OCZ Apex 120GB SSD Review

Read Performance

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these hard drives. The long test was run to give a slightly more accurate picture.

We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and this goes double for SSD based hard drive. The main reason we include it is to show what under perfect conditions a given drive is capable of; but the more important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.


Considering this drive is for all intents and purposes a clone of the Titan we recently reviewed, it is a pleasant surprise to see this version perform even better. If this is not just an anomaly it may hint at some heavy firmware tweaking. This would be par for the course for OCZ as they have been known in the past to take a reference design and tweak it.

Write Performance

For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have.

While most OS drives spend most of their times reading and not writing, the write speed of the drive does have a big impact on the stutter issue and how fast the drive feels.


The plot thickens! Even though the bottom end is slightly better than the Titan's this is only half the story. As with the Titan, darn near all the of the write graph stayed above 50MB/s and there were only THREE dips below this. This is certainly an improvement over the Titan’s 5 dips. Either the controller is has been tweaked to work better (via firmware) or the NAND chips on this particular SSD are especially good. The chips are a later revision as they were made a couple of months after the Titan's and Samsung has been known to tweak and refine their manufacturing…but its most likely a more refined firmware doing this. In either case, it certainly will lead to even less stuttering than the Titan’s already good performance.