency, was one of the big performance bottlenecks at the time.

For the vast majority of consumers or employees this bottleneck would start to be alleviated only well after 2010 when SSDs slowly started to become standard in new computers.

And that's mostly also the point of SSDs: their I/O operations are measured in micro seconds instead of milliseconds. It's not that throughput (MB/s) doesn't matter, but for most interactive applications, you care about latency. That's what makes an old computer feel as new when you swap out the hard drive for an SSD.

The Raptor as a boot drive

For consumers and enthusiast, the Raptor was an amazing boot drive. The 74 GB model was large enough to hold the operating system and applications. The bulk of the data would still be stored on a second hard drive either also connected through SATA or even still through PATA.

Running your computer with a Raptor for the boot drive, resulted in lower boot times and application load times. But most of all, the system felt more responsive.

And despite the 10,000 RPM speed of the platters, it wasn't that much louder than regular drives at the time.⁶.

In the video above, a Raspberry Pi4 boots from a 74 GB Raptor hard drive.

Alternatives to the raptor at that time

To put things into perspective, 10,000 RPM drives were quite common even in 2003/2004 for usage in servers. The server-oriented drives used the SCSI interface/protocol which was incompatible with the on-board IDE/SATA controllers.

Some enthusiasts - who had the means to do so - did buy both the controller⁷ and one or more SCSI 'server' drives to increase the performance of their computer. They could even get 15,000 RPM hard drives! These drives however, were extremely loud and had even less capacity.

The Raptor did perform remarkably well in almost all circumstances, especially those who mattered to consumers and consumer enthusiasts alike. Suddenly you could get SCSI/Server performance for consumer prices.

The in-depth review of the WD740 by Techreport really shows how significant the raptor was.

The Velociraptor

The Raptor eventually got replaced with the Velociraptor. The Velociraptor had a 2.5" formfactor, but it was much thicker than a regular 2.5" laptop drive. Because it spun at 10,000 RPM, the drive would get hot and thus it was mounted in an 'icepack' to disipate the generated heat. This gave the Velociraptor a 3.5" formfactor, just like the older Raptor drives.

In the video below, a Raspberry Pi4 boots from a 500 GB Velociraptor hard drive.

Benchmarking the (Veloci)raptor

Hard drives do well with sequential read/write patterns, but their performance implodes when the data access pattern becomes random. This is due to the mechanical nature of the device. That random access pattern is where 10,000 RPM outperform their slower turning siblings.

Random 4K read performance showing both IOPs and latency. This is kind of a worst-case benchmark to understand the raw I/O and latency performance of a drive.

I've tested the drives on an IBM M1015 SATA RAID card flashed to IT mode (HBA mode, no RAID firmware). The image is generated with fio-plot, which also comes with a tool to run the fio benchmarks.

It is quite clear that both 10,000 RPM drives outperform all 7200 rpm drives, as expected.

If we compare the original 3.5" Raptor to the 2.5" Velociraptor, the performance increase is significant: 22% more IOPs and 18% lower latency. I think that performance increase is due to a combination of the higher data density, the smaller size (r/w head is faster in the spot it needs to be) and maybe better firmware.

Both the laptop and desktop Seagate drives seem to be a bit slower than they should be based on theory. The opposite is true for the HP (rebranded Seagate), which seem to perform better than expected for the capacity and rotational speed. I have no idea why that is. I can only speculate that because the HP drive came out of a server, that the fireware was tuned for server usage patterns.

Closing words

Although the performance increase of the (veloci)raptor was quite significant, it never gained wide-spread adoption. Especially when the Raptor first came to marked, its primary role was that of a boot drive because of its small capacity. You still needed a second drive for your data. So the increase in performance came at a significant extra cost.

The Raptor and Velociraptor are now obsolete. You can get a solid state drive for $20 to $40 and even those budget-oriented SSDs will outperform a (Veloci)raptor many times over.

If you are interested in more pictures and details, take a look at this article.

This article was discussed on Hacker News here.

Reddit thread about this article can be found here