Geoff Gasior at The Tech Report has just published a long and very comprehensive side-by-side comparison of four SSDs from Corsair, Kingston, Plextor, and Western Digital. He’s pulled the covers off the drives to look at the guts (and he names names of the on-board controller chips in the process) and Gasior then tests each drive in turn to come up with some really interesting comparisons. If you’re interested in how SSDs are being and will be tested and want to see some surprises in the differentiated results, be sure to read through the entire 10-page article. For the more impatient, here are some key points made in the review:

Controller chips

One of the really interesting elements of the review is a description of each design’s architecture including the controller chip used. Here’s a summary:

Corsair Nova V128 (128 Gbytes)
Controller chip: Indilinx Barefoot ECO
NAND Flash: 16 MLC chips from IM Flash

Kingston SSDNow V+ (128 Gbytes)
Controller Chip: Toshiba T6UG1XBG
NAND Flash: 8 MLC chips from Toshiba

Plextor PX-128M1S (128 Gbytes)
Controller chip: Marvell "Da Vinci" 88SS8014
NAND Flash: 16 MLC chips from Samsung

Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue (256 Gbytes)
Controller chip: JMicron JMF612
NAND Flash: 32 MLC chips from Samsung (double stacked)

The diversity of the controllers and the differing quantities of on-board NAND Flash chips results in a diverse set of I/O performance specs for the drives:

Corsair Nova V128
Rated read speed: 270 Mbytes/sec
Rated write speed: 195 Mbytes/sec

Kingston SSDNow V+
Rated read speed: 230 Mbytes/sec
Rated write speed: 180 Mbytes/sec

Plextor PX-128M1S
Rated read speed: 130 Mbytes/sec
Rated write speed: 70 Mbytes/sec

Western Digital Silicon Edge Blue
Rated read speed: 250 Mbytes/sec
Rated write speed: 170 Mbytes/sec

Take some time to read through the article. Pay particular attention to the well-written discussion of the TRIM command, which is implemented on all of the above drives except for the Plextor drive.

This article is a good example of how people will be evaluating SSDs in the future. Unlike mechanical HDDs, where the read/write performance is largely set by the rotational speed of the spinning platters regardless of the drive vendor or the built-in controller chip manufacturer, SSD performance is very much a function of the NAND Flash parallelism in the drive’s architectural design, the SSD’s controller chip’s design, and the effectiveness of the firmware running on that controller chip. Based on the article’s results, you can see that there’s quite a bit of flexibility in play with respect to SSD performance and that the innovations put into the drive will be sussed out by advanced customers.