Linux Solid-State Drive Benchmarks

Besides greater reliability with SSDs because of no moving parts, extended battery life / lower power consumption, and faster read/write performance, two other advantages of solid-state drives include silent operation and lower heat output (on smaller capacity drives). The main disadvantage though of SSDs at this time is the cost, which is significantly more than a similarly sized SATA HDD. For example, Intel's flagship X25-E 32GB SSD retails for over $700 USD. The 30GB OCZSSD2-2C30G sells for $90, but these prices should drop significantly with time. Unlike the more expensive SSDs, the OCZ Core Series V2 and other low-end models use multi-level cell (MLC) flash memory compared to single-level cell (SLC) flash memory.

We were using an Ubuntu 9.04 development snapshot for our testing with the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, GNOME 2.24.1, X Server 1.5.99.3, xf86-video-intel 2.5.1, Mesa 7.3, GCC 4.3.3, and we were using the default EXT3 file-system.

The tests we ran on both the Fujitsu HDD and OCZ SSD were LAME MP3 encoding, timed ImageMagick compilation, Gzip compression, Parallel BZIP2 compression, IOzone, SQLite, and GnuPG. With both the SSD and HDD we had run the tests when Ubuntu was occupying the entire disk with the default settings and then again when we setup an encrypted LVM across the entire disk. Tydal 1.6.0 Beta 1 of the Phoronix Test Suite carried out all of these tests.