Of course PCIe drives aren’t anything new to the market, but I think you’ll agree that our solution offers some new breakthroughs in performance and efficiency. In the video below, I walk through some of the features of the P320h (you’ll quickly see why I’m so excited about this device).

And stay tuned; we’ll have more performance numbers and a demo posted soon.

Doug will talk about the importance of establishing “specsmanship”—or industry-standard terms and tests—for SSDs. Listen in as he debunks SSD myths, defines important SSD terms, and highlights standardized testing methodologies that work.

Register today to attend the Webinar on Wednesday, March 30 at 11:00 a.m. EST.

But we know most of you are interested in seeing a wide variety of tests. Our Crucial team runs many of the tests popular with reviewers, and I’ve included screen shots from AS SSD, ATTO, and CrystalDiskMark for the Crucial m4 SSD (the consumer version of the C400 OEM drive). Enjoy. You can see why we believe the C400 and m4 will be one of the most compelling client SSD designs of the year; great performance, leading 25nm NAND, and Micron’s thorough quality and reliability testing. More in-depth performance tests will be available from all your favorite reviewers in a couple weeks.

AS SSD

ATTO

CrystalDiskMark

Of course the demo itself isn’t a novel concept by any means, but we think you’ll agree that results are staggering.

Of course, our immediate goal is to get these in the hands of independent reviewers. You should see third-party tests coming out in the next month or so as we ramp to production and get drives sent out. Stay tuned–we’ll call out results both here and through our @RealSSD Twitter feed.

AS SSD Benchmark: 3G Empty

AS SSD Benchmark: 6G Empty

We’re using the same Intel Core2Duo system, equipped with our 256GB RealSSD C300 drive and a 6 Gb/s SATA host bus adapter. We also test it at SATA 3 Gb/s to show how it will perform in those systems. I think you’re going to like the results.

System Details
MoBo: Intel® X48 chipset based
Processor: Intel Core2Duo E8500
Memory: Micron® 2GB DDR3 1066 (PC3-8500)
OS: Windows® 7 Pro 64-b

If you used you car as a vanpool, and if you were loaded to the gills already, probably not.  But what if I also told you that this rule applied to their larger vehicles too—you could get a massive 18-passenger maxi-van with double the typical gas mileage if you  were willing to order one with 13 seats instead.  Suppose I also told you that this trick worked on every car they made.

What about now?  Would you do it? For those of you that think I’ve lost it there is a computer analogy coming (you knew there would be, right?). Suppose I told you that you could  as much as double the performance of your solid state drive (SSD) if you gave up 25% of the capacity.  Would you do it?  Suppose I also told you that the drive will last longer as a bonus.  How about now?

You can do all this. How? Overprovisioning.

First, a little background on overprovisioning—the basic principle here is to put more NAND on the drive that the drive actually reports.  Why on earth would one do that?  Performance.

Suppose we have a drive that actually is built with 64GB of NAND.  Suppose we “fix” the drive such that it knows to tell the operating system (Windows, Linux, doesn’t matter) that it is “really” a 50GB drive and that the drive owns the extra 14GB of NAND.  So physically we have 64GB on the drive, but logically the drive only shows it has 50GB.  Where did the other 14GB go?  Who stole my NAND?

Well, nobody–the NAND is still there.  That extra 14GB is reserved for the drive; it is there only for the drive’s private use.  This is the principle of overprovisioning. What does the drive use the extra space for?  Several background bookkeeping functions that are hidden from the user, but that are essential to a solid state drive’s performance over the life of the drive.

In a nutshell, NAND-based SSDs like to group data together–it’s a feature of NAND’s personality, the chips like to have data grouped.  They also like to leave little pieces of data scattered about the drive.  A contradiction?  Yes, NAND is like that.  The contradiction comes from the physical way NAND is erased and programmed.  The short version: when NAND is erased, it has to be erased in large segments.  But applications and operating systems like to write data in small blocks.  So even though the NAND prefers the data in large chunks, applications and operating systems aren’t always so obliging.  Therefore we get scattered bits of data on the drive.

But, NAND drives are smart. They know that they like their data well organized and rely on the NAND controller to group these little scattered bits and place them all nice and neat together.  We use a somewhat unflattering term for this process: garbage collection.

Another important feature of NAND-based SSDs is “wear leveling” – which ensures that all the NAND cells on the drive work together to share the storage load (wouldn’t it be nice if people worked that way?).  In order to ensure all the cells share the work, the NAND controller often has to move data around–moving data from cells that are heavily used to less-used cells to make sure all cells are worn evenly.  Hence the fancy name.

In order for garbage collection and wear leveling to work, they both need free space on the drive.  This free space is a temporary spot to put data during the garbage collection and wear-leveling processes.  The data sits there for a bit until it finds a more permanent home.

On an empty drive, free space is abundant, but what about a full drive?  What happens to free space–the working space the garbage collection and wear leveling processes use–as the drive fills?  It goes away.  Without free space, these processes struggle to keep up with demand. What’s a drive to do?  It needs to collect the garbage (by the way, I don’t like that term, but it is well adopted) and do its wear-leveling thing.
Enter overprovisioning.  By reserving a bit of NAND (typically 25% in an enterprise drive and 7% in a client drive) for these background processes–effectively hiding that “extra” space for the OS–the NAND controller is ensured that it has enough empty space to do its thing and not get in the way of the normal data storage processes.

Cool, isn’t it?  But what’s the real gain?  I mean, you’re essentially giving up 25% of the drive to this reserved space–so what do you really get?

First let me throw out a caveat: YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary). Because the actual improvement is heavily dependent on workload, the OS, how full the drive really is, and a number of other factors.  However–in the lab I’ve seen performance improvements up to 4X,  and–the drive lasts longer too. For us, overprovisioning was a no-brainer. With the rapid and regular increases in NAND density, giving up a small slice of capacity for better performance, higher reliability, and longer life was an easy call. I’ll discuss all the details more in a later post.

The SSD group at Micron has done extensive research into the behavior of Windows XP and Windows Vista under different conditions.  To gather data, the SATA interface was analyzed and data captured while installing, booting, shutting down, and running Office productivity applications on both operating systems.

The results of this research show that XP and Vista do indeed handle their interfaces to an SSD differently. The main difference is XP does not align the data in the best way for an SSD.  Vista, on the other hand, does align the data.  These findings differ from other claims we’ve seen that Vista is somehow worse for an SSD.  In fact Vista is better for an SSD (incidentally, so is Windows Mojave). The example below illustrates the difference… By aligning the data and not partially filling NAND pages, performance is optimized for the SSD.

Click to Enlarge...

Another key difference between Vista and XP is that Vista enables background drive defragmentation by default. Defragmentation is totally unnecessary with an SSD and actually wears the drive out more rapidly. However, most OEMs will disable background defrag on systems that ship with SSDs and Vista.  So—if you happen to be buying a new SSD for the holidays, be sure defrag is off when you upgrade.  You don’t want to hold performance back by making your new SSD live in the HDD days-of-old.