OCZ Apex 120GB SSD Review

Real World Stutters

Over a three day period we used the SSD as our main OS drive. During this period we did everything in our power to make the drive stutter. This is what we found out.

As with the Titan, it really is hard to make the Apex stutter, and we had to work at it to get it to stutter enough to be considered anything more than “a meaningful pause” length of time. You really need to work at and copy a bunch of large and small files from and to itself (all at the same time), do a virus scan, watch a couple Youtube videos…etc…etc before this drive will get the proverbial hiccups. To reduce these problems we first turned off Indexing, PreFetch / SuperFetch, short file names, disabling timestamp for last access of files, re enabled write caching on the disk, moved the page file to another drive, and couple other minor tweaks. This took care of all but a few of the stutters and reduced those stutter times significantly. Unless you really, really want it to get the absolute best from this drive this amount of tweak will probably be enough for most users to be completely satisfied.

In order to really get rid of and stutters and squeeze out the last drop of performance we had to get out the big guns and aligned the partition for optimized 4k sector allocation w/ a 128 sector offset (though we too agree that a 256 sector off set may net even better results with these RAID 0 bad boys). This was accomplished via Diskpar and if you are interested in doing this major tweak there is a great guide floating around on an certain forum which we can PM you if you so wish. If you are running Vista you can actually use the Recovery Disk to accomplish this (with Diskpar) but we did it the old fashioned way of setting the system up to temporarily use another drive as the OS drive and has this Drive as the Slave; followed by doing an old fashioned fresh install (without destroying the partition!). Doing this resulted in a for all intents and purposes stutter free environment, one which was bloody damn quick. So quick apps seemed to open before we had finished double clicking their icons.

Value

The term “Value” is such an amorphous term that it truly has different meanings for different people. For some a hard drive is only as good as its performance potential, for others it is how quiet or durable it is; for others still it’s how effective it is for its cost. We here at HWC try to provide as many answers as possible for the term “Value”. Hopefully by this point in the review people looking at performance potential will have a fairly good idea of what its Value is. For the “best bang for the buck” crowd we have included a chart below showing how much a give drive costs per GB . No consideration has been made for performance, “durability” or any other extraneous factors; this is just raw performance vs. monetary cost. All prices are based on the lowest price found in our Price Comparison engine at the time of this review.


It may not be as good a value as the G. Skill Titan but the Apex is still a heck of a lot better than the X-25M in this regard. Is the added expense over and above that of the Titan for a moderate performance gain worth it? Only you can be the judge of that. To us, OCZ's commitment to its customers with their great FAQs and How To guides on their forums certainly do go along way to justifying the premium.