Shoot Out: Intel X25-V 40GB SSD vs. WD3200BEVT HDD vs. Pretec 8GB SSD , Bonnie++ Benchmarks


We've already sold a handful of these Intel X25-V SSDs to customers and listed them on the website. V is for value and it is slower than the X25-M but still boasts a decent theoretical read speed (175MB/s), compared to the Kingston SSDNow value line that is 100MB/s. Albeit, this is alongside a very low write speed (40MB/s). The write speed would seem to be comparable to a 5400RPM hard drive and we're pitting against one our favourites the Western Digital Scorpio Blue 3200BEVT, a very quiet 320GB 2.5" drive that doesn't have the whine that Seagate laptop drives do. But its' about 20% less expensive than faster SSDs (like the ATP reviewed below) and offers 40GB of space instead of 32GB.
Update: added the 8GB Pretec SSD (actually a CF card inside a SATA enclosure) that we sell with the T1.
I installed Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2) and bonnie++. Results are below (all in MB/s)
- Block Output on SSD: 43.735 MB/s
- Block Output on HDD: 82.322 MB/s
- Block Output on CF: 8.160 MB/s
- Rewrite on SSD: 31.022 MB/s
- Rewrite on HDD: 34.232 MB/s
- Rewrite on CF: 10.793 MB/s
- Block Input on SSD: 211.938 MB/s
- Block Input on HDD: 84.112 MB/s
- Block Input on CF: 53.330 MB/s
- Random Seeks Per Second on SSD: 3674
- Random Seeks Per Second on HDD: 162.7
- Random Seeks Per Second on CF: 2167
No surprise but Random Seeks is where SSDs just kill it - no stupid moving platters to spin up. On the other hand they are reasonably matched elsewhere and the hdd is a little more than a third of the cost. Will update shortly with our Fujitsu 40GB drive since these are the 3 we use across our product range.