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There is a lot of discussion on forums about the impact of available disk space on SSD performance. A pertinent question was raised; At what point does drive utilization impact SSD performance? Running some quick tests, the results proved rather insightful.
Questions and Answers
Earthdog raised that question in this post on Overclockers Forums. It spawned from the prevailing knowledge professed across forum communities reporting that available disk space has rather relevant impact upon the performance one obtains from an SSD. There is considerable evidence supporting that stance also.
Supporting Evidence for Excess Drive Capacity
For example, one method people are using to reap the benefits of extra drive capacity is being termed “over provisioning” or “short stroking” the SSD as is discussed in this Overclockers.com article or this thread at the OCZ Forum. Check out the thread, and their forum is a great source of information also – especially their “Stickies”. Both these terms seem rather obtuse for whats actually going on however. “Short stroking” has previously been used in regards to optimizing RAID arrays made up of traditional HDDs – it applies well in that sense because it achieves its advantages by shortening the stroke distance of the read/write head when accessing data from the platter, hence “short stroking”. Noting the obvious absence of rotating platters and read/write heads in SSDs, it doesn’t really have any meaning for an SSD. “Over provisioning” is a bit more acute, but still not very indicative of the method. Whatever you want to call it however, essentially to gain performance benefits you only partition and format a fraction of the drives total capacity. The resulting unformatted capacity is then used by the firmware’s TRIM/Garbage Collection (GC) to prepare NAND blocks so that it is “free” for writes.
What does “free” mean? If writing to a previously “used” NAND block, it requires a read/erase/write operation that really bogs things down. If TRIM/GC has operated on the block, that block is then “free” for the drive to just write – things get done much faster.
While we’re on the topic, I’ll share a few short words on TRIM/GC. TRIM requires support by the drive firmware as well as the OS. It’s similar in concept to an application API if you know anything about programming – at an elementary level an API can be considered a built-in set of functions, but those functions don’t do anything unless called and utilized by some external process. Windows 7 is the only OS which issues TRIM commands natively – Linux can support it by patching the kernel, but Kernel Hacker Mark Lord doesn’t recommend it for the masses yet and I’d take his advice. GC operates purely in firmware, so the drives controller manages keeping itself tidy – this benefits any OS. On OCZ Vertex drives like mine, you need to be running firmware v1.4 to get TRIM, or v1.41 to get GC. Firmware version varies across make and model, so you’ll need to do your homework specific to the drive model you’ve purchased.
But let’s get back to understanding the original question, as well as why we are seeing the answers we’re seeing. At what point does drive utilization impact performance? I performed some rudimentary benchmarks, and this is where things started to get interesting to me.
Testing Platform
The tests were performed on a Thinkpad T400, running an OCZ Vertex 60GB drive I purchased locally at Microcenter. Searching the shelves, I couldn’t find a single OCZ drive – they keep them in the back, and a really helpful sales associate by the name of Paul grabbed one for me. Microcenter stores aren’t everywhere, but if you have one near you it’s worth a visit – they typically have a relatively solid staff of tech enthusiasts and geeks compared to other major retail outlets I’ve visited, and their hardware selection is great.
The OS is 64bit Arch Linux, and Linux doesn’t yet support TRIM natively. It does however have a manual TRIM utility written by Mark Lord called wiper which can be downloaded here. This enables a level of control in this testing which isn’t possible on any other platform – specifically, it controls exactly when TRIM operations are run, as well as the state of the drive immediately prior to performing the tests.
Test Methodology
My testing methodology is as follows:
1. Fill the drive to the desired capacity with garbage data
2. Run the linux TRIM utility wiper.sh to ensure we’re writing to “free” NAND
3. Perform a test timing the amount of time it takes to write 4.1GB of data, and outputting the average throughput for that write operation
4. Delete the test data, repeat from step 2
The Results
Test runs on a trimmed drive at 87.3% capacity (93.9% capacity upon completion of each run):
4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 20.917 s, 196 MB/s
4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 20.9674 s, 195 MB/s
4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 22.1089 s, 185 MB/s
4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 20.4842 s, 200 MB/s
Test runs on a trimmed drive at 62.9% capacity (69.4% capacity upon completion of each run):
4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 20.4235 s, 201 MB/s
4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 22.7503 s, 180 MB/s
4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 21.9374 s, 187 MB/s
4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 21.1049 s, 194 MB/s
Understanding, Not Just Answers
While the testing was by no means rigorous, it’s clear from the results that the amount of available disk space has no tangible impact upon the performance of the drive in these tests. That contradicts what we’re commonly reading across the forums, as well as the performance improvements achieved by “short stroking” or “over provisioning” SSDs. So what gives?
In these tests, the available disk space is in a purely clean state where TRIM has been executed prior to each run. The drive is able to get directly to writing throughout the test, without any read/erase/write hoopla. These results demonstrate that drive performance is not directly related to available disk space – performance is relatively equivalent between a drive that’s half full and a drive that’s almost completely full.
So if drive utilization is just a bit of seasoning in the SSD performance cuisine, why are people seeing the advantages they are seeing from over provisioning/short stroking? The improvements they are leveraging are a direct result of how TRIM/GC is implemented at the firmware/OS level. This implementation limits the drives performance relative to the amount of available disk space which can be utilized for TRIM/GC. More available space, lends itself to more efficient TRIM/GC operation, thereby improving real world performance.
Look forward to part 2 of my testing coming soon, which will quantify the effect drive utilization has on benchmarks running on Windows 7. Part 2 will examine and demonstrate real world SSD performance as it relates to available disk space.
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