discussion OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD Review

[AkG]

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO disk benchmark tests the drives read and write speeds using gradually larger size files. For these tests, the ATTO program was set to run from its smallest to largest value (.5KB to 8192KB) and the total length was set to 256MB. The test program then spits out an extrapolated performance figure in megabytes per second.

Read

​

There is no getting around it, this is a real monster when it comes to shear read speed. However, the Vertex’s performance curve is nowhere near the Intel on the low end and on the high end it's basically the same performance as the Falcon (look for the black dash line just above the Vertex’s Red which signifies the Falcon scores).

Write

​

Once again we walked away very impressed with the write performance of this drive. As a nice bonus, the write speed is actually slightly better than the Falcon. It is funny but the only real program which showed significant changes in score from 1.1 to 1.3 firmwares was HDTACH and ATTO (we ran this drive and the Falcon with both firmwares). The other programs differences were so slight as to fall into error tolerances.

 

[AkG]

IOMETER / IOMeter Stutter Test

IOMETER

IOMeter is heavily weighted towards the server end of things, and since we here at HWC are more End User centric we will be setting and judging the results of IOMeter a little bit differently than most. To test each drive we ran 5 test runs per HDD (1,4,16,64,128 que depth) each test having 8 parts, each part lasting 10 min w/ an additional 20 second ramp up. The 8 subparts were set to run 100% random, 80% read 20% write; testing 512b, 1k, 2k,4k,8k,16k,32k,64k size chunks of data. When each test is finished IOMeter spits out a report, in that reporst each of the 8 subtests are given a score in I/Os per second. We then take these 8 numbers add them together and divide by 8. This gives us an average score for that particular que depth that is heavily weighted for single user environments.

​

For all intents and purposes the Vertex and Falcon both post the same awe inspiring level of performance. To bad the Intel is slightly better at the middle que depths, as other wise it would have been another win for this amazing device.

IOMeter Stutter Test

In our usual IOMeter test we are trying to replicate real world use where reads severly outnumber writes. However, to get a good handle on how well a Solid State Disk Drive will handle a worse case scenario (and thus how likely the dreaded stutter issue will happen) we have also run an additional test. This test is made of 1 section at que depth of 1. In this test we ran 100% random. 100%writes of 4k size chunks of information. In the .csv file we then found the Maximum Write Response Time. This in ms is worst example of how long a given operation took to complete. We consider anything higher than 333ms (one third of a second) to be a good indicator that stuttering may happen, with the higher the number the worse the duration of the stutter will most likely be.

​

As we said in the past, we will take a negligible (and completely unnoticeable) increase in average completion time for an extremely low worst case scenario. We are not sure who did the leg work to find Indilinx, nor do we know what engineers helped in nurturing the Barefoot controller to life but whoever they were….THANK YOU and thank you OCZ for making this possible. A three way competition (Indilinx vs. Intel vs. Samsung) makes for much more interesting times as well as a generally better price for customers.

 

[AkG]

XP Start Up / Adobe CS3

XP Start Up

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. For our tests the clock starts as soon as the system “beeps!” and stops when our Anti-Virus splash screen disappears. While all the other tests were run with a streamlined XP image this particular image is the test bed's “day to day” OS and it has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.

​

While it’s a tie for first place with 39 seconds…..the boot time of the Vertex is simply amazing. If a fast start up is a major consideration for you, THIS is the drive to get. It really is that simple.

ADOBE CS3 LOAD TIME

​

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, but when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!

​

As with boot time, the Vertex eats the competition for breakfast. If anyone still has any reservations about the Indilinx controller or the Vertex (in general), it is performance numbers like this which will make a believer out of you.

 

[AkG]

Real World Data Transfers

Real World Data Transfers

No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it can not really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 4.00GB contiguous RAR file and a folder containing 49 subfolders with a total 2108 files varying in length from 20mb to 1kb (1.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, timing each process individually to provide an approximate Read and Write performance. To then stress the dive even more we will then make a copy of the large file to another portion of the same drive and then repeat the process with the small one. This will test the drive to its limits as it will be reading and writing simultaneously. Here is what we found.

​

For all intents and purposes, the G.Skill Falcon, the Intel X-25M and now the OCZ Vertex are tied for first place. You can nit pick a zinger here and there and declare your favorite a winner but honestly it’s really to close to call. This is saying something as the bar is awfully high for entrance to the winners circle yet the Vertex handled the challenges with a grace and style all its own.

 

[AkG]

Real World Stutters / Value

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 G. Skill Falcon, as long as you occasionally run the wiper.exe program the Vertex will not stutter. You can however overload the drive, but just like a regular spindle based drive your system just becomes slooooow and does not stutter per say. Of course, if you pile on enough past this point it will then get the hiccups but this is way, way past the point where even an HDD would start to complain. In a nut shell you really don’t need to do any OS tweaking to get phenomenal performance from this drive; nor worry about the dreaded stutter issue as it’s not there in any perceptible way. We of course recommend turning of defrag and the ilk but that is just common sense “care and handling” of any SSSD more than tweaking for acceptable user experience. If you do go whole hog and either use MFT (or just use diskpar to properly align the partition) you will be rewarded with increased performance; but after a certain point “faster” becomes less and less discernible and the time (and possible monetary investment) required to do such tweaks does quickly hit the point of diminishing returns.

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 their initial review.

