SSD-maker responds to nasty report, says it'll do better next time

If you were shaken to your very core at the recent report that SSDs may not be as power-friendly as you'd been led to believe, drive-maker STEC wants to talk you down from the ledge. According to the company's Patrick Wilkison, the Tom's Hardware article which benchmarked (and gave failing grades) to power-consumption of the non-mechanical drives was flawed because, "They are using legacy drives, none of which will be used by any major PC OEM." According to Patrick (whose job, you might note, is to sell SSDs), new versions of the drives will / do have intelligent power management which circumvents the issues that report shed light on. Wilkison goes on to say that, "Drives will need to have very intelligent power management systems. Some of these SSDs will have them, and those (that) do not have such power intelligence will not be used (by PC makers)." So it's sort of like saying a car you buy in the future will get better gas mileage than the one you own now, provided the automaker cares about fuel efficiency. Small solace, we'd say.

Update: We've gotten a statement from Micron concerning the report -- you can check it out after the break.

From Dean Klein, vice president of memory system development for Micron:

"The controllers analyzed in the Tom's Hardware review are early-generation, multi-chip and in some cases even use FPGA's, which can be quite power hungry. As with many other first and second generation drives, these drives are not delivering on the full potential of the NAND and are not delivering properly on the performance promise. There is another factor to be aware of. If the CPU spends 25 million clock cycles waiting for random HDD data, but only part of that waiting for SSD data, the actual increase in notebook power consumption may be in the CPU. A useful metric is how much processing gets done per watt. If you are willing to scale back performance to that of an HDD-based system, an SSD-based system should deliver significantly longer battery life. Finally, consider that many of today's applications and operating systems are not optimized for SSDs, but for rotating media. As an example, Vista has a background defrag utility that is not needed, and in fact is not desired for SSDs."

[A33A @ Jul 3rd 2008 11:04AM]

Bad move to say that,
They need to make money now to develop technology for the future.

[gotsmart @ Jul 3rd 2008 11:06AM]

So what drives are currently being used by OEMs, if they aren't "legacy" drives and they aren't these mythical "drives of the future"?

[jason @ Jul 3rd 2008 11:10AM]

engadget, you sound so pessimistic. like you are "taking down the man" or something. lighten up.

just because ONE website says one thing doesnt mean it is automatically true across the board...

If he says that the new drives have intelligent power management, instead of mocking him by saying "small solace" "his job is to sell them" "if he cares" you should get a new one, and test it. Wow. now that could be considered journalism.

your title is flawed too. He says that the CURRENTLY are better, not that they "will do better next time" like he is sulking in the corner.

[Derbeste @ Jul 3rd 2008 11:39AM]

It isn't engadget's job to test (although they have at times like with Wii fit.....sort of).

It's their job to report and editorialize as they see fit.

In other words....BLOG!

[Mike @ Jul 3rd 2008 12:28PM]

yea, but Fox News called, and they want their typist back.

[Wwhat @ Jul 3rd 2008 12:54PM]

A blog isn't a job, a real blog is just some guy writing his public diary.

[Emilio Mundula @ Jul 3rd 2008 11:11AM]

What they need is stopping horsing customers around and get serious with serious products and prices.

I don't care for 16/32/64/128/256GB SSD kits.

Bring us the "already developed" 500GB or more with trusted power and data management, at prices, if not similar, a bit lower than current Hard Drives.

With capacities ranging around 300/500GB, then we are talking serious business. Until then, it's simply a waste of time !

[Mr. E @ Jul 3rd 2008 6:09PM]

Sure. And Henry Ford should have rolled a Tesla Roadster off his first assembly line. That Model T was just a waste of time!

[loosely_coupled @ Jul 3rd 2008 8:02PM]

"I want a Mercedes for the price of a Hyundai!"

[Flashpoint @ Jul 3rd 2008 11:17AM]

Power management is the last thing on people's minds.

They care about upfront price and usability...they never think about "price to own".

PS3 and Xbox 360 use more power than my Energy Star efficient refridgerator yet people just grin and bear that $10 jump in their electric bill. They grin and bear that $100 a week on $4 a gallon gasoline yet they continue to drive their SUV's and Hemi equippted sedans.

Then they wonder why America is in an energy crisis.

[Kingus @ Jul 3rd 2008 11:22AM]

you couldn't be more wrong

[Mam00th @ Jul 3rd 2008 11:56AM]

@Kingus

I bet he could

[DogEars @ Jul 3rd 2008 12:11PM]

Actually, a good portion of people have given up on the SUV/Big Truck thing in favor of smaller and more efficient transportation.

