Samsung 470 Series 256GB SSD - Long Term Test Results
Our readers have asked numerous times if we could take a longer term look at an SSD to see how the performance fares over time. We thought the Samsung drive would as good a guinea pig as any. Measurements on a few benchmarks were taken over the course of three months and compared against scores on a fresh drive. General perception is that a noticeable performance loss occurs. Are they right? Read on to see.
Based on the few benchmarks we ran the verdict is pretty clear. The performance loss over the course of three months of normal use is minimal at best, with no real discernible difference observed by the user. Windows boot time is still under 15 seconds where we see most of the newer drives performing out of the box.
It appears TRIM is doing it's job. I hope the little SSDs I picked up hold up pretty well. I'm worried that running them in RAID is going to make them suffer faster.
Which ones did you get? Garbage collection works pretty well for awhile without TRIM but eventually it will catch up to you. That time depends how much data you use, how much of the drive you leave empty and how much spare area is there by default. I haven't heard of any ETA's on TRIM support in RAID.
The cheapest ones that Corsair sales (Nova 32GB). Since it's using an older Indilinx Barefoot controller I doubt it supports garbage collection. The only thing I have installed on the 2 drives is Windows, a few small apps, and Office 2007. Everything else is installed on my RAID 0 2x1TB array. I even moved Windows' temp folders to the big array. Right now I think (not sitting in front of the PC) it has a combined 58ish capacity and I'm only using less than 30GB. I plan on leaving a lot of room on the drives to hopefully let it do it's thing.
I only ran PCMark Vantage after I installed the drives. The thought of over-benching them was making me worried.
The only time a difference was observed was on a MacBook Pro running on a SandForce drive. The drive was completely filled with media on a few occasions while traveling which triggered a slow down in performance mainly because OS X does not support TRIM.
Don't forget the Kingston SSDNow V100 SSD.
It has its own idle garbage collection making it a good candidate for platforms that do not support the TRIM function like Mac OS X and Windows XP.