​

IF there is a weakness to the Vertex it has to be the elevated cost of it versus the G.Skill Falcon. Of course, we have seen Mail In Rebates (MIR) recently on the Vertex line which do address this perceived weakness so we recommend snapping it up as soon as you see it on sale. In the mean time, if you eliminate the Falcon from the equation the Vertex does become a very, very good way to get X-25M levels of speed (and better) and increased storage capacity, so it is hard to knock the Vertex as being a bad value. OCZ were the ones who brought the Indilinx to market and were the ones who took the risk on an unknown company. Should we reward this? Yes….especially if you can find a good M.I.R. for this drive.

 

[AkG]

Conclusion

Conclusion

For those of you who skipped to the end of this review let me put this down right away, the OCZ Vertex is a great drive to use. It’s fast, fun and definitely can be considered one of the best SSDs on the market right now. It really is head and shoulders above any JMircon based SSD that it’s not even funny how outclassed those drives are by this beast. No matter what we threw at this drive it just kept on impressing us, and this is after we had put the G.Skill Falcon through its paces and knew how good the Vertex was going to be.

As with any other version of Indilinx controller based drives, the Vertex is literally one of only a handful of drives which are plug and play. You don’t need to spend any time tweaking and cajoling an outdated (XP) or cranky (Vista) OS into playing nice. All you need to do is turn off defragmentation and once in awhile run the TRIM program. If it makes you feel better, you can consider the wiper.exe the fastest degfragger out there as it does for the Vertex what defragmentation programs do for HDDs: return the speed robbed by day to day usage of the drive (albeit in a totally different manner).

When taken head to head with the Intel X-25M, the current Vertex walks away the much better than many other drives. It only sacrifices some speed in very certain instances, but in many ways is a far more well-rounded solution than what has been the fastest drive on the market. It really is an interesting duality and shows the different underlying design philosophies behind the Intel Controller and the Indilinx. After all, both are first generation products and both will rock your world if you are willing to pay the cost of admission. To put it another way it another way: both are awesome drives just one costs significantly LESS than the other. More space, more power, less cost sounds like an awfully good winning combination to us.

When you compare the G.Skill Falcon to the OCZ Vertex things are not quite as cut and dry. On the one hand OCZ has spent a lot more time and effort in nurturing this technology and has the best and most active manufacturer support forum for SSDs out there. They are the ones who released the TRIM program and they are the ones who developed the OS tweaking guides. This counts for a lot in our opinion. However, the cutting edge storage device market is a cut throat place with no conscience and no institutional memory. G.Skill has for all intents and purposes taken all the hard work of the OCZ team and integrated it into the Falcon…and will continue to do so. So if price is the only determining factor the Vertex does lose out to the Falcon....or until such a time when OCZ reduces the price of their drive.

However, when you include the tweak OCZ has done which G. Skill has NOT included things start to change. All Vertex 120GB drives have sixteen 8GB chips for a grand total of 128GB space …just like the Falcon. However, OCZ has firmware limited the amount available to you the customer by 8GB. This on the surface sounds like a bad thing but the key thing to remember is to ensure the longest lifespan possible you have to leave enough room for the wear leveling algorithms to do their jobs. Most people who buy SSDs may know this but a lot do not…and do not care. Theoretically, by ensuring that even at “full capacity” the Vertex has 8GB of room to play with the MLC Flash chips should last longer than a Falcon. It is a difference in opinion and not everyone will agree that OCZ’s implementation is better than that of G.Skill, heck even we are not sure; but this extra attention to detail that will allow for happier customers IS classic OCZ and you have to respect that.

Even putting the above to the side and just looking at the facts the fact is OCZ risked a heck of a lot to help bring a third player to the SSD controller table. This is a very good thing for consumers and we think it should be rewarded whenever possible. Now please don’t get us wrong; OCZ saw a chance and probably took it for monetary gains, BUT the fact they were willing to take that chance is key. The 1st Century AD Roman Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca said it best when he said “It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult.” This unfortunately is too true of the SSD market and very few companies besides Intel have shown their willingness to take risks and innovate. Were OCZ lucky in finding Indilinx first and working with them to be first to the market? Seneca also said “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” So while yes they were “lucky” it was because they were doing what no one else was willing to do: spend money and time actively looking for another option.

On top of this, OCZ recently announced their Vertex SSD warranty is going to be retroactively extended by another year. This may not seem like much BUT it is a big deal. This is one of the few SSDs out there (and may be the only one) which has the same warranty as a HDD.

This may be a long winded way of saying that only YOU can make the final decision on whether the G.Skill Falcon, the Intel X-25M, various Samsung SSDs or the OCZ Vertex is right for you. We have a strong hunch many are going to bet on a sure thing and pick OCZ knowing full well that you will not regret your decision. In the end, the OCZ Vertex is many things but we think the best description we can think of, the one which is the most fitting, is Dam Innovative and really DAM GOOD. On behalf of the enthusiast community, thank you OCZ for taking a risk and bringing such an unknown company like Indilinx into the spotlight and then be willing to back it up with a great warranty.

Pros:

- Fast
- Stutter Free
- FUN to use
- Trim program
- Good value vs. Intel X-25M
- Firmware upgradeable
- Did we mention FAST!!
- Ability to see how much life is left in the SSD
- THREE YEAR warranty


Cons:

- Price vs. other Indilinx based SSDs
- Slightly smaller size
- May require firmware update to get TRIM functionality and / or life expectancy numbers via CrystalDiskInfo
- Firmware may take 30 minutes to complete…and if interrupted WILL brick your drive

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/storage/19613-ocz-vertex-120gb-ssd-review-comment-thread.html​