[CraigJ @ Jul 3rd 2008 12:14PM]

Actually, on this occasion I happen to agree with him.

[R1cebrner @ Jul 3rd 2008 12:40PM]

I don't think anyone is grinning about the $4 gas, bear it maybe.

[Reader @ Jul 3rd 2008 2:14PM]

What type of psychopaths do you know that grin at gas prices, Flashpoint?

[saintchuck @ Jul 3rd 2008 7:03PM]

I grin but I work in the industry.

[JamesR @ Jul 3rd 2008 11:37AM]

If an SSD drive uses twice the power of a platter drive but only runs 1/4 the time (Wild Ass Guess) because of lower seek times then it's actually netting out to half the power. Tom's test does not that this into account.

[Salsa Shark @ Jul 3rd 2008 1:12PM]

The point is that there is no power management in the SSD drives that were tested. So they use the same amount of power whether they're "active" or "idle".

[JamesR @ Jul 3rd 2008 1:52PM]

@Salsa Shark

The article said SSD drives only know two states: active and idle. They use full power when active (this is where the power management will come in). They are not drawing full power when idle.

[doakes @ Jul 3rd 2008 11:38AM]

I see a problem in the near future. A spinning hard disc does not significantly increase power consumption if the data density, the number of read heads or platters is increased so a hard drive will use much the same amount of power regardless of its capacity.
SSD are not the same, every extra chip will increase the power consumption, so a 500G SSD may consume many times the power of a 64G SSD. Obviously sensible power management will mitigate this but not eliminate it entirely.

[Jinnai @ Jul 3rd 2008 11:55AM]

That's an interesting point, and one I've been wondering about myself. However, as the memory chips become more dense and the actual number of chips themselves remains constant maybe the energy use won't climb as much as using lots of smaller chips obviously would. Something to watch in the future, definitely.

[Nexxo @ Jul 3rd 2008 2:56PM]

Not as straightforward as that. Think of modern processors, which often have many times the transistors that older generations have and still use less power (an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 chip uses half the power that my old dual Opteron 250s use, for twice the number of cores). Same with GPUs.

SSDs will get smaller, faster and use less juice. It's the way of things in the world of electronics.

[bebop @ Jul 3rd 2008 8:33PM]

but its flash memory ... just like your USB memory stick or SD card ... so except for the actual I/O cycle no power is used except for the controller circuit... no?

[Derbeste @ Jul 3rd 2008 11:40AM]

Yeah....NO ONE cares about battery life in a laptop.

[Douglas Pace @ Jul 3rd 2008 1:38PM]

I agree - totally a useless criteria for consumers. This crazy SSD manufacturer suggesting notebook manufacturers would choose new more power-efficient drives is totally off-base. Thankfully engadget sees right through his silly games.

[jinnai @ Jul 3rd 2008 11:55AM]

I'm still having a hard time understanding why people think the Tom's Hardware article wasn't flawed on a basic level...

Their own charts showed one of the SSD's had a lower MAX power use than the HD in idle mode. Which means even with a magic laptop that could access that HD without ever taking it out of idle, but having the SSD always at max power the SSD would STILL use less power. But for some reason their runtime chart showed that SSD still had less battery life than the HD. It makes no sense, yet no one seems to be actually questioning the validity of that article.

Still, it's nice to know that the newer SSDs will have even better energy use. I'm curious to see what the differences are with the OCZ Core line coming out. And as soon as I get my hands on one I plan to do my own set of HD vs SSD benchmarks.

[404 @ Jul 3rd 2008 12:12PM]

jinnai: I haven't thoroughly read the article, but I heard someone mutter that Tom's Hardware didn't take one thing into account: the number of times their benchmark was run, and true enough it doesn't mention that. The SSD may have drained the battery faster but if it ran the process twice as many times as the HDD then that may be where people are getting confused.

A far better test of battery life would be to use the same setup but run the benchmark X times, and then see the % remaining in the battery. Running synthetic benchmarks until it's out of juice doesn't prove anything except rate of power use, not efficiency.

[fh @ Jul 3rd 2008 3:23PM]

TH did not measure simply power consumption. They measured performance-per-watt. SSDs with lower idle/max power consumption had slower performance than the traditional HDD, and faster SSDs consumed more power. In other words, lower power consumption = longer battery life, but the slower performance = more time to complete the same tasks, negating the longer battery life (and vice-versa).

