Intel X25-M 160GB SSD vs Seagate Cheetah 15k.6 SCSI Benchmarks

What happens when you are addicted to speed and have a Seagate Cheetah 15k.6 (SCSI) drive setup in your desktop and a brand new Intel X25-M in your laptop? You benchmark them, that’s what!

1. Introduction
2. Setup
3. Results
   1. Copy Tests
   2. IOPS Tests
   3. General Tests
4. Conclusion

Introduction

This was exactly the situation Grant Gochnauer found himself in after finally giving into the hype and throwing an SSD into his laptop recently. When asked to subjectively describe the performance difference from a “user” perspective (ignoring numbers and science for now) Grant sent us back a lengthy reply that made us drool. You have to keep in mind that Grant is not comparing an SSD to a standard SATA drive – he’s comparing an SSD to his 15k SCSI desktop drive (which would probably dazzle most of us):

The best way I can describe how working on an SSD feels compared to a traditional (fast/15,000RPM X15) hard disk are that programs open almost instantly. I think between Windows 7 64-bit, 8 GB of ram, and insane access times/read speeds everything just operates as you’d want and expect from a PC.

As a developer who works with pretty large code bases, the high IOPS really helps when I’m compiling and doing other things at the same time. As an example, updating my SVN repo on my desktop which is about 600MB and contains about 48,000 files is about 5-6x faster on my SSD than my 15,000RPM drives. Furthermore, I can update 2 SVN repos of the same size on the SSD without any slowdown whereas on my desktop the whole system crawls and the update process takes at least 2x longer. If I were just surfing the web I wouldn’t notice much benefit from an SSD. However when I start Windows from a cold boot, I click on outlook 2010, IntelliJ IDE, and Firefox and to see them open all virtually instantly on the SSD is just breathtaking. Not only that, I have Dropbox and Digsby concurrently starting while I’m opening these 3 programs. It’s just crazy that I can start working right away.

After having used this SSD, I’ll definitely be replacing my traditional hard disks on my desktop with the Intel G3 drives come out this fall. For my desktop, I need better write speeds as I move a lot of MKV files around so write performance is key on the desktop.

We are really looking forward to this benchmark. If I didn’t want to cry for the rest of the week, I would have offered to benchmark the Intel SSD against my standard SATA desktop drive – but I doubt my wallet or psyche could handle it.

DISCLAIMER: This comparison is more about fun and seeing how these two drives perform in real-world setups next to each other. This is not a scientific comparison done at NASA laboratories wearing HAZMAT suites and working in a decompression chamber. For those type of tests, we like Anandtech; they wear a lot of HAZMAT suits.

Benchmark Setup

• SSD – Laptop
  • Dell XPS 1645
  • Intel X25-M 160GB SSD
  • Core i7 820
  • 8GB DDR3 RAM
  • SATA Controller
• SCSI – Desktop
  • Custom Built
  • 2x Seagate 15k.6 SCSI Drive
  • Core i7 975 Extreme Edition
  • 12GB DDR3 RAM
  • 512mb Adaptec SCSI Controller 5805
• Benchmark Software
  • AS SSD

The benchmarking software used (AS SSD) was developed to test the operations that SSDs are particularly strong at. This is not an “SSD-only” test, just a trimmed down pairing of tests that SSDs do well at. The tests were run on both the Intel X25-M as well as the Seagates to keep the comparisons as close as possible.

Keep in mind that the SSD was using a standard integrated SATA controller built into the Dell XPS 1645 while the Seagate Cheetah’s were using the server-grade Adaptec 5805 controller with 512mb of on-board RAM.

There is no telling how much better the SSD would have performed if it could have been put on a comparable controller.

Results

Intel X25-M – Copy Test	Seagate Cheetah 15k.6 – Copy Test

The “Copy Test” executes the following for each section:

• ISO – Two large files copied
• Program – Folder with many small files is copied
• Game – Folder with many large and small files is copied

The OS-level “copy” command is used for this test, so Operating System level caching is enabled if it’s applicable.

In the comparison above we see almost a 20% increase in speed for the SSD on the SATA controller from the SCSI Seagate Cheetah’s on the insane-o Adaptec controller.

When Grant originally talked about these benchmarks I was expecting 0-10% leads by the SSD given the differences in the two setups, to see a 20% gap of performance in favor of the SSD was surprising. It’s not like he’s comparing a standard SATA desktop drive here – Cheetah 15k.6′s are enterprise drives.

Intel X25-M – IOPS Test	Seagate Cheetah 15k.6 – IOPS Test

The IOPS tests are run without the use of the Operating System caches and results are self-explanatory. You can check the AS SSD homepage to see how the final scores are calculated, but the net-result is the Intel X25-M raping the doors off of the spindle-based Cheetah’s.

I expected the increased IOPS for small files (4k-64k) during reads, but didn’t expect a 17x increase over the Seagates. I expected the sustained performance on larger files (16 MB) to be much closer, but again the SSD is showing a 2x increase over the SCSI-based drives.

Lastly, let’s look at the “General” test results:

Intel X25-M – General Test	Seagate Cheetah 15k.6 – General Test

For the “Seq” portion of the “General” tests, AS SSD is reading and writing a 1GB file. The rest of the results are self-explanatory.

Again, just as with the IOPS tests, I expected the SSD to maybe be bursting 20-30% faster than the high end Seagate Cheetah drives, but instead we see more or less a performance increase of 2x for the large read operation — in the case of writing the Seagates surprised us and kicked the Intel X25-M in the nuts just a little bit with a 43% increase in speed over the SSD.

Small file read/write performance was off the charts with the SSD however, likely due to the near-instant seek time while the spindle-based Cheetahs (no matter how fast they spin) still have to seek for tiny tracks all over the disk.

Conclusion

Keeping in mind that the Seagate Cheetah’s had the better operating environment (512mb SCSI Adapter) seeing the Intel X25-M SSD blow the doors off of every test except for large file write operations (100 MB/sec versus 144 MB/sec) was impressive to say the least.

Both of these drives carry a price premium and as far as “bang for buck” goes, if you are going to drop some serious money on a fast disk subsystem SSD looks to be the only way to go.

While the Intel X25-M does represent some of the “best of breed” SSD performance out there, we wonder if one of the newer SSDs like OCZ’s Vertex line wouldn’t post even higher write performance numbers.