IDF: stress testing SSD – and user frustration
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Silicon, Storage, Hardware, Laptop, Intel on
Battery life? Performance? No, the important test Intel’s new SSD passes is known internally as P*ssmark…
That’s the nickname for the way Intel tests how much of a difference SSD makes to user experience. It’s not just about how much extra battery life, although I’d like the expected 14 hours batter life I could get from the HP 2730p, the next version of my tablet, with SSD and the thin slab battery I already get 8 or 9 hours from.
The improved performance isn’t just for looking good in benchmarks or running video editing apps most people don’t use, it’s for stopping you sitting at the screen hollering “what are you doing!” as the hard drive light flashes on and off and Outlook sits there staring blankly. Not that it’s always Outlook; Acrobat is pretty good at sitting on its thumb, as are plenty of other applications. And as notebooks get smaller and lighter and 5400rpm is seen as something to aspire to, you can be left waiting far too often.
According to Intel’s cheekily named and possibly unscientific internal benchmark, you’ll be gnashing your teeth ten times less with an Intel SSD than a hard drive. They worked this out by asking a group of Intel employees to mark on a log sheet how often they got fed up enough with their computer to remember that they were keeping score. After two weeks they swapped them over to SSDs. And then after another two weeks, they made them go back to hard drives instead, sticking to show their frustration.
That frustration - and the tick marks - went down significantly Intel’s Principle Enginner for NAND Stephen Wells told me. “Not to zero; I’d still get annoyed if Windows blue-screened or something,” he said. But ten times less frustration was very noticeable. “And oh, the moaning and whining you got when we made people go back to the hard drive. I know - I was one of them. Do you want to get rid of your mouse? No. Do you want to go back to DOS? No. In a few years will you want to get rid of your SSD? Absolutely not.”
 Not only is flash faster than hard drive, it’s more consistent. The 34 seconds it took to run through the photo and video tasks in one of Intel’s benchmarks always came out somewhere between 30 and 35 seconds, no matter how often the team ran it. But with the 5400rpm hard drive, Intel’s Chris Saleski told me the day before, the results were anywhere from one and a half minutes to two and a half minutes.Â
Wells puts that down to the fact that data can be scattered anywhere around the disk and there’s an unknown latency in getting to it and getting it back that you don’t see with SSD - and he expects that to mean a more deterministic battery life with SSD as well. That way, when Windows says you have an hour of battery life left, you won’t find the machine hibernating to save your data fifteen minutes later. And that’s another thing I’d be ticking the frustration mark for…
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