The test is flawed in the sense that it doesn't measure -isolated- drive power consumption -- battery life is also affected by the CPU load, which might vary according to hard drive performance (and TH did not clearly state or control those variables). So poor battery life may not exclusively be the fault of the SSD. A more definitive test would be to strap the battery directly to the hard drives (run all other components on AC), and measure the resulting battery life weighted against performance.

However, no one turns on a laptop just to power up -only- the hard drive; other components (CPU, RAM, LCD, etc) are required for it to be functionally useful. To that end, MobileMark is still a good indication of overall performance -- even if it does not isolate hard drive performance -- because it does in fact simulate daily-use.



(The complaints that TH should have reported the number of hard drive operations completed is unrealistic, as hard drive operations are never the only power-consuming operations under -normal- laptop use)

[Patrick @ Jul 3rd 2008 12:00PM]

Flashpoint,

XBox users may not care about power management, but laptop users care about it a lot. How many hours a laptop can go on battery alone is a *major* selling point.

[BigD145 @ Jul 3rd 2008 12:49PM]

No, it's more like, "car manufacturers will make CHEAPER cars that get better gas mileage." The intelligent power management is not likely to cost you anything and prices of SSD's are still dropping.

[Wwhat @ Jul 3rd 2008 12:57PM]

Perhaps they should use the space won from thin SSD's to add a li-ion battery to them to take care of the power that charge while your laptop charges.
Incidentally, I thought SSD's used flash RAM, and flash RAM doesn't need power to maintain data, so why do they use power at all apart from during read/write? should it not be zero like sd-cards/flashkeys/etcetera.

[Wwhat @ Jul 3rd 2008 1:13PM]

Forgot a comma and a s, make that:
'to take care of the power, that charges while your laptop charges.'

[Backwards People @ Jul 3rd 2008 1:21PM]

All hail your ignorance? Google it!

[Wwhat @ Jul 3rd 2008 1:50PM]

Oh there a so complex a secret that you can't enlighten me? OR are you afraid your big mouth gets sized down if you try?

[Wwhat @ Jul 3rd 2008 1:55PM]

I looked, here's what I found:
"An SSD is commonly composed of either NAND flash non-volatile memory or DRAM volatile memory.

Most SSD manufacturers use non-volatile flash memory to create more rugged and compact alternatives for the consumer market. These flash memory-based SSDs, also known as flash drives, do not require batteries, allowing makers to replicate standard disk drive form factors (1.8-inch, 2.5-inch, and 3.5-inch). In addition, non-volatility allows flash SSDs to retain memory even during sudden power outages, ensuring data retrievability. "

[Andrew @ Jul 3rd 2008 1:18PM]

jinnai, 404,

Both of you are totally right about the shortcomings in Tom's test. What surprises me about this article is that even the manufacturers seem to be buying into the Tom's Hardware article.

This concession by SSD makers is shocking (and unfortunate) because it only gives more credence and publicity to a seriously flawed and obviously biased article.

On a side note, it's funny that any kind of "big corporation" (in this case, SSD makers) gets demonized no matter what response is provided. This time, the reply seemed to be amicable and positive. I wonder, if the rebuttal had been more negative--denying or refuting Tom's benchmarks, for instance--would Engadget have been just as critical of SSD makers?

[Reid @ Jul 3rd 2008 1:31PM]

SETEC Astronomy?

... if this is obscure, then I am officially old.

[Agentenders7 @ Jul 3rd 2008 1:37PM]

Why'd they put a picture of a Super Talent drive when the article is related to comments made by STEC?

[Amerist @ Jul 3rd 2008 2:33PM]

Busted!

[Garst @ Jul 3rd 2008 7:46PM]

And y'all wanted to put SSDs in every! I scoff at you! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!

[joe blow @ Jul 3rd 2008 7:48PM]

Yes, all new technology comes right out of the gate at it's peak performance and efficiency. Why should SSD be any different. Just because the tech offers potential for a huge reduction in failure rate, eff the basters. Go get 'em Engadget!

[andrewag @ Jul 3rd 2008 11:29PM]

As an early adopter to SSD, I have to say that the performance advantages outweigh any slight drop in battery life. To everyone complaining about the performance not being worth it, compare video editing between a SSD and a hard drive and you'll quickly understand what I'm talking about. To those complaining about the price, the top drives by mtron and memoright are the creme de la creme of drives, they aren't going to be cheap. I mean seriously, savvio drives are priced just slightly less than the top SSDs. And who's complaining about the price of savvio drives? And please don't bash SSDs if you have never used one.

So are SSDs overpriced? NO! The technology still has years to mature and is still priced for very specific niches in the market. They will eventually replace hard drives, but not anytime soon.