The 2011 Mid-Range SSD Roundup: 120GB Agility 3, Intel 510 and More Compared
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 7, 2011 12:52 PM ESTA year ago whenever I'd request an SSD for review I'd usually get a 128GB drive built using 3x nm 4GB 2-bit MLC NAND die. These days the standard review capacity is twice that as most drives ship with 25nm NAND, using 8GB die. Seeing a bunch of scores for 240GB+ drives however is frustrating to all involved. At these capacities you're almost always looking at two die per NAND device, which has significant performance benefits due to interleaving. Most SSD controllers have eight NAND channels and with sixteen NAND deviecs with two die per device that's four NAND die that the controller can interleave access between for each channel. The 128GB drives by comparison halve the number of NAND, which only allows the controller to interleave requests among two die.
How read interleaving works on a single channel
Not only are these 240GB+ drives the best case performance you'd see from a particular SSD, they are also very expensive. At around $2/GB you're looking at over $500 for a high end 240GB+ SSD. I've spent the past few weeks gathering modern SSDs with 128GB of NAND on-board to provide a look at a more balanced point in the price/capacity spectrum.
Mid-Range 2011 SSD Roundup | ||||||||
Specs (6Gbps) | Corsair P3 128GB | Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB | Intel SSD 320 160GB | Intel SSD 510 120GB | OCZ Agility 3 120GB | OCZ Vertex 3 120GB | ||
Controller | Marvell 6Gbps | Marvell 6Gbps | Intel 3Gbps | Marvell 6Gbps | SF-2281 | SF-2281 | ||
Raw NAND Capacity | 128GB | 128GB | 176GB | 128GB | 128GB | 128GB | ||
Spare Area | ~6.9% | ~6.9% | ~15.3% | ~12.7% | ~12.7% | ~12.7% | ||
User Capacity | 119.2GB | 119.2GB | 149.0GB | 111.8GB | 111.8GB | 111.8GB | ||
Number of NAND Devices | 8 | 16 | 12 | 16 | 16 | 16 | ||
Number of die per Device | 4 | 2 | 1 - 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | ||
NAND Type | 32nm Toggle | 34nm ONFI 2.0 | 25nm ONFI 2.1 | 34nm ONFI 1.0 | 25nm ONFI 2.1 | 25nm ONFI 2.1 | ||
Street Price | $229.99 | $234.99 | $304.99 | $284.49 | $279.99 | $252.99 | ||
Cost Per GB | $1.797 | $1.836 | $1.906 | $2.222 | $2.187 | $1.976 |
Corsair Performance Series 3
The first drive in the roundup is the one I've had the longest: Corsair's P3.
The P3 is based on the same Marvell controller used by Crucial in the C300 and Intel's SSD 510, however it's using what appears to be Marvell's standard firmware and as of yet Corsair hasn't provided any firmware updates to the drive. Internally the P3 uses 32nm Toshiba NAND on a very small PCB:
There are 8 NAND devices, making this a fully populated controller. Each NAND device has four 32nm die internally:
At $229.99 the P3-128 is the most affordable drive in our roundup, and it's a 6Gbps drive so it should be able to post some pretty high sequential numbers.
Crucial RealSSD C300
The C300 is nothing new, we reviewed this drive last year. I still don't have a 128GB version of the updated m4, however as we discovered in our review of the 256GB m4, performance isn't necessarily better than the C300. In many cases the m4 is actually slower than the C300.
The 128GB drive uses Marvell's 6Gbps controller (with Micron's own firmware) and features 34nm ONFI 2.0 NAND:
With sixteen NAND devices on the PCB, each package has two 4GB die inside it.
The C300 is pretty affordable by today's standards. The 128GB drive we tested here is selling for $234.99.
Intel SSD 320
Based on Intel's X25-M G2 controller but with new firmware the 320 adds features like real time encryption, however 6Gbps isn't in the cards with this drive:
Intel sent along the 160GB version of the 320, which has a pretty unusual NAND configuration. Remember Intel's controller is a 10-channel architecture and on the front of the PCB we have ten 25nm NAND devices:
These are 16GB NAND devices (two 8GB NAND die per package). That alone is good for the 160GB drive capacity, but the 320 needs more spare area than its predecessor so 160GB won't cut it. Flip the PCB over and you see two 8GB NAND devices:
I'm not entirely sure how Intel is striping data across all of the NAND. It's likely that Intel is simply just interleaving more operations on two of the channels. The 160GB 320 is the most expensive drive here at $304.99, but that's mostly because of the drive's capacity. In terms of cost per GB, the 320 is middle of the road here at $1.906 per GB.
Intel SSD 510
While the 320 is Intel's mainstream drive, the 510 is the high performance 6Gbps offering for enthusiasts. Intel is using Marvell's 6Gbps controller, again with its own custom firmware. The drive uses Intel's 34nm NAND and doesn't support the encryption features of the 320.
Since it uses 34nm NAND, Intel has 16 NAND devices internally each with two 4GB die:
The 510 is our second most expensive drive here at $284.49 and the most expensive on a cost-per-GB basis as well ($2.222):
OCZ's Agility 3 & Vertex 3
OCZ was the first to ship a SF-2281 based drive and now there are multiple offerings in the OCZ lineup. The Vertex 3 uses 25nm IMFT synchronous NAND, while the Agility 3 uses 25nm IMFT asynchronous NAND. As I hinted at in our review of the 240GB Agility 3, I fully expect a lot of pricing fluctuation between these two lines depending on availability of NAND. As a result, today you can buy a Vertex 3 from Newegg for less than you can an Agility 3. Obviously at the same price the Vertex 3 is the recommended drive but I expect to see these two flip flop more in the future.
Internally the Agility 3 (and Vertex 3) use 16 NAND devices with one die per device:
OCZ is very aggressive on Vertex 3 pricing, you can get the 120GB version today for $252.99.
The Test
CPU |
Intel Core i7 965 running at 3.2GHz (Turbo & EIST Disabled) Intel Core i7 2600K running at 3.4GHz (Turbo & EIST Disabled) - for AT SB 2011, AS SSD & ATTO |
Motherboard: |
Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) Intel H67 Motherboard |
Chipset: |
Intel X58 + Marvell SATA 6Gbps PCIe Intel H67 |
Chipset Drivers: |
Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel IMSM 8.9 Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel RST 10.2 |
Memory: | Qimonda DDR3-1333 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20) |
Video Card: | eVGA GeForce GTX 285 |
Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 190.38 64-bit |
Desktop Resolution: | 1920 x 1200 |
OS: | Windows 7 x64 |
68 Comments
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Oxford Guy - Thursday, June 9, 2011 - link
And so the 240 GB Vertex 2 would be nice to see in a review -- for perspective.jjj - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
without the M4 and the MAX IOPS the comparisson is pointelss since those 2 models are the most interesting on the market atm at 120GB.dcuccia1 - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
This is fantastic, thanks for the roundup. I'd love to see the same analysis at the low-end. When I build my or mom a PC with a 64GB SSD drive, I have no firm grasp on which generation of drives have the best value for a mom-style workload (word processing, music, videos, etc).SmCaudata - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
Anything you can find.I have a first gen vertex 60gb that I got for $89 or something on sale before the Vertex2 drives came out. Even coming from a 1gb samsung F3 it was night and day. Outlook opens instantly and that is by far the most data intensive of the general use/productivity programs. I'm guessing music and videos will be on a separate drive anyway due to size and they play back at a fixed speed regardless so a spindle drive is just as fast for them.
So again, in summary... anything from a reputable vendor is likely going to be night and day. If you can pick up an Intel for reliability that would be a good way to go. There are some firmware issues with the c300 drives that have the potential to make them really slow, but I'm not familiar with them so I cannot speak to the specifics.
dcuccia - Wednesday, June 8, 2011 - link
Thanks, good points all around. Still, would be cool to see which drives gave a good bang for the buck for light workload systems. But you're right, at the right price it would be hard to go wrong with an old Vertex or Intel.Mr Perfect - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
I'm also interested in how 64GB drives would scale, but only because they are the largest drives Intel will let you use for SSD caching. That would be completely different benchmark runs though...tecsi - Friday, July 8, 2011 - link
Yes, I have exactly the same question. What about boot/app desktop SSDs in the 40-100GB range (<$100)?Quizzical - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
Are you sure that the Crucial RealSSD C300 only has 111.8 GB of usable capacity? Last July, you said that exactly the same SSD had 119.2 GB. I have the "64 GB" version of the same drive, and Windows reads it as 59.5 GB of usable capacity, so I'd expect the "128 GB" version to be around 119 GB.I don't have one, but Legit Reviews also shows the Corsair Performance 3 as having 119 GB of usable capacity, not 111.8 GB. In the past, Corsair has been inclined to do the usual hard drive manufacturer shenanigans of claiming 1 billion bytes as 1 GB, but not going beyond that and listing the total NAND flash. See the F115, which gives you about 115 billion bytes of capacity, but isn't marketed as a 128 GB drive, in spite of 128 GB of NAND flash.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
You're very correct, fixed :)Tommyv2 - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
Should've waiting until you had the 120GB m4 and the 120GB Max IOPs units for review, especially with some other sites showing that the 120GB m4 actually beats out the 240GB unit in some benchmarks! Those are the two I'm most interested in, and yet there are too few reviews out there for them...