Final Thoughts
I was going to include a price comparison, but a few of the units tested (like the Corsair P64) don’t seem to be carried anywhere as of yet. That said, prices generally do not sway far from the cost/GB of ~$2.75 set by Intel when they released their G2 drives at record low prices. The exception here is the SLC-based PhotoFast V4S, which will retail for a whopping $499 (that’s $15/GB in case you ran out of fingers and toes).
The goal of this piece was to evaluate the real world differences between larger and smaller capacities. Without such research, everyone would be left wondering why the specs were different for a given controller. Our testing showed that for pure sequential operations, most smaller capacity units still perform well despite the reduction in parallelism resulting from the drop in channel and/or flash chip count. Where they showed their weakness was in random write and mixed workloads. This held especially true for Samsung 64GB units, which suffered even though they carry an identical controller and cache, presumably due to cutting its pipelines in half. Indilinx did better here, as their architecture is based on creating 8 ‘virtual’ channels from 4 physical ones (i.e. toggling chip select to enable alternate banks of flash on the same physical lines). This enabled the Indilinx controller to stick closer to its comfort zone with reduced flash / channel capacities.
It’s great to see added competition in the SSD field. These new units from PhotoFast, OCZ, Corsair, and Crucial will only help increase SSD adoption by the masses. While the Samsung and Indilinx controllers did not perform as well when equipped with smaller capacities of flash, they still did well overall, and will do fine when mated with lower power mobile platforms such as laptops and netbooks. The big takeaway here is to avoid mixing the smaller capacity Samsung and Indilinx units with heavy desktop workloads, as they will not perform as well as their larger counterparts.